Brooklyn Youth Chorus prep debut LP produced by Bryce Dessner (National) & Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire)

Brooklyn Youth Chorus, who are celebrating their 25th anniversary season, will release their debut album, titled Black Mountain Songs, which will be out March 31 via New Amsterdam Records. It’s the studio recording of the stage program of the same name that was commissioned for the 2014 BAM Next Wave Festival. The record was curated by Bryce Dessner (The National), Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire), and produced by Grace Row, and it features songs by Dessner, Parry, Shaw, Jherek Bischoff, Tim Hecker, John King, Nico Muhly, and Aleksandra Vrebalov. You can listen to the title track, penned by Dessner, right here:

The title is a reference to North Carolina’s storied Black Mountain College, a liberal arts school that existed from 1933 – 1957 and spawned such artists as Willem de Kooning, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, Josef and Anni Albers, Franz Kline, and Robert Rauschenberg. Dessner conceived the album as a tribute to the school and most of the words featured in Black Mountain Songs come from poems and texts from Black Mountain faculty or students, including John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Josef and Anni Albers, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Duncan, Fielding Dawson, Ruth Asawa, Basil King, and MC Richards.

There will be a Black Mountain Songs release show at NYC’s Greene Space on March 31 which is sold out but they have other projects on the way. They’re part of theater production Aging Magician which is being staged from March 3 -12 at The New Victory Theatre in Times Square:

AGING MAGICIAN is an epic new opera-theater work that tells the story of Harold, an aging clockmaker near the end of his unusual life. The Brooklyn Youth Chorus helps Harold uncover his legacy as the New Victory stage is transformed into a living, breathing instrument. Creators Julian Crouch (Shockheaded Peter, New Vic 1999), Rinde Eckert, Paola Prestini, Mark Stewart and the Attacca Quartet bring together the worlds of music, theater, puppetry, instrument making and scenic design to paint this poignant allegory on time, youth and the peculiar magic of ordinary life, or perhaps, the ordinary magic of a peculiar life.

Tickets for Aging Magician are on sale.

They’ll also be performing “Silent Voices,” a multimedia, multi-composer stage work conceived, produced and performed by the Chorus” at BAM’s Howard Gillman Opera House on May 12 & 13 as part of BAM’s Winter 2017 Program. Tickets to “Silent Voices” are still available.

Check out Black Mountain Songs cover art and tracklist below.

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Brooklyn Youth Chorus – Black Mountain Songs tracklist:

01 Black Mountain Song (Bryce Dessner)
02 there is a sound (Richard Reed Parry)
03 Its Motion Keeps (Caroline Shaw)
04 ars imitatur naturam (John King)
05 My World (Bryce Dessner)
06 Bubbles (Aleksandra Vrebalov)
07 Childhood’s Retreat (Jherek Bischoff)
08 Fielding Dawson in Franz Kline’s Studio (Nico Muhly)
09 Maximus to Gloucester (Bryce Dessner)
10 Spaceship Earth (Richard Reed Parry)
11 M.C. Richards (Tim Hecker and Bryce Dessner)
12 Anni’s Constant (Caroline Shaw)
13 Their Passing in Time (Richard Reed Parry)