Richard Reed Parry: Music For Heart And Breath Richard Reed Parry

• 1 Quartet For Heart And Breath 06:45
• 2 Heart And Breath Sextet 15:00
• 3 For Heart, Breath And Orchestra 12:22
• 4 I Miniature 1 01:23
• 5 II String Peaks 02:13
• 6 III Wind's Idea 03:30
• 7 IV Miniature 2 01:39
• 8 V Sticks/Tension 04:16
• 9 VI French Guitars 03:24
• 10 VII Freeform Winds/String Drones 03:43
• 11 Duet For Heart And Breath 04:28
• 12 Quartet For Heart And Breath 06:48
• Total Runtime 01:05:31

Info for Richard Reed Parry: Music For Heart And Breath

Music for Heart and Breath is Richard Reed Parry´s debut as classical composer who is mostly known from the Grammy Nominated Uber Indie Rock Band Arcade Fire. Richard is a multi-instrumentalist and composer, drawing his influences from classical music, folk and electronica. This is his first core classical release that will find his home at Deutsche Grammophon!

The album features various compositions for Heart and Breath for various ensembles, as well as small interludes (Interruptions).

The concept behind Heart and Breath is that every musician involved in the piece generates his own tempo by listening to his/her pulse during the performance. Fragile and intimate, these stunningly created performance effects are the basis for this conceptual compositional approach.

Richard explains: “Music for Heart and Breath is a series of compositions that use involuntarily moving organs of the human body (specifically the lungs and the heart) as performance parameters. There are no time signatures: the tempos and rhythms are always governed by either the heart rates or the breathing rates of the individual players. In the case of the latter, the performers are instructed to play directly in sync with their own or another player’s individual breathing (playing at the speed of their inhalations, their exhalations or both). To enable the players to hear and play in sync with their own heartbeats, they wear stethoscopes and, naturally, generally play quietly.”

The music is performed by an exciting line-up of musicians, produced by Bryce Dessner Nico Muhly (Conductor, celeste/piano), Bryce & Aaron Dessner (guitar) from The National, Kronos Quartet, the ensemble Ymusic

Rob Moose, violin
Nadia Sirota, viola
Clarice Jensen, cello
Bill Kalinkos, clarinet
Alex Sopp, flute
C.J. Camerieri, trumpet
Nico Muhly, piano, celesta
Caroline Shaw, violin
Yuki Numata, violin
Courtney Orlando, violin
Annaliesa Place, violin
Nadia Sirota, viola (soloist)
Caleb Burhans, viola
Clarice Jensen, cello
Brian Snow, cello
Shawn Conley, double bass
Amelia Lukas, flute, piccolo
Arthur Sato, oboe
Hideaki Aomori, clarinet
Richard Reed Parry, double bass, piano
Bryce Dessner, guitar
Aaron Dessner, guitar
Kronos Quartet:
David Harrington, violin
John Sherba, violin
Hank Dutt, viola
Jeffrey Zeigler, cello

Recorded by Nick Lloyd at Dreamland, July to November 2012
Mixed by Nick Lloyd at Firehouse 12, April 2013
Produced by Bryce Dessner and Richard Reed Parry
Executive Producer: Christian Badzura (Deutsche Grammophon)

Richard Reed Parry
is the musical polymath at the heart of the ever inventive art-rock band Arcade Fire, but his work and story reach far beyond. He debuted as composer with Music For Heart and Breath in 2014, formed the instrumental ensemble Bell Orchestre, and collaborated and performed with artists like David Bowie, David Byrne, Kronos Quartet, The National, and Nico Muhly. He recently released Quiet River of Dust Vol. 1+2 and created a 360 projected visual world for live performance in the dome at the Societé des Arts Technologiques, with touring to follow throughout 2019-2020.

As the red-headed polymath and multi-instrumentalist at the heart of the endlessly inventive art-rock band Arcade Fire, Richard Reed Parry has performed in front of immense crowds and sold millions of records across the world. But this is only one aspect of an artist whose unconventional trajectory has resulted in work that is as varied as it is surprising and unique.

In between the last few Arcade Fire world tours Parry has crafted an innovative debut record of solo compositions released in Summer 2014. Realized slowly and thoughtfully over a handful of years, Music for Heart and Breath is an exquisite collection of modern neo-classical pieces in which each note is played in synch with the heart rates or breathing rates of the performers, each musician generating their own tempo by listening to their pulse with a stethoscope during the performance. Produced with his great friend and collaborator Bryce Dessner of The National, the album features performances by Dessner, Kronos Quartet, Nico Muhly and YMusic Ensemble. At times fragile, playful, sombre and intimate, these unique and stunning creations have been dreamt into life by Parry's refreshing compositional approach and his own philosophical belief that music and nature - in this case the human body - can be, indeed are, explicitly linked.

Adding to the breadth of that picture, Parry has premiered a piece for Bang On a Can at the Ecstatic Music Festival in New York, created a surround-sound, sci-fi electronic composition for synths, voices and, yes, bicycles called Drones/Revelations, and collaborated on The National's last two critically acclaimed albums, the Grammy-nominated Trouble Will Find Me and High Violet. He recorded and produced Montreal artist Little Scream's magnificent debut album The Golden Record. In fall of 2014 the Brooklyn Academy of Music debuted a series of compositions he wrote for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus as part of Black Mountain Songs, an event curated by Parry and Bryce Dessner which also included pieces by Nico Muhly, Tim Hecker, Dessner and Pulitzer winner Caroline Shaw.

Booklet for Richard Reed Parry: Music For Heart And Breath