an album of chamber works by Kitty brazelton

about the project:

Kitty Brazelton has pushed boundaries and challenged existing divisions in the avant-garde scene for decades, yet always with an eye towards unity. Across genre, and all the inherent separations that genre entails, she has encouraged her musical collaborators to look inward and find their own personal, emotional connection with the music, and to put themselves into the performance. If this approach sounds theatrical, it should be no surprise to learn that she has written and directed several operas in recent years.

With The Planes of Your Location, composer Kitty Brazelton covers familiar territory—the chamber concert—this time with a new purpose: writing for people she knows.

The Planes of Your Location premiered in March 2020 in Los Angeles, performed by a collective of friends and fellow musicians, to an audience also of close friends and collaborators. Two years prior, Brazelton’s former student Emily Call, a violinist, had asked Brazelton to officiate at her wedding in LA, where the composer discovered to her delight a small but thriving community of musicians eager to perform her work.

The key collaborators on this album are LA-based ensemble Isaura String Quartet, as well as cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, clarinetist Christin Hablewitz, and pianists Vicki Ray and Basia Bochenek. Brazelton found the intimacy of writing for this small community “sort of radical.” Embracing the specificity of each musician’s life experience was essential in making the music feel meaningful.

In I am not my Photograph (you cannot erase me), the string quartet at the heart of the album, Brazelton captures in sequence the journey of a woman’s life: childhood, coming of age, sexual maturity, working a job and becoming part of a society… Of particular interest to her was the part that happens after settling down, when “you fall into a rhythm without realizing that it’s happened… you start to feel irrelevant.”

“These feelings are basic to anybody, not necessarily just female,” Brazelton says. Turning these pivotal moments in life into feelings (in musical form) and then putting those feelings into sequence, she conveys the detail of her life so that someone else could feel those feelings; experience that arc. Yet while …Photograph traces through musical gesture the basic beats of Brazelton’s life, its true narrative is on a grander scale: Brazelton tells the familiar, very modern story of “trying to fit into a world that is full of people.” She explains, “The world is algorithmicizing itself in trying to deal with all the people, and we’re losing parts of ourselves in trying to fit.”

And so The Planes of Your Location is secretly a protest record. It is a protest against the erosion of identity Brazelton has experienced in the digital age; a persistent, creeping sensation which she suspects is more widespread than ever in 2022. She hopes it can bring you peace.

About Isaura string quartet:

The Isaura String Quartet—Emily Call, violin; Madeline Falcone, violin; Jonathan Morgan, viola; and Betsy Rettig, cello—is a Los Angeles-based ensemble dedicated to the promotion of contemporary chamber music through live performance, workshops, and collaborations with composers and interdisciplinary artists. ISQ has been heard extensively in Southern California performing for presenters REDCAT, Beth Morrison Projects, MicroFest, RADAR L.A., the Carlsbad Music Festival and more. Since their formation in 2013, the quartet has commissioned over 30 new compositions and has presented world premieres of works by artists including Amy Knoles, Ajay Kapur, Charles Gaines, Anne LeBaron, Scott Worthington, and Ulrich Krieger.                                                           

Recent projects include Machines and Strings, a 2-part concert series curated by ISQ for CalArts and REDCAT; John Kennedy’s chamber cantata One Body at Boston Court; workshop performance of David T. Little’s Artaud in the Black Lodge for REDCAT’s NOW Festival; world premiere of Gloria Coates’ chamber opera Stolen Identity; Love, Honor, Obey with Timur and Margaret Cho; and a concert of microtonal string quartets for MicroFest LA. ISQ is featured with processed music box and guitar on Daniel Corral’s concert-length Refraction on Populist Records.                                          

In addition, ISQ is the house band for Emo Nite LA under the alias “String String Quartet,” hosting artists including the All-American Rejects and Demi Lovato. They have also performed and recorded for artists such as Baths, Man Man, Emily Wells, and Jherek Bischoff.