Treading Water
Indie-folk singer Sarah Goldfeather brings her music and voice to a new work
Treading Water is a new song cycle by composer and singer Sarah Goldfeather, commissioned by Contemporaneous. Using original texts by Martha Sprackland, Goldfeather's songs explore the obsessive, irrational, despairing and desperate inner world of cognitive distortions and closed-circuit logic that feed our ugliest insecurities.
Goldfeather comes from a unique musical background — as a violinist, she is steeped in contemporary music, but as a singer, she performs most often in the indie-folk world. The piece will therefore be folk-influenced, not unlike some of the later music she has written for her band, Goldfeather, but with an evident new music influence in both structure and orchestration.
The song-cycle will be 25-35 minutes in length, featuring Goldfeather singing with an ensemble of roughly 16 players. It will be broken up into five movements that can be performed separately or all as one unified work. The piece could be paired with a performance by Sarah's band Goldfeather and/or music from the Contemporaneous repertoire (such as Dan Trueman and Caomhín Ó Raghallaigh's new work).
Sarah Goldfeather is a project of Contemporaneous IMAGINATION, the ensemble's commissioning initiative which seeks to give voice to the wildest and most meaningful dreams of composers of all backgrounds from around the world.
In Short
Music by Sarah Goldfeather; text by Martha Sprackland
Duration: 25-35 minutes, 5 movements
Instrumentation: solo voice (Sarah Goldfeather) and medium ensemble (ca. 16 instrumentalists)
Performance history:
Movements 1 and 2 were performed by Present Music on March 24, 2018 at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee
Movements 1, 2, and 3 were performed by Contemporaneous on June 24, 2018 at National Sawdust, Brooklyn, NY
Booking: For booking inquiries, contact Contemporaneous Executive and Co-Artistic Director Dylan Mattingly at dylan@contemporaneous.org or (510) 333.2543.
Listen
Artists
Sarah Goldfeather, composer & singer
Martha Sprackland, poet
