Album Review: Fanfare
Colin Clarke
July/August 2024
There is quite the shift to Shawn Jaeger’s Love Is, which takes a text by feminist scholar bell hooks and has a lot of fun with it, both in terms of the manipulation of that text and in the musical realization, all the while asking the six-million-dollar question of what is, after all is said and done, love? The singers of Ekmeles sing with much zeal; the recording supports their endeavors beautifully, with each voice precisely placed.
Album Review:
The Arts Desk
Bernard Hughes
June 8, 2024
…the rocking minimalism of Shawn Jaeger’s love is….
Album Review:
I Care If You Listen
Sofia Rocha
March 14, 2024
Meanwhile, Shawn Jaeger’s love is evokes Ligeti with disjointed, rhythmic singing and extensive use of distinct vocal timbres that remind me of the Nonsense Madrigals. This setting of text by American feminist author bell hooks also includes significant spoken passages, which are handled as readily and expressively by the ensemble members as their sung work. In particular, the solos midway through the work are both extremely difficult and extremely well executed, with the transitions between spoken and sung tones handled convincingly by each singer. Eventually, Jaeger builds to a powerful climax that breaks out into wild melismas, foreshadowed by the repetition of “crashing” and “smashing” earlier in the work.
Thy Wondering Eyes had moments of the same kind of beauty as the previous works, but was also far more extroverted, even exuberant and chaotic. Jaeger worked from the idea of Old Regular Baptist hymnbooks, which have the words but no music—the singers learn this orally and as a group have a looser, heterogenous quality than musicians following scores.
The piece starts in a fairly close unison, but then the instruments take their own path through material that keeps them together as a group. There is far more violence in this piece than one imagines in an Old Regular service, and some of the sensations are dark, the feeling of a group turning into a crowd and then into a mob. That complexity in the performance was rather unbalancing, but in the end the energy of this excellent concert proved both positive and thoughtful.
New York Classical Review
George Grella
September 16, 2022
Barre-Montpelier Times Argus
Jim Lowe
February 17, 2018
However, the most memorable work in Friday’s program at the Green Mountain Club would be the highlight of any contemporary classical music program. (The program was repeated Saturday at Burlington’s FlynnSpace.)
New York composer Shawn Yaeger [sic] was on hand to hear his deeply powerful song cycle “The Cold Pane,” based on poems by Wendell Berry, and he couldn’t have asked for a more sensitive and committed performance that this one led by Artistic Director Anne Decker.
Marshfield soprano Mary Bonhag combined agility and a broad expressiveness with vocal beauty as she delivered the disparate lines of the five haunting poems about death. Beginning with the false promise of spring, there is the contemplation, the sadness of rain, remembrance and an ecstatic resurrection. The vocal lines employ varying techniques from lyrical to declamatory, always tonal and nearly always unexpected, resulting in a riveting tale of emotions.
Opening and closing with haunting birdcalls from the violin, the four instruments – mandolin, violin, bass and clarinet – wove an intricate tapestry around the vocal line. Jaeger’s sophisticated compositional craftsmanship utilized extended techniques (effects) as well as traditional ones in creating unexpected but convincing colors. This was a powerful performance of truly powerful music.
If I wrote that there was a new opera being performed that was inspired by “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” you would justifiably think I was making fun. Yet something that seems even more unlikely happened in 2014. An opera based on and inspired by two of our most beloved agrarian homesteaders, Harlan and Anna Hubbard, made its debut. It was written by a young professional musician, Shawn Jaeger, and performed by trained singers and actors. Jaeger, at the time, was working at Hearty Roots Community Farm near Red Hook, New York, growing food for subscription-paying customers, a job he says he thoroughly enjoyed. “I like the idea of being rooted in a specific place, and sometimes it seems to me that contemporary music possesses a kind of generic or anonymous international style that ignores local traditions.”
[…]
His opera uses…[Wendell] Berry’s poem[s]…He titled his opera Payne Hollow, the name of the Hubbards’ homestead farm. “Mr. Berry was very gracious and helpful. I wanted to say something about society today, about climate change, about sustainability and what I consider to be the way forward for our species, without being heavy-handed,” he says. “I thought the Hubbards represented a powerful, peaceful example of doing just that in their personal lives.” While the Hubbards, now passed away, lived primitively in terms of money and derived most of their food from their own garden farming or from trading fish they caught in the Ohio River for other food, they lived in refinement on the intellectual level. Harlan played the violin and Anna the piano, and if you were a mouse in their attic you might hear them in the evening discussing some esoteric philosophical theory…in French. What little money they made came from Harlan’s paintings and a couple of books he wrote, plus a little rent he received from a house he had built in his earlier years. I asked him once why he didn’t write a book on how to live the way he and Anna did. His reply: “It would require very detailed instruction, too tedious to interest any publisher.”
New York Times
Zachary Woolfe
September 10, 2015
More intriguing, though, was Shawn Jaeger’s “The Cold Pane” (2013), settings of five stark Wendell Berry poems in which Ms. Upshaw was joined by an unusual group — clarinet, mandolin, violin and double bass — drawn from the ensemble Contemporaneous. It’s a thoughtful work: The background of “Raindrops” is formed by the musicians’ lightly tapping on their instruments, and “The Widower” joins milky clarinet tones with a vibrating mandolin strum.
New York Classical Review
George Grella
September 10, 2015
Following this was Shawn Jaeger’s The Cold Pane, from a poem [sic] by Wendell Berry—a desolate meditation on death, rather than a remembrance of life. Scored for soprano, clarinet, mandolin, violin, and bass, the music upends all expectations of homophonic accompaniment, replacing it with a radically ascetic collection of sharp pizzicatos, tappings, and clacks. Against this, Upshaw sang subdued, languid lines, and the result was unsettling and engrossing.
Seen and Heard International
Bruce Hodges
September 16, 2015
Shawn Jaeger’s cycle, The Cold Pane, draws on an unusually thoughtful quintet of poems by Wendell Berry, set in motion by the composer’s often subtle effects. In “Raindrops,” pianissimo clicking and tapping, coupled with asymmetrical rhythmic patterns, showed uncanny skill in evoking water falling on a tin roof. Upshaw’s lustrous instrument was delicately framed by members of Contemporaneous, adroitly led by conductor David Bloom.
New York Times
Vivien Schweitzer
April 1, 2015
As part of the Concert Artists Guild’s commissioning program, which has produced some 100 new works since 1984, the program featured the premiere of Shawn Jaeger’s “Thousands of Years to Make It What It Was,” inspired by a poem by Wendell Berry about a field whose soil eroded after being cleared for farmland. Introducing his piece, Mr. Jaeger described the poem as being about both human error and faith that things will grow again.
The work’s solitary piano notes and spare violin whispers, which evolved into turbulent interludes featuring broad violin strokes over a chaotic dissonant piano accompaniment, certainly suggested uprooting and disconnection. And if not hope, the stark, bleak conclusion vividly depicted the barren aftermath of human interference in nature.
Seen and Heard International
Bruce Hodges
September 11, 2014
Shawn Jaeger’s gentle Träumerei starts Greif on a scooter, and ends with the singer curled up on the floor as the familiar Schumann piano strains enter—seems peaceful enough, or is it?
Modern Farmer
Caleb Pershan
March 7, 2014
Perhaps the young composer was convincing to Berry because, like him, Jaeger is a Kentucky native. Or maybe his earnest interest in the tradition of Appalachian folk music won Berry’s sympathies. But most likely, his genuine feeling for the characters of “Payne Hollow,” Harlan and Anna Hubbard, spoke to the author. Berry’s close friendship with the Hubbards — who lived at the bank of the Ohio River from 1951 to 1986, painting, scavenging, making music and farming — inspired not only Berry’s original work but much of his lifelong philosophy of self-sufficiency.
Jaeger has come to share that philosophy, bringing him close to the story of the Hubbards, whose ghosts are the principal characters and singers of the opera. When he conceived of the work, Jaeger “was living in the Hudson Valley and getting really into the whole experience of having a garden and growing my own food, into the satisfaction of that.” In the summer, he […] did a work-trade at Hearty Roots community farm in [Red Hook]. “I thought, well homesteading isn’t a typical subject that you see represented in opera. At least in the traditional repertoire, the canon, it’s a lot of nobility, not people just trying to support themselves by living off the land.”
Minneapolis
Star Tribune
William Randall Beard
October 28, 2013
Former Artistic Partner Dawn Upshaw returned to Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra last weekend (heard Saturday night at Ordway Center in St. Paul) with mixed results. She sang the world premiere of a disappointing song cycle by Shawn Jaeger, “The Cold Pane,” which was an SPCO commission. The cycle, setting poems by Jaeger’s fellow Kentuckian, the environmental activist, poet and farmer Wendell Berry, was accompanied by violin, mandolin, clarinet and double bass. It opened with harsh pizzicato notes on the violin—an overly familiar world of dissonance. The most lyrical moment was accompanied by violin, mandolin and bass used as percussion instruments. Moments of Appalachian folk music, played on the mandolin, only emphasized the overall lack of melody. Upshaw made the best of her spiky vocal lines, but poor diction hurt her chances of getting across the poetry. But Jaeger was not very successful at conveying the texts’ meanings anyway.
Twin Cities Pioneer Press
Rob Hubbard
October 26, 2013
Combine her theatrical presentation on the Mahler with a sparse and haunting new work by young American composer Shawn Jaeger and this return visit might have been the soprano's most satisfying one of the past few years.
Jaeger's "The Cold Pane" often pushes minimalism to its maximum in barren austerity, as Upshaw's unpredictable vocal lines (ranging from a whisper to a shout) cut jagged patterns atop violently plucked pizzicato and the drummed bodies of string instruments. It's a curious work that doesn't always seem to keep its mood in sync with poet Wendell Berry's words. But it certainly has a sound world of its own.
New York Times
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
September 6, 2013
In the gospel-tinged “In Old Virginny” for voice and double bass, by Shawn Jaeger, it’s the bowed bass (played elegantly by Doug Balliett) that is agitated and cerebral, while the vocal part is natural and free.
Sequenza 21
Elliot Cole
September 6, 2013
In Old Virginny, by Shawn Jaeger, juxtaposed a forthright Appalachian lament with a snarling, snaky bassline, played athletically by Doug Balliett, to surprisingly tender effect.
Washington Post
Stephen Brookes
May 19, 2013
Shawn Jaeger’s “Poor and Wretched,” which opened the program, was inspired by an arcane form of hymn singing, used by Appalachian Baptist congregations, in which the chorus freely echoes a leader rather than precisely following a score. “I wanted to capture the complexity, rawness and honesty” of that music, Jaeger told the audience. “Poor” proved to be a luminous piece that treated the instrumental ensemble much like a chorus, united in a loosely flowing, soft-edged sort of hymn, full of the natural inflections and patterns of human speech. There may have been more calculated inexactness to the music than raw spontaneity, and it never quite captured the ecstatic quality of the original singing. But the work’s warmth and quiet beauty were often deeply moving.
I Care if You Listen Blog
Arlene and Larry Dunn
February 21, 2013
The program opened with Shawn Jaeger’s Thy Wondering Eyes (2010), a Midwest premiere. McSweeney introduced the piece, noting that it was partly inspired by Jaeger’s Kentucky roots, which were evident throughout the piece. Jumping off with a fractured bluegrass theme, the music careened from crazy rhythms and dissonance to dreamy sequences with long melodic lines; from an energetic, sometimes frenetic pace, to a slower, more deliberate tempo. Conjuring Kentucky’s hill country milieu, there were segments that evoked a back-woods revival meeting with call-and-response phrasing leading to a crazy-fast tempo, like a fast talking minister speaking in tongues. It was clear the players were deeply committed and thoroughly enjoyed playing this spirited work.
Los Angeles Times Culture Monster blog
Mark Swed
June 10, 2011
[Dawn] Upshaw joined in for a Finale. It was an arrangement by a Bard [sic] student composer, Shawn Jaeger, of a Percy Grainger arrangement of a traditional Scottish folk song, “Scotch Strathspey and Reel.” You probably know it as “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?” What Jaeger did to this drunken sailor was throw seven singers, two pianos and an alto clarinet at him. This was not a blended Scotch reel, but rather folksong as an aged, complex single malt, different flavors interacting with intoxicating complexity.
New York Times
Steve Smith
April 19, 2011
Shawn Jaeger, in “Letters Made With Gold,” memorably reset the lyrics of three folk songs to spare, enigmatic melodies that leapt and oozed unpredictably. Margot Rood, a soprano, performed with luminosity and grace. And when Fanny Alofs, a mezzo-soprano, brought an arresting intensity to “And am I born to die?” you sensed the entire audience holding its breath in wonder.
New York Times
Vivien Schweitzer
June 6, 2010
The singing traditions of the Old Regular Baptists in Appalachia inspired Shawn Jaeger’s “Wondering Eyes.” Introspective, mournful passages meshed into frantic fiddling in the evocative work, which received its premiere here.