ListN Up
I Care if You Listen
Boston, MA
ListN Up is a weekly series of artist-curated playlists that offer an intimate sonic portrait of contemporary artists by showcasing the diverse and stylistically varied music that influences their creative practice.
In a world that’s progressively more divided and more polarized, we need music more than ever before. One of the things I’ve been considering a lot lately is how music can foster dialogue – by telling stories, by transporting us into a different place, a different culture, a different sense of time, a different point in history. All of the selections that I chose for today’s playlist are selections that relate to storytelling or conveying some great idea. Perhaps ideas are stories that are too hard to put into words. Words have limitations, words have biases, words limit us in the way in which we can be transported into that story. In this music, some of the music includes words, but the music itself makes us go into somebody else’s skin or somebody else’s shoes – or perhaps makes us reconsider something that we think we understand. I hope that you will enjoy all of these works as much as I do. All of them are by composers whom I love dearly and admire. Many of these are pieces I have worked on in the past few years. All of them are works that move me greatly every time I hear or perform them.