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Track 6 - IV. Treason: It Could Be True from Henry VIII
Composer: JOSEPH LEVIN
The composer writes, " I first experienced the physical power of music when, as a little boy, my parents took me to an outdoor concert at Wolf Trap. The explosion from Beethoven's kettle drums knocked me off my parents' blanket and onto the grass. I covered a lot of ground in that short distance because from that point forward I was aware of music as a force unto itself. I had gone through a passageway and come out a different person. "
Levin's background includes classical training in composition with Leo Edwards at the Mannes College of Music in New York City and private jazz studies with Eric Goletz and other artists. These studies form the foundation upon which his compositions are built.
The compositions on the recording are "aural dramas" about the forces that create passageways and the beings that move through them. White Russian: soldiers rush through a break in the line and press the advantage; Rip Tide: churning beneath the water's surface, cross currents drive a swimmer farther and farther from shore; Henry VIII: a prideful and paranoid king follows the threads of real or imagined subversive plots; Passageways: an ill parent ebbs away, forcing adulthood on the child; Black Bear Walking: an innocent and playful bear meanders through his territory; Serious Child: a child toddles down a hallway to investigate something; Battle Cry of Freedom: an exhausted Union army slogs through the muddy backwoods of the South.