Black Cats & Blues

The Metier catalog which includes all types of contemporary music from the sweetest post modernist song to the most challenging avant-garde works, has nothing like this totally unique piece. Composed by Craig Vear, professor of digital performance and music at de Montfort University in Leicester, England, the work (to put it very simply) is an interaction between an electronically generated score and an improvising cellist. The initial digital score sends the compositional idea to the player, who can then explore defined boundaries and materials, and introduce rerecorded sound (and in live performance, video). It's various movements are based on the 1949 book Blues for a Black Cat and Other Stories by Boris Vian and aim to recreate in sound the imaginative realm created by the book, influenced also by jazz and the esoteric aesthetic of 'pataphysics. Vear's work has been described as 'pioneering' and 'hugely exciting'. The work was composed between 2014 and 2018 and is dedicated to Rick O'Donnell and Anna Lum. Cellist Craig Hultgren is a major figure in American new music with over 300 works written for him. After more than 30 years with the Alabama Symphony he now works as a farmer-cellist in Iowa. He has taught in several fine music schools and is a performer of the highest caliber.