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Once you get to know them, it becomes clear that Amity Trio’s debut album couldn’t be about anything other than love. As individuals and as an ensemble, they express love through everything they do. Their love of life, of food, of music, of teaching, of community, and of each other are infectious and candid, and this album is a testament to the way they move through the world.
The album is a theme and variations on the notion of love itself, turning the idea love over and seeing it from all its angles, in all its guises—romantic love, familial love, false love, self-love, and love of one’s culture. As a whole, the works they’ve selected invite us to consider how deep love goes, how we can find love in all facets of our lives, and how profound it is to be able to profess love.
Amity Trio’s mission is to support and foster the development of new works by composers from underrepresented groups, and this album celebrates what it means to be “American” by providing a testament to the profound range of experiences that define American womanhood. We’re taken on a tour
beginning in the twentieth century, with Amy Beach’s late Romantic sentimentality, and Florence Price’s contrasting perspective of what love feels like from a Black perspective. Their works are placed in conversation with the music of four living composers—Lauren Bernofsky, Alice Jones, Carrie Magin, and Nur Slim—each of whom proclaim a different kind of 21st-century American womanhood. Each composer on this album declares, in their own voice, the powerful claim that all people have the right to exist, the right to be heard, the right to love and be loved.
This album exists despite the odds stacked against it. Amity Trio rehearsed, recorded, and promoted this album in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, with Kim living in Indiana and Katie and Mike based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It shouldn’t have worked. But love finds a way. They commissioned new works, embraced new virtual platforms for rehearsal and marketing, and resolved to find a path forward where none had existed before. This is an ensemble driven by a roll-up-the-sleeves, entrepreneurial spirit that says, in the face of all challenges, “we can do this.” Love finds a way. -Dr. Alice Jones
- Genre
- Classical
Contains tracks
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