Contemplative Timelines: .....

A walled city, a map of the world, a spiraling call: a mandala’s meaning extends far beyond pattern and line. It does more than represent an ideal or suggest a path. It is reality, laid out in its true form, for us to contemplate.

Composer and percussionist Adam Rudolph finds a similar shape of things via sound, enlisting the Go: Organic Orchestra, an ensemble of players who can be assembled anywhere, anytime. In the project’s latest iteration, Rudolph has gathered his longest collaborating group of musicians based in New York, for a series of elegant, diversely textured pieces that form a Sonic Mandala (Meta Records; release: September 17, 2013). Following a compositional and conducting approach Rudolph has honed over decades of contemplation, performance, and creation, the group delineates a space where contemporary classical, jazz, and global traditions effortlessly converge.

Though Rudolph provides matrix-based scores and a streamlined vocabulary of conducting gestures to guide musicians, ultimately the pieces spring from the intent focus and spontaneous dialogue engendered in the musicians themselves. “The beauty lies in the ambiguity, the openness,” reflects Rudolph. “There’s something about playing into the center of the expressive quality of the music, something really intuitive that the musicians bring to it, as they focus on it. It’s about being in tune, being completely in the present. You don’t think about your musical gesture ahead of time, but serve the moment.”

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