1. Peace on the Left - Justice on the Right (Kerwin Young)

2. American Kaleidoscope (Stephen Prutsman)

3. Valencia (Caroline Shaw)

A Passage Between Earth and Sky (Jessica Meyer)

4. Sown Seeds

5. Zen Branches

6. Dissevered - Reverie of Renewal

7. Pale Blue Dot (David Serkin Ludwig)

Pale Blue Dot wasn’t conceived as an album with a concept, and even the idea of an album with a story seems almost frivolous in an age when we mostly consume music by streaming it one track at a time. We started from a desire to record music that we love, little of which was already available, but, as we lived with this music, a theme did begin to emerge and crystalize. Each of the pieces on this album deals with the shifting ways that we view ourselves, each other and our planet in our ever-changing collective conscience and shared universe.

This record opens with an earthbound view of a fight for social justice in Kerwin Young’s “Peace on the Left - Justice on the Right”, a response to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, before transitioning to Stephen Prutsman’s surreal take on a couple’s cross country road trip. Stephen’s “American Kaleidoscope” explores the power of popular culture, how we digest media and the way current events frame our cultural identity and give us a certain feeling of time and place, before (spoiler alert!) seemingly laying waste to it all at the end.

 This gives way to a view from a completely different lens, that of the natural world. Both Caroline Shaw’s “Valencia” and Jessica Meyer’s viola quintet “A Passage between Earth and Sky” explore the wonders of nature, from the marvel of a common orange to the life, death and renewal of “Igor,” an umbrella pine that once reached proudly to the sky.

 Jessica’s work ends with a beautiful segue to our final perspective, that view of our tiny planet in the greater universe and our human significance expressed so profoundly in David Serkin Ludwig’s “Pale Blue Dot”, inspired by the writings of Carl Sagan.

 In celebrated writer Haruki Murakami’s novel A Wild Sheep Chase, he writes:

“Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder's frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain.”

We hope this collection of great music can act as a kaleidoscope, offering an array of perspectives that allow the listener to hear and see more than one side of the mountain.

~ Hausmann Quartet

We are thrilled to present Hausmann Quartet’s Pale Blue Dot, a fantastic array of extraordinary compositions by ground-breaking contemporary composers. The pieces individually and together comprehend a vast range of ideas, emotions and perspectives as well as musical traditions and techniques, and offer them to us for view as if, as the Quartet describes, a gorgeous and fascinating kaleidoscope.

For Phenotypic Recordings, this album is especially close to our hearts. Our CEO Mike Hostetler and his wife Erica Pascal have been long time supporters of the Hausmann Quartet, and Mike and Erica commissioned two of the pieces contained here. One composition is by our beloved Creative Director Stephen Prutsman, a wonderously talented pianist and composer, which was commissioned prior to his appointment to Phenotypic.

In many ways the music contained here was the spark for the creation of Phenotypic Recordings itself. Too often, Mike saw that innovative, new music was played at a few performances, but was not accessible beyond the audiences that were physically present. Phenotypic was founded to immortalize such music in high quality recordings, and make them accessible to the world. Of the five compositions on this album, four have never been recorded in the past. We hope you will agree that you the listener, as well as music communities everywhere, benefit from the presentation of these exciting pieces into the global dialogue.

It is our belief that such music can move all the aspects of what makes us human and alive – our intellect as well as our hearts, and even our physicality and our spirit and soul. And that nurturing a rich musical sharing transcends boundaries of nations, cultural divides, and even individual separation.

It is the small contribution that we seek to make to respond to the call issued by Carl Sagan, American astronomer, for caring between humans and for our planet. Sagan had advocated for NASA to take a photo of the earth in its context in the vastness of space. Of the resulting photo, which shows our planet as a speck in the universe, he wrote: 

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives… on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam… Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner... There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” (Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994)

 It is our hope that this kaleidoscope of an album, like the NASA photo, will help us see our common humanity, shared plight, and place in the universe from a larger lens, and remind us to care for each other and the earth.

Phenotypic Recordings will donate all its proceeds from the album to the Surfrider Foundation (https://www.surfrider.org/)

~ Phenotypic Recordings

KERWIN YOUNG, Peace on the Left - Justice on the Right (2020): Commissioned by the Tesla Quartet for its “Alternating Currents” commissioning project, “Peace On the Left - Justice On the Right” in its musical context, draws its motivic shape and development from the intervallic relationships found in “Beethoven’s String Quartet in A major, Op.18 No.5” - Andante cantabile. I wanted to compose a modern, original work that fused some of the core elements found in Beethoven’s string quartet. Major sixth and minor seventh relationships dominate throughout this work; as does my intent to keep it in a relative key. It’s a grooving, fun piece with lots of interplay. “Peace On the Left – Justice On the Right” is written in two sections that shift from E major to E Dorian (Kafi). The final chord in this work lands on an E diminished to provide a sense of drama and optimism. The title of the work derives from a chant-phrase I heard on a televised newscast from St. Paul, Minnesota. The televised chant was in direct response to the senseless murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Since 1989’s Public Enemy anthem, “Fight the Power”, I’ve continued to use music for social commentary. This work, thirty-one years later, finds me continuing the work I began as a teenager composing and producing for Public Enemy.

STEPHEN PRUTSMAN, American Kaleidoscope: "'American Kaleidoscope' was commissioned by a couple to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary and was inspired by a drive that they took across the country when first married. The piece combines a live string quartet with prerecorded music and other sounds to evoke the ever-shifting historical soundscape accessed by the car radio as the couple traveled. Rather than attempting to recreate the songs and programs likely to have been heard in 1988, “American Kaleidoscope” is more concerned with using music in a transformative way, a collage to suggest different ways of expressing distinctively American experiences. This kaleidoscope travels not just across the country, but back in forth in time, from Stephen Foster’s mid-19th century parlor songs to the present and across musical genres, from bluegrass to Broadway. Along the journey, the references transform by evoking something different from their original context: the panoply of artistic and historical associations of a country and the lives of its inhabitants. The piece falls into different sections, segmented by sonic interruptions, and marked by different grooves and textures, and by different relationships between the string quartet and the electronics."

CAROLINE SHAW, Valencia (2012): There is something exquisite about the construction of an ordinary orange. (Grocery stores around the country often offer the common "Valencia" as the standard option.) Hundreds of brilliantly colored, impossibly delicate vesicles of juice, ready to explode. It is a thing of nature so simple, yet so complex and extraordinary. In 2012, I performed at the MoMA with the musician and performance artist, Glasser — a song which she described as being about the simple beauty of fruit. Later that summer I wrote “Valencia”, for a concert I was playing with some good friends in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. I decided to channel Glasser's brave and intuitive approach to melody and texture, such that “Valencia” became an untethered embrace of the architecture of the common Valencia orange, through billowing harmonics and somewhat viscous chords and melodies. It is also a kind of celebration of awareness of the natural, unadorned food that is still available to us.

JESSICA MEYER, A Passage Between Earth and Sky (2022): "Igor was a glorious tree that provided shade and sanctuary for Michael and Erica (who commissioned the work). One day PG&E cut him down out of fear that he would somehow be uprooted from the soil and fly into the powerlines. I can’t understand how even a diseased tree could fly away like that, yet I am also constantly reminded of the many destructive things we humans do out of fear. In this piece, I wanted to weave together sounds that are evocative of a tree extending their roots into the earth, the birds who rest on his branches, the traumatic dismembering of Igor, and the fantasy of a supernatural force somehow allowing him to magically reassemble and fly up into the sky in order to find a new home. The Overstory by Richard Powers was a book that Erica recommended I read to get into the mindset of how trees exist on the planet, how they grow, and how they can communicate with each other. Early on in the book, a quote immediately grabbed my attention – about how a tree can 'be a passage between earth and sky'."

DAVID SERKIN LUDWIG, Pale Blue Dot (2014): The Voyager I space probe captured my imagination as a child. At the time of this writing, Voyager is approaching the fiftieth anniversary of its launch and 15 billion miles of travel. Voyager was sent to study the planets, but had a second objective as a message in a bottle to be received by other denizens of the vast ocean of stars. Voyager is equipped with a record containing pictures and music intended to document humanity. Its audio playlist includes music by Bach, Berry (Chuck), Mozart, Stravinsky, and last on the album: Beethoven’s shattering Cavatina from his Op. 130 quartet. In 1990, Carl Sagan asked NASA to turn Voyager around to take a deep space portrait of Earth and its neighbors as it was leaving the solar system. The photo is titled “Pale Blue Dot”, and Sagan poetically described our planet–which shows up as a tiny pixel–as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” I like to think of what first contact with Voyager and alien life forms would look like a million years from now, imagining them searching for the “on” button. What would that Cavatina sound like after all those years? Perhaps the aliens would learn what they needed about us and send Voyager back into space to continue its eternal journey. These thoughts and images are the inspiration for my string quartet."