Book II of Arthur: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

SSC1640 2021-09-03

Track List

The Wager - 8:58
The Endless Knot - 3:00
Pared from Paper - 1:43
The Deer - 6:16
The Boar - 3:43
“of love, its grief and grace” - 3:12
The Final Boon - 3:33
The Fox - 6:45
The Wager (reprise) - 2:17
“he cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down” - 2:49
The Doleful Charge - 14:16

Musicians

Logan Strosahl - saxopohone, flute, clarinet
The Charles Rosen Ensemble - ensemble

Arthurian tales have captured the imaginations of artists for centuries. In the late 12th-century, the floodgates of Medieval Arthurian literature burst open, and across Western Europe, works about the fictional deeds of individual knights of the Round Table were written. These were tales of mistaken identity, switched births, giants, ceremonial duels, and forbidden love, that portrayed the different knights as flawed upholders of what came to be known as the Chivalric Code. // Saxophonist and composer Logan Strosahl has reanimated one of the most influential of those works through his own idiosyncratic music. Like the protagonist, Sir Gawain, Logan Strosahl took his own musical quest and learned much along the way. The amazing work the young composer created with his Book II of Arthur: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight shows a commanding new level of artistry. // Difficult to categorize” could with equal justice describe Strosahl’s music. Informed by many channels but dominated by none, influences operate as elements in a fully integrated, personal language rather than pastiche. While the music in Book II obviously contains a good deal of “classical” craft ranging from the Wagnerian to polyphonic fantasias and to 21st-century composition; it also contains the Blues, various grooves, improvisation, and common-language materials.