Within this album live several novel voices, and they are novel for many different reasons. Khachaturian, the Armenian working in Moscow, who emerged victorious from the shackles of official state censorship; Clarke, a British female composer working in the United States, who – whilst writing in a male-dominated world – gifted the planet with a sonata for viola and piano that has become one the masterpieces of the century and an icon of this noblest of instruments, despite being one that is constantly at the mercy of the violin’s shadow; Weinberg, a Polish Jew in Soviet Russia, doubly marginalized by virtue of both his Jewishness and his Polishness, forced to displace himself to another country because his own was occupied by the Nazis (who murdered his sister and parents), writing music that showed us all that one’s ethnic roots alongside one’s pains and joys could be turned into powerful art. And lastly, Fernando Arroyo Lascurain’s piece, Novel Voices, a unique composition inspired by our travels through the Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project into refugee camps and support programs in the US, Europe, and the Middle East – during which we performed concerts and workshops, as well as listened to, learned from, documented, and recorded the stories of our refugee audience members. Lascurain used our conversations and encounters as the basis for an original musical composition, giving the project’s refugee participants and their stories a novel musical voice.
