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Web: Purchase: Newsletter (Tour Updates Free Track Download): --------------------------------------------- Pianist and composer Dave Meder presents “modern gothic“, a single from his 2023 album 'New American Hymnal'. ON THE ALBUM: 'New American Hymnal' is a collection of worship songs, not in a religious sense, but rather for the American civic and cultural experiment. It is a chance, in my small corner, to join others who are taking a fresh look at what constitutes the creed of American culture, independent of any religion. Nevertheless, I use the metaphor of a hymnal to guide the structure of this work: a nod to the names of existing church worship collections like the New English Hymnal or New Harmonia Sacra. I think of each work as a figurative meditation on an aspect of American civil life. Some works worship the good, some lament the bad, and others act as calls to action. But much like in a literal hymnal, these songs combine their various affects and messages into a unifying set of ideals. The enduring power of religion, faith, and hymns is that they bind us to a unifying creed: a set of principles that form the value system for even the most secular of cultures. Perhaps in no other country does religion remain such a curious force than in the United States. Despite our theoretically secular founding, several recent judicial and social policy changes have been driven by Judeo-Christian tenets. It's not a new phenomenon: political-cultural issues have been a steady unifying force for fundamentalists since the rise of the Moral Majority in the 1980s, and the broader idea of mobilizing religion for political ends is a centuries-old strategy. Yet, on issues of existential and once-in-a-generation importance, such as the threat of climate change, this same American religious establishment is unable, or unwilling, to mount the same kind of organized political effort as it does on polarizing social issues. Why not? Who decides which issues make it onto the battle lines of a religious or political creed, and which do not? Who has the privilege of setting the dominant interpretation? Let’s decouple the ideas of worship, faith, hymns, and religion from the stigma and sometimes-toxicity of modern American religious institutions. Let’s look at these ideas in a civic and cultural sense. What exactly do we worship as Americans? What do we choose to elevate as themes in our American cultural creed? What values ultimately inform our metaphorical American hymnal? Full album notes/narrative found at: ON THE TRACK: As the first track on the album, “modern gothic“ begins by invoking the feeling of classic Americana (a reference to the classic Grant Wood painting), but with a slight distortion. I use three folk-like triadic harmonies as the motivic root of this piece (for the music literate, these are I, IV and V). Each one is paired with a triad from an unrelated key. The piece requires improvisors to utilize the new collection of notes arising from these three “triad pairs.” The melody consists of five melodic phrases, each played with five bars in between, cutting against the normal four-bar organization of American folk and jazz. When taken together, these harmonic and structural variations on traditional American styles represent the expanding diversity of what constitutes American folklore, and the clashes that come along with such a change. Sometimes the triad pairs will be consonant with one another, but often (as in the exclamatory piano chords in the last melody statement at 5:07) they will conflict. Ultimately, the music tries to expand the definition of nostalgic American idealism. Full album notes/narrative found at: CREDITS: Dave Meder - Piano Philip Dizack - Trumpet Marty Jaffe - Bass Michael Piolet - Drums Recorded March 25, 2023 at Big Orange Sheep (Brooklyn, NY) Michael Perez-Cisneros - Engineer Dave Darlington - Mixing and Mastering Video: Adrien H. Tillmann () Label: Outside In Music () Dave Meder is a Yamaha Artist. Yamaha CFX provided by Yamaha Artist Services NYC ()
