This album features the first recordings of four representative works composed for various chamber ensembles, completed between 2007 and 2023. The performers featured on this album premiered these compositions as part of an all-Christopher James concert sponsored by North/South Consonance, which took place on June 11, 2024, at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City.

The composer has said, not entirely in jest, that he is an experimental composer: he regards each new work as an adventure, an opportunity to do something entirely different from anything that he has done before. One great lesson he has learned from a life of composing is that each new work must begin utterly from scratch, from the seed, or ab ovo, from the fertilized egg. At the same time, much of James’ work may be characterized as eclectic or polystylistic, emphasizing the continuum of historical styles and reflecting his concern with maintaining awareness of the past in the current of today’s music. Stylistic references are deployed strategically in an effort to provide a context or framework for interpretation. This is particularly notable in the Concerto Grosso and the song cycle, where the stylistic flux is neither historical, nor imitative, nor didactic, but operates autonomously through purely musical means.

James notes that involuntary musical memory is always present to a composer’s mind; it provides the raw material for the fermentation that is required to imagine and produce any new work, the chemical process, the mental process. The ultra-rationalist would say that this amounts to nothing more than a rearrangement of elements. But when out of this unconscious rearrangement something of special value suddenly comes to hand unbidden, there is always a frisson of joy in discovery. As Elgar has said, music is everywhere, in the air, down by the river, “written on the skies for you to note down.”