Folk composer, singer and multi-instrumentalist Emily Pinkerton and contemporary classical composer/NOW Ensemble member Patrick Burke are excited to announce their new collaborative work with chamber group NOW Ensemble, Rounder Songs, will be released November 17, 2017 on New Amsterdam Records. Rounder Songs is a song cycle for voice, banjo and chamber ensemble that brings together the sounds of 21st century post-minimalist classical music and North American old-time. The work is based on public domain songs and legends from Kentucky and West Virginia that tell the stories of several “rounders”: rural drifters who include a gambler, a murderer, and a mill laborer who strikes a deal with the devil. Rounder Songs was conceived and composed by Pinkerton and Burke (who are also a married couple) to focus on the common ground between their musical styles -- hypnotic, pulsing rhythms, subtle melodic variation over time, and perhaps most of all, the vivid evocation of certain moods. The work features old-time and classical genres on a level playing field, rather than subsuming one within the other. Pinkerton and Burke started with traditional songs and lyrics from Appalachia, then re-composed them for Pinkerton to sing and play banjo with NOW Ensemble, using the group's unique instrumentation of flute (Alex Sopp), clarinet (Alicia Lee), electric guitar (Mark Dancigers), double bass (Logan Coale), and piano (Michael Mizrahi) to amplify the mood of each song. Each movement of Rounder Songs is motivated by a distinct vision of this wedding of musical cultures. In “Red Rocking Chair,” NOW Ensemble’s instrumentation serves as a distillation of a clawhammer banjo pattern. The individual lines interact in a way that echoes the relationships between the banjo strings, creating a minimalist texture. In "Marcum and the Yankee" a mill worker strikes a deal with the devil and trades his soul for a gun in this legend from the famous Hammons Family of West Virginia. Both eerie and cathartic, it represents the intersections of industry with the environment.