Powell on Powell CDs are classified by musical genre to simplify shopping. My work has never fit into a genre, though, because I’ve never composed with attention to traditional formula or system. This is handmade music, written out of my head with pencil, paper, and occasional recourse to a piano. I have never used preexisting structures; I don’t use computers; I’m not affiliated with any school of composition. I borrow no licks or lines. If you sample each of the works on “On and Off the Score,” the diversity of work will be clear, for no piece sounds like any other. You won’t find a “style.” The roster of musicians on this CD in itself hints at the indefinable quality of my music. These are all world-class performers, yet they are at the top of disparate genres: avant-garde, jazz, experimental and improvisational music; orchestral, chamber, and solo performance. I composed the works on this CD for these, my wide-ranging world of friends, collaborators, and colleagues. They came from all over the literal map to record this music:; John Fonville, San Diego; Ray Sasaki, Austin; Steve Butters and Tomeka Reid, Chicago; Eric Mandat and Ron Coulter, Carbondale, Illinois; Jim Staley and Phoebe Legere, New York City; Edwin London and Howie Smith, Cleveland; Ariane Alexander, Philadelphia. Several of us are rooted in Champaign/Urbana, with ties to the University of Illinois: Dorothy Martirano, Michael Cameron, Armand Beaudoin and I. The Cleveland Chamber Symphony has its home city; the Tone Road Ramblers do just that. In all, over fifty musicians participated in recording the music on this CD. The oldest recording, “Zelanski Medley,” for the ineluctable Modality and Contemporary Chamber Players was in 1972 and the most recent, “Miscreant Angels” for Ariane Alexander, in 2015. I am grateful to all of these performers and to Ann Starr, the publisher of Upper Hand Press, who had the faith and courage to publish this CD of what many will consider unorthodox, strange, and difficult music. And all of those adjectives can be legitimately applied—if you forget that we are deeply programmed to hear only consonant music. The question is: whether it is worth it to you to experience dissonance and new sound to discover the satisfactions that lie beyond your expectations? That depends on where you want to go with your sensibility. This is not music you will relax to on the first or second hearing. Rather, it is music to listen to one piece at a time. With repeated listening, your mind adjusts to its sound and workings, and it discovers a new world on the other side of your patience. Science has established that Western minds are programmed to hear consonant music; but, with exposure, the mind will not only adjust to dissonance but come to like it and where it takes you. Again, is the experience worth it? I decided a long time ago that it is. From CD Liner Notes - Ann Starr Composer Morgan Powell is a brilliant, genuinely unprecedented artist who has quietly created a tremendous body of scored and improvised compositions(the latter as a member of the Tone Road Ramblers sextet). Powell has never sought reputation, his musical process being so much a part of thoughtful living that to step away into promotion is to depart into an alien world inimical to the twin improvisatory processes of life and music. In a world awash with recorded music, composers we haven't heard of tend to merge into a pounding headache of background noise. We feel annoyed and imposed upon even by free handouts of new CDs by unfamiliar artists, and especially when we’re asked to buy something cold. Why should we? Music composition is a profession; for many, it’s a competition. For composer and improviser Powell, it’s art, launched by observation toward the end of new understanding—and new beginnings. There’s no looking back: Life is improvised from minute to minute moving forward, and this is how Powell composes. His third eye music creates sounds and form not from rules or traditions of music, but from the freedom of art. So if listening to Powell's extraordinary, unfamiliar music sounds like a recommendation to eat your vegetables—it's good for you!—freedom has to have the same lack of appeal. Who knows what will happen when there are no rules that both bind but protect you? When there is nothing to tap your foot to, telling you that you are hearing "correctly?" What if the music is written so that you can listen with your own ears and mind open, taking what comes and interpreting it as you will, without needing an expert to tell you what you hear? With Powell's music, every listener is an expert because for every listener it is unprecedented—completely new. Sit back and let it float or drown you; lean in and delight in the brilliance and sweetness of the sound world Powell composes, offers to you, or ambushes you with. Powell’s music is powerful, beautiful, efficient, and unprecedented in the challenges for the many virtuosos who commission it and play it. In Morgan Powell you will discover a composer you wish you’d discovered years ago because his music reminds you why humans make art in the first place. Ann Starr - Upper Hand Press