A Brief History -A Collection of Great Dance Songs is a series of commissions for live performance multi-media dance works that were created and performed in the United States from 2008-2011. “Martin Case has been building musical floors under the feet of Boston dancers for a long time – floors supported by an eclecticism that girds the globe, from the cramped apartment complex of “Dispute” to “Thailand Outdoors” with its hectic, techno-Thai suspension of disbelief, the onboard guidance of a modern Guinean shamanism in “Fractured” or the jungle-born adrenaline of “Hunter”...We delve in the sacred spaces of the inner ear, where the stresses are laid on reverence, and adherence is achieved through impulse rather than obligation. Case has conceived of the album as an auditory journal covering his past five years as a composer working with companies and choreographers as varied as Boston Ballet, Prometheus Dance, Harvard University, Samantha Cameron and Min Tzu Li, among many others. Publishing these eighteen pieces as a stand-alone collection puts them within reach of a much wider audience, of course. It also opens a window onto the intensely personal vision-quest behind the collaborative work ethic essential to stage production. Martin Case employs the rhetoric of shamanism unabashedly. When he brings us face to face with the rich darkness at the center of this universe, in “Lament of the Father” or “The Ancestors Are Moving Through Us” and again in “The Ancestors”, he reminds us that the floors beneath us open onto a world where we take bigger steps...” -Vin Nivens, Berkshire Fine Arts, 2012.