"Routes of Evanescence:" Music for Solo Violin and Violin + 1 by American Women Composers Ariana Kim's debut solo album, Routes of Evanescence, features six captivating works written by American women composers spanning three generations. The record will include the world premiere recording of two new works by Tonia Ko and Jennifer Curtis, iconic sonatas by Ruth Crawford Seeger and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, spellbinding solo pieces by Augusta Read Thomas, and a bonus track of “Wheel Hoss,” a bluegrass tune written by the great Bill Monroe arranged by Ariana Kim and Jennifer Curtis. Jennifer Curtis' 2007 composition, The Moon in the Sand, is a duet for violin and mandolin that traverses the virtuosity of each instrument, paying homage to Ariana and Jen's bluegrass roots, incorporating a home-spun fiddle tune and interplay reminiscent of a front porch jam session. Having been written for one of Ariana's doctoral recitals, it received its premiere at The Juilliard School in 2008. A "bonus track" will bookend the album as Ariana and Jen arrange an old bluegrass tune for two dueling fiddles and pay homage to the great Bill Monroe. Augusta Read Thomas' Incantation and Pulsar, (1995 and 2003, respectively) both written for solo violin, illustrate the breadth of her writing style. Incantation, written as a lament to a dear friend, asks the listener to discover a balance between pain and peaceful resignation with yearning tritones and suspended phrygian scales; Pulsar is a surging, flickering, virtuosic tour of a sonic galaxy, filled with frenetic passagework and bursts of musical light. Ruth Crawford Seeger's 1926 violin sonata is powerful and playful, written in the world of post-modernism; her brilliance and musical charm through this work put her on the map as a preeminent composer in a heavily male-dominated field. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music, wrote her prize-winning violin sonata in 1973, and presents a compact offering of her passionate, thoughtful, and fiery language. Tonia Ko, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, wrote this piece expressly for Ariana, and it received its premiere on Cornell's campus in 2012. Still Life Crumbles invites the challenge of asking the violin to become a hybrid voice, at times mimicking the plucked action of the harpsichord, and others soaring above with cascading melodic lines. The piece has since been featured at the Tanglewood Festival and earned her place as a Copland House Fellow. - Ariana Kim, 2015 "I will never write any other violin piece with out you in my mind and ear. It is spectacular. Your tone, colors, depth, soul, grace, musicality, vision, are all PERFECT. You play just the way I hear it." -- Augusta Read Thomas upon hearing the master edit of her piece, "Pulsar" for solo violin.