Various Artists - Jack Van Zandt: A Chaos of Light and Motion (2025)

A Chaos of Light and Motion celebrates the musical partnership of Grammy-winning composer Jack Van Zandt and soprano Stacey Fraser, presenting recordings of a selection of works they have created together with some of their favorite Los Angeles performers and friends in recent years. The music on this album includes the title song cycle, a dramatic madrigal, and songs from a jazz opera.

With roots in Classical art song, European Modernism, and mid 20th century jazz artists, the album offers a full helping of richly sophisticated and warmly embracing musical artistry.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems are marked by many interests and influences—especially science, mathematics and philosophy, including Hinduism and Buddhism—and were often a mash-up of numerous ideas of the time. Van Zandt’s composing style has similar qualities, combining elements of science, math, philosophy, visual art theory (especially Klee and Escher), and music from ancient traditions and cultures outside his own. The text of the title song is a wondrous evocation of the scientific achievements of the Age of Reason and explores the crossroads of science and spirituality. Also typical of Shelley, his poems tell a story that takes the reader on a journey.

The Three Arias presented in the next set come from Van Zandt’s two-hour dramatic madrigal, On the Shores of Eternity, a multimedia work that pays homage to the form pioneered by Claudio Monteverdi in the 17th century. It uses digital music and video technology to take the audience on an ethereal journey contemplating human existence. The work—scored for soprano soloist, vocal ensemble, dancers, digital instruments and sound designs, small ensemble, and video—sets specially chosen texts by the Bengali Hindu poet and Nobel Literature Prize winner (1913) Rabindranath Tagore that explore the twilight zone between life and death.

The New Frontier is a semi-humorous music theater solo inspired by growing up in California in the 1950s and 60s against the background of the threat of nuclear annihilation. In the staged work, a woman alone in an underground fallout shelter after a nuclear war, imagines herself to be a series of characters from the Atomic Age. The characters portrayed in these two selections are the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg and a home underground fallout shelter saleswoman. The musical influences for the work are American jazz masters of the period, such as Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Chet Baker, and Eric Dolphy. Literary influences include the Beat poets, Kurt Vonnegut, Samuel Beckett, the French Existentialists, and the political theater of Piscator and Brecht.

Jack Van Zandt (b. 1954) is a veteran Los Angeles and Ireland-based composer of music for concerts, streaming platforms, television and film, and multimedia presentations. He studied composition at UC Santa Barbara with Thea Musgrave and Peter Racine Fricker, and in England with Alexander Goehr at Cambridge University, and Peter Maxwell Davies at the Dartington. He is a teacher, music education program designer, writer, concert producer, and frequent lecturer on various musical subjects.

The Canadian soprano Stacey Fraser’s eclectic musical interests have made her much in demand on international operatic, concert, and theatre stages. She is a core member of the LA-based Brightwork ensemble and teaches at California State University San Bernardino.