Dennis Ruff: Baroque Redux CD

This CD, BAROQUE REDUX, is the seventh CD I have submitted to CDBaby. In all of these seven -- since the first that contained my Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-4 -- my effort has been to create music that is consistent with the beginning of the 21st Century. By that I mean that I believe that experimentation in art music (sometimes for experimentation's sake, it seems) was pushed as far as it could go in the 20th Century, and that our time is a time of "leavening" -- a time for composers to pause and look around, and even to look back; a time to consider the audience, instead of attempting to innovate at the price of becoming incomprehensible -- and as a consequence, watching the audience steadily disappear. In the process of attempting to accomplish this "leavening" in my own music, I have made a serious effort to discover what my creative spirit really is all about -- and not to simply surrender to what my intellect might believe would lend my music academic cachet.In BAROQUE REDUX, I have set myself the task of revisiting the Baroque Era -- not, of course, to imitate the musical styles of the luminaries of that era, but to see what I might accomplish, as a composer in the early 21st Century, working with forms indigenous to that era. The result in this, my latest CD, is that the two major works on it are in a form that any lover of art music will instantly recognize: the Concerto Grosso. And to bring the CD to a dramatic, lyric conclusion, the final work suggests a choral style from the earliest of the Baroque -- the madrigal.