STILLPOINT by Awadagin Pratt

Internationally acclaimed pianist Awadagin Pratt announces his new album STILLPOINT

On Friday August 25, 2023, the internationally acclaimed pianist Awadagin Pratt, known as “one of the great and distinctive American pianists and conductors of our time” (NPR All Things Considered), and praised for his “enormous dynamic range [that] encompasses grave quiet to immense thunder” (Boston Musical Intelligencer), releases his new album, STILLPOINT, via New Amsterdam Records. STILLPOINT is a collection of six newly-commissioned works of profound grace, power, and depth, composed by a group of stylistically diverse composers for piano (Pratt), string orchestra (A Far Cry), and vocal ensemble (Roomful of Teeth).

STILLPOINT is a departure from — and a re-imagining of — Pratt's decades-long artistic journey, as he engages with and questions the long established genre-specific norms of classical music. By uniting T.S. Eliot's prescient poem The Four Quartets with his own pioneering musicianship, and with the creative voices of his chosen composers, Pratt explores, in his words, Eliot’s “expression of a particular kind of tension, an understanding of a duality that can exist in life, the struggle for balance, and an acknowledgement of the inexpressible–that which cannot be tidily communicated” as a pathway to ideas not particular to one’s own experience, but universal to the human condition.

The album is a collaboration between Pratt; the Grammy-winning vocal band, Roomful of Teeth; the democratically run string orchestra, A Far Cry; and a stellar array of composers including Alvin Singleton, Jessie Montgomery, Judd Greenstein, Paola Prestini, Pēteris Vasks, and Tyshawn Sorey.

Pratt’s virtuosic performance and unmistakable touch weaves together the disparate voices of the composers and ensembles throughout STILLPOINT. His masterful musicianship and unique voice casts each piece as a part of the greater whole — uniting the ensembles, composers, and philosophical inquiry into one temporal universe where his piano sits at the center.

Awadagin Pratt - pianist, pedagogue, conductor, and curator-of-artistic-moments - is actively inventing the musical world he hopes to live in. And you’re invited.