Zosha Warpeha - silver dawn

silver dawn, the solo debut from New York composer Zosha Warpeha, releases May 3rd, 2024 on Relative Pitch Records. Drawing from a meditative practice immersed in free improvisation and Nordic folk music, Warpeha brings us an ethereal, poetic collection of intimate sonic vignettes performed on Hardanger d’amore and voice.

silver dawn was recorded over two days of improvisation in a sun-filled room near the Ashokan Reservoir, engineered by Eli Crews of Spillway Sound. The Hardanger d’amore Warpeha plays is kin to the traditional Norwegian hardingfele and Baroque viola d’amore; it is a rare type of fiddle that houses five bowed strings and five sympathetic strings, suspended below the fingerboard. The resonant strings are never touched, but vibrate sympathetically when activated by bowed tones, imbuing the record with a striking timbre and natural reverberation.

Titled after a refrain of E.E. Cummings evoking the transient morning light, Warpeha presents thirteen pieces that magnify ephemeral moments with a poet’s attention, like the rustle of prairie grasses in the wind or a dream dissolving into daylight. Inspired by an old fiddling practice of capturing the natural world and folklore through impressionistic tone paintings, Warpeha writes: “In my playing, I seek a clear mind. Through stillness come elements of the space around me; birds outside the window, sunlight reflecting off a metallic surface, specks of dust floating in the air.”

In pieces that circle around fragments of melody, abstract texture, and organic gestures of rhythm and rest, the record marks a moment in Warpeha's intersecting practices of free improvisation and traditional fiddling. Warpeha spent two years in Norway, studying the Hardanger fiddle tradition on a Fulbright award. Face to face with her teachers, collective memories passed from one hand to another, she began to experience moments of deep, embodied presence and stillness
in her playing, carried by the cyclical, trancelike momentum of traditional tunes. “Learning this music opened a new relationship between me and my instrument; my improvisations were guided by my hands and body, driven by a somatic memory more ancient than myself.”

Following the feelings in her body and bow, Warpeha began to draw from a vein of fiddling modular in form, improvisatory in nature. “Tunes can be built from the tiniest melodic cells; repeated, left behind, returned to,” she says. “I became interested in cyclical cells and physical sensations that became their own building blocks: a feeling in my fingers, a hand frame or embellishment. What would happen if I moved the framework to a different set of strings, a different tuning? What if I fixated on the trill itself rather than its resolution?”

Through a record of sensitive touch, silver dawn reveals a synthesis of a highly personal compositional practice, magnifying touch and embracing transience.“Every phrase is but a gesture in a larger form and cycle, existing just for a moment. Fleeting, temporary, like a flower blossoming after a spring thaw. It blooms and then goes dormant, but will reemerge in a new form after the cycle of seasons.”

As her mentor Unni Løvlid once told her, “It is not only about the tunes, but the secrets between them.”