A Bluegrass Counterpoint to...Counterpoint

Gabriel Jenks has a new album out. It’s called Lonesome, and it’s a collection of songs in folk and bluegrass traditions. It’s a bit of a departure. Jenks is an associate professor of music composition at the Jacobs School of Music, and the project he did before Lonesome involved composing from historically stylistic standpoints as part of a multifaceted project titled A Journey Through the Underworld: Counterpoint, which bridges book, play, opera, and musical composition, interrogating music theory from various points of views in the past few centuries. Not a bluegrass album. Alex Chambers invited him to come in and tell me about how he got from one to the other. They talked about the social context of music theory in the Enlightenment and early twentieth century Europe, being maybe the biggest music nerd at a music conservatory, and what working in a cow barn has to do with becoming a harpist.