It is beautiful, haunting, immersive. A meditative sound world to live in for a time and think about once you’ve left… In Davis’ hands, the psaltery soars and twangs, pings and croons. Gentle and meditative at one moment, sharp and melancholy the next, the music on Neutral Buoyant reveals the bowed psaltery as an instrument capable of producing tones in surprisingly varied spectrums of texture and color, evoking fluid shapes and celestial voices moving together through a complex, slowly shifting soundscape. It is both of this world and somehow beyond it. - Megan Westberg
Read More“macrocosmic masterpiece…here was music of spheres, both as tiny as a grain of sand and as large as a world.”
- Zoë Madonna, The Boston Globe
“hauntingly beautiful”
- Philip Brandes, The Los Angeles Times
“The excellent Calder Quartet performed " Echeia" by Nathan Davis in the Mozart Hall of the Donauhallen(Composition commissioned by the SWR) with multifaceted tremolo effects and additional sound intervals on the computer.”
-Ralf Brunner, Online Merker
“Hagoromo is magic…stunningly beautiful. The score is lyrically evocative”
-George Grella, NY Classical Review
“Contrapuntal passages of Mozartean elegance emerge unexpectedly from chaotic textures, and the expressive motives of Baroque composition provide a Western equivalent to Noh’s stylization.”
- Joe Cadagin, Opera News
“ “Limn” for bass flute, contrabass flute and electronics employed extended techniques to produce expressive sounds of painful fragility.”
-Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times
“It's an ingenious piece you can access in any number of ways, and consequently, everybody has their own experience.”
-James Chute, Chicago Tribune
“Nathan Davis writes music that deals deftly and poetically with timbre and sonority.”
- Steve Smith, The New York Times
“A melancholy, beautiful choralelike middle section teetered between dissonance and consonance. It gradually increased in intensity, becoming an uplifting and harmonically intriguing explosion of activity.”
-Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times
-
Read More“...deftly illuminated its eclectic moods and myriad timbres — which ranged from breathy, guttural noises to rhapsodic melodies in a high register, interspersed and contrasted with digital sounds.”
-Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times
“an alluring and pensive musical experience.”
- Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
“a fantastical litany of squeaks and squeals, followed by a warm, wooly thicket of resonating overtones.”
- Steve Smith, The New York Times
“The highlight had to be the two scores that concluded the marathon, and thus the [Ojai] festival: Nathan Davis's "Sounder," receiving its premiere, and Louis Andriessen's "Workers Union." “
-David Mermelstein, The Wall Street Journal