Jeff Beal — The Paper Lined Shack Podcast
Highlighting the recording of the same name on on Supertrain Records, Jeff Beal’s ‘The Paper Lined Shack’ album features Grammy Award-winning soprano Hilá Plitmann, the New Hollywood String Quartet, and Leonard Slatkin conducting the Eastman Philharmonia. Listen to the Jeff Beal — The Paper Lined Shack Podcast.
Comprising two works — The Paper Lined Shack” for soprano and orchestra, and “Things Unseen” for string quartet — this album is a deeply personal one for Beal in many respects, representing Beal’s lineage, past and present. The libretto to “The Paper Lined Shack” was compiled by Joan Beal, utilizing texts and images sourced from his great-grandmother’s memoir, composed in her late years. the world premiere of “The Paper Lined Shack’’ took place in 2019 with Plitmann, Slatkin, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
“Things Unseen,” the second complete work of the album, was originally commissioned by Eastman School of Music’s quartet-in-residence, the Ying Quartet which, at the time of its world premiere, consisted of four siblings. According to Beal, “Each of the four movements unfold as balancing acts of controlled dialog and chaos. Ideas are introduced by one player, developed, morphed, and passed around the room, as in the best of dinner party conversations — perhaps a group of siblings,” The recorded version is performed by the New Hollywood String Quartet (Tereza Stanislav & Rafael Rishik, violins; Robert Brophy, viola; Andrew Shulman, cello).
The album is also indicative of Beal’s many ties to Eastman School of Music, where he is an alumni and the founder of The Beal Institute for Film Music and Contemporary Media.
Full track list:
The Paper Lined Shack for soprano and orchestra
1. Carefree Girl
2. The Red Chair
3. The Paper Lined Shack — May 13 single release
4. Our Garden
5. My Heart
Things Unseen for string quartet
6. Ghosts
7. Spirits
8. Angels
9. Gnomes — June 3 single release
Jeff Beal is an American composer with a genre-defying musical uidity. His work has been nominated for nineteen, and won five Primetime Emmy awards for scores for House of Cards (Netflix), Rome (HBO), Carnivale (HBO) Nightmares and Dreamscapes (TNT), Monk (USA) and Oliver Stone’s The Putin Interviews (Showtime). Film scores include the documentaries The Biggest Little Farm and Black?sh, and dramas Pollock (dir. Ed Harris) and Shock and Awe (dir. Rob Reiner).
Beal composes, orchestrates, conducts, mixes and often performs on his own scores — no other artist’s brush strokes touch his canvas. An accomplished and recorded jazz musician, Beal uses his improvisational skills to read the emotional tone of a scene.
Produced by Max Horowitz — Crossover Media, This content, as well as the related podcast, are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) for redistribution and adaptation.
