During the Covid doldrums of 2020, the wind faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, like so many of us, experienced acute loneliness and isolation. As musicians accustomed to the musical and social connections that come from the intimate art of chamber music, they longed to channel their creative loss into something meaningful. Bandwidth – a mission as much as a group – emerged to champion chamber repertoire for wind instruments, foster connections between faculty, and provide a model of music-making and musical citizenship to university students. Central to this concept is an embrace of heterogeneity, between instruments and composer styles.

The five works on this album, Where Songs Go at Night, cover a range of themes; from wry observations on late-stage capitalism to St. Francis feeding the birds, throbbing science-fiction machinery, and song fragments that mingle, chat, argue, and finally come together. Likewise the five diverse, ground-breaking composers hail from far and wide (South Africa to Colorado) and together reinforce the perspective that this album is taking the wind ensemble to new territories.