SARAH PLUM
an expanding distance of multiple voices
Set for release on April 10, Sarah Plum’s new recording grows organically out of a life immersed in new music. The album brings together long-standing artistic partnerships, works that have traveled with her for decades, and more recent collaborations that have quickly become essential to her musical world. Rather than a retrospective, the CD functions as a snapshot—capturing how these pieces sound and feel now, and how Plum hopes they will continue to circulate through performers and listeners alike.
Several works were written specifically for Plum and reflect relationships built over many years. Sidney Corbett’s Canticle continues a long creative dialogue, while Mari Takano’s Elegy arrived unexpectedly as a gift—an intimate gesture of trust and generosity. Benjamin Fuhrman’s Sirens, which Plum has performed for nearly two decades, is a tour-de-force: physical, virtuosic, and immediately compelling, carried into performances worldwide since it was introduced to Plum by a former student.
Newer chapters appear alongside these established works. Osnat Netzer’s Olive Cotton, transcribed from viola, allows Plum unusual closeness to the composer’s voice. Tonia Ko’s Moves and Remains, a piece Plum discovered soon after both arrived in Chicago, is a quietly striking work deserving wider attention. Jeffrey Mumford’s “an expanding distance of multiple voices” which Plum has chosen as the evocative title of this album, rounds out the program, revisited in a performance here with fresh perspective and urgency.
At heart, the album is about transmission: how music is lived with, shaped, and passed forward. For Plum, recording is not documentation but continuation.
