Neuma Records

21/05/2026

PHILLIP SCHROEDER, Radiance Within

"Phillip Schroeder’s Radiance Within feels less like a conventional contemporary classical album than a carefully cultivated refuge. Across seven deeply introspective works for violin, piano and occasional percussion textures, Schroeder creates an atmosphere where silence matters as much as sound, where resonance becomes emotional architecture, and where moments of tension drift through otherwise luminous stillness like passing weather drifting across an open landscape. In an era when so much music competes for attention through density and spectacle, Schroeder chooses to invite listeners inward.

The veteran composer’s aesthetic is rooted in patience, restraint and spiritual attentiveness. Yet despite the meditative framework, Radiance Within is never static background ambience. The album continually balances serenity with unease, illustrating how tranquility and chaos coexist in modern life. The music functions as an oasis of peace, while peppered with bursts of chaos to illustrate the way the crazy world can creep into even the calmest of spaces in our mind and lives, if we let it....

The performances are exceptional throughout. Violinist Margaret Jones brings both technical precision and emotional vulnerability to the music, while Schroeder’s own piano playing emphasizes clarity, restraint and resonance over virtuoso display. Alan Zimmerman’s subtle percussion contributions add depth and atmosphere without overwhelming the fragile emotional equilibrium of the pieces.

Now living on forty acres in southern Colorado after decades in academia and musical life across the United States and Europe, Schroeder seems to compose from a place of earned stillness. Radiance Within reflects that perspective completely. This is music that resists urgency in favor of presence, music that asks listeners not merely to hear, but to dwell inside its spaces. In a restless cultural moment, the pianist offers something increasingly rare: the possibility of genuine quiet, reflection and spiritual renewal.

Phillip Schroeder
Margaret Jones

Phillip Schroeder’s Radiance Within feels less like a conventional contemporary classical album than a carefully cultivated refuge. Across seven deeply introspective works for violin, piano and occasional percussion textures, Schroeder creates an atmosphere where silence matters as much as sound, ...

21/05/2026

D.J. SPARR, The Tao of Muhammad Ali

What’s most striking about The Tao of Muhammad Ali is how quietly it unfolds. Originally composed by D. J. Sparr as part of the multi-layered Imagine Audio/iHeart podcast adaptation of Davis Miller’s acclaimed memoir, the music could easily have remained functional underscore—atmospheric c***ective tissue supporting narration and storytelling. Instead, separated from the spoken word and reconstructed as a standalone release, these thirteen concise instrumental pieces reveal themselves as something far more intimate and unexpectedly transporting: a meditative sound journal shaped by memory, spirituality, loss and reverence.

Rather than attempting to sonically recreate the spectacle and swagger associated with Muhammad Ali’s public persona, Sparr focuses almost entirely on atmosphere and emotional afterglow. Ali hovers over the album less as a celebrity athlete than as a spiritual presence whose wisdom, humor and humanity continue to ripple through the lives he touched. The result is deeply personal music built from hypnotic percussion patterns, resonant chimes, folk textures, ambient electronics, soulful grooves and understated instrumental storytelling. Throughout the album, Sparr demonstrates remarkable restraint, allowing silence, repetition and tonal color to carry as much weight as melody itself...
More than simply music inspired by Muhammad Ali, this is music about the lingering emotional resonance extraordinary individuals leave behind—their ability to shape history, identity and human c***ection long after they are gone. Sparr captures that elusive existential territory with unusual sensitivity and restraint, crafting a recording that feels less like biography than spiritual reflection. The result is an album that invites not passive listening, but immersion: a quiet, contemplative journey into presence, memory and the enduring echoes of wisdom."
D. J. Sparr
Muhammad Ali

What’s most striking about The Tao of Muhammad Ali is how quietly it unfolds. Originally composed by D. J. Sparr as part of the multi-layered Imagine Audio/iHeart podcast adaptation of Davis Miller’s acclaimed memoir, the music could easily have remained functional underscore—atmospheric c***e...

21/05/2026

GEOFFREY GORDON, Fumée

"For some composers, visual art serves merely as inspiration, but in the musical imagination of Geoffrey Gordon, it becomes architecture — a way of shaping motion, color, emotional tension and sonic space into something almost tactile. Across Fumée, the latest release from Neuma Records, the British-American composer transforms paintings, poetry and philosophical ideas into vividly cinematic orchestral environments that feel less like conventional concert works than all-encompassing sensory experiences. Performed by an international roster of elite ensembles, conductors and soloists, the album reveals Gordon as a composer uniquely attuned to the psychological and physical properties of sound itself.

What unites the three major works presented here is Gordon’s fascination with translation: color into orchestration, brushstroke into rhythm, poetic atmosphere into melodic contour. Yet despite the conceptual sophistication behind the music, Fumée never feels academic or remote. These are deeply visceral compositions, alive with dramatic movement, restless volatility and striking textural imagination...
Throughout Fumée, Gordon demonstrates a rare ability to merge intellectual ambition with immediate sensory impact. His music is undeniably sophisticated, drawing from visual art, literature, philosophy and orchestral tradition, yet it never loses its visceral immediacy. Whether evoking the fractured energy of de Kooning’s New York, the drifting melancholy of Belle Époque poetry or the radiant abstraction of Synchromist painting, Gordon composes with a striking command of atmosphere, movement and orchestral color.

Just as importantly, the performances throughout the album are exceptional. Ferreira, Vegara, Po**en, Ward, Morus and the participating orchestras approach this demanding music not as academic exercises but as living dramatic experiences filled with tension, mystery and expressive possibility.

By the album’s conclusion, Fumée feels less like a collection of contemporary orchestral works than an extended meditation on transformation itself — the transformation of image into sound, emotion into texture, and abstraction into something profoundly human."
Geoffrey Gordon

For some composers, visual art serves merely as inspiration, but in the musical imagination of Geoffrey Gordon, it becomes architecture — a way of shaping motion, color, emotional tension and sonic space into something almost tactile. Across Fumée, the latest release from Neuma Records, the Briti...

21/05/2026

ITTAI SHAPIRA, Chunhyang

"Some works of contemporary classical music ask listeners to admire their architecture, complexity or conceptual daring from a distance. Others invite us into an emotional landscape so vividly rendered that the boundaries between story, sound and lived experience begin to dissolve. Ittai Shapira’s sweeping and deeply immersive Chunhyang belongs emphatically to the latter category. Featuring two-time Grammy-winning soprano Hila Plitmann and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Romanian born maestro Florin Parvulescu, the ambitious three-movement concerto-monodrama transforms one of Korea’s most enduring folktales into a transcendent cross-cultural meditation on love, resilience, dignity and spiritual perseverance...
Ultimately, Chunhyang succeeds not merely because of its ambitious cultural synthesis or technical sophistication, but because of the humanity at its center. Across centuries and continents, the story’s themes of integrity, resistance and emotional survival remain deeply recognizable. Shapira honors that universality by allowing the music itself to travel freely between traditions, refusing rigid borders in favor of shared emotional truth.

The result is a work that feels simultaneously ancient and contemporary, intimate and epic, culturally specific yet profoundly universal. More than a reinterpretation of a beloved folktale, Chunhyang emerges as a powerful meditation on resilience itself—and a reminder that stories of courage and dignity continue to resonate precisely because they speak to something timeless within us all."
fans
Ittai Shapira
Hila Plitmann

Some works of contemporary classical music ask listeners to admire their architecture, complexity or conceptual daring from a distance. Others invite us into an emotional landscape so vividly rendered that the boundaries between story, sound and lived experience begin to dissolve. Ittai Shapira’s ...

21/05/2026

Congrats to Ittai Shapira for his Neuma release, Chunhyang, being selected for the Spotify New Classical playlist.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWV0gynK7G6pD?si=fccf789f472e40a7
Hila Plitmann

20/05/2026

“Pastoral (…and there were birds)” is a dedicated work by R. Denham...

15/05/2026

OUT NOW! D.J. Sparr: The Tao of Muhammad Ali

The Tao of Muhammad Ali began as music for a podcast, but in the hands of composer D. J. Sparr, it has been reborn as an intimate commentary on an extraordinary life. Stripped of narration and reimagined for the album format, these pieces form a single arc: an invocation, a walk through the shadow of mortality, and a peaceful return. The score was originally written in collaboration with author and narrator Davis Miller, whose memoir traces his life-transforming friendship with boxing legend and larger-than-life persona, Muhammad Ali Center (1942-2016).

The journey opens and closes with "The Zen of Muhammad Ali." Here, a simple, resonant bell melody blooms into a breathtaking crescendo of light, before retreating into a silence that feels like reverence. In these moments, Ali is not the brash champion in the ring, but a spiritual presence—a stillness at the center of the world.

What lies between is a deeply personal exploration of his gravitational pull. The music breathes with the intimacy of a private thought. A steel tongue drum hovers, suspended in time. Handclaps in an uneven, human meter give way to a hypnotic piano ostinato and wordless, ethereal voices. The warm swell of a Hammond organ and a steady drum groove briefly part to reveal an unexpected treasure: a child’s voice, unguarded and bright, a fleeting domestic-Sparr home recording that dissolves like a memory.

Ali himself is only addressed peripherally. He is felt as a force, shaping the lives of those who orbited him. Guest dobro artist Isaac Miller provides tonal gravity, his Appalachian-inflected performances—including the co-written "Paddy’s Lament"—anchoring the album’s meditations on loss. Strummed guitars evoke old Irish airs, low drones hum with the weight of memory, and flashes of glockenspiel light pierce through a lullaby refracted by gentle synthesizers. This is a sound world of exquisite restraint, where mortality is not a tragedy, but a quiet observation.

Created primarily by Sparr in his Baton Rouge studio, the album moves seamlessly between acoustic warmth, subtle electronics, and the sparing, soulful cry of electric guitar. Known for bringing the instrument into orchestral and genre-defying spaces, Sparr composes here with an economy that speaks volumes. The Tao of Muhammad Ali is not background music; it is a cohesive world to step inside; a return to the quiet power of presence – as useful in the ring as in everydayness.

D. J. Sparr, DMA, is a composer and guitarist equally at home writing for symphony orchestras and collaborating with guitarists like Kaki King. A guitar soloist on a Grammy Award-winning album recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, his own music is a continual exploration of the intersection where vernacular energy meets grand musical form.

13 track album

15/05/2026

OUT NOW! Andreja Andric and The Networked Ensemble: Square Zero- Concert for Computer Network

We sometimes forget that our digital world is built from 0s and 1s, but this musical experience – Square Zero – will bring you back with a start. From such unassuming elements, a gargantuan blast is built; immersing the listener for an hour in a cathartic maze of raw noise and heft. Fascinating patterns, helter skelter energy, altogether visceral and kaleidoscopic.

A singular single, Square Zero: Concert for Computer Network is a 63-minute electronic piece for networked laptop ensemble by composer and programmer Andreja Andric and The Networked Ensemble. Built from relentless square-wave loops and performed through real-time collective improvisation, the piece unfolds as a dense, pulsating flow of 1-bit sound shaped simultaneously by four performers inside a shared distributed system.

Using custom software, the musicians c***ect their laptops through a network that synchronizes their actions and merges their inputs into a single evolving musical stream. Patterns synchronize, drift apart, and recombine as the performers respond to one another inside the system, producing a hypnotic sonic current that can feel equally suited to meditation, surrender, trance, or dance. Listeners familiar with the work of Iannis Xenakis and Tristan Perich will recognize a similar intensity and focus on sound as structure.

Developed over six years alongside the ensemble’s related project Concert for Smartphone Network, the piece grew out of a series of performances at international festivals and media-arts events. Concert for Computer Network explores the musical potential of computer networks as collective instruments. Rather than playing separate devices, the ensemble inhabits a shared distributed instrument, within which all four performers shape the resulting sound in real time.

Andreja Andrić (b. 1973) is a Serbian composer and programmer, living in Aarhus in Denmark. He explores the intersections of mathematical processes, intuition and chance and uses computer programming as key means of artistic expression. With a primary interest in composition and performance for his networked laptop/smartphone ensemble, he is also active as composer of vocal and instrumental music and creator of video and multimedia art.

The Networked Ensemble is Andreja Andric, Malgorzata Zurada, Maja Bosnic and Marija Sumarac. The ensemble operates as a geographically distributed group, with members based in Denmark, Switzerland, Serbia, and Finland.
.zurada
.zabuna
.sumarac.3

track by Neuma Records