Erika Switzer & Tyler Duncan record songs from British Columbia

New York, NY (May 12, 2023) — On Friday, June 23, 2023 , baritone Tyler Duncan and pianist Erika Switzer release A Left Coast on Bridge Records . In a heartfelt playlist for their home of British Columbia, Duncan and Switzer share their fondness for the Vancouver communities, geography, and spirit that continue to nourish them as artists. View the trailer for A Left Coast here. In showing immense gratitude for Canada’s West Coast new music scene, Duncan and Switzer have compiled songs written by friends and colleagues from University of British Columbia’s School of Music: Stephen Chatman, Jean Coulthard, Iman Habibi, Melissa Hui, Jocelyn Morlock, and Leslie Uyeda . Drawing on themes of identity, self-knowledge, wonder, and nature, each work is an unapologetic romanticization and celebration of their Canadian home.

At the core of the album is Jan Zwicky’s poem Schumann: Fantasie, Op. 17 set to music by Jeffrey Ryan in Everything Already Lost . The poem was written in response to Schumann’s Romantic piano work, which was itself a response to Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte . Ryan describes the piece: “Opening with a short fantasia based on the same Beethoven fragment that Schumann quoted, the song follows the Fantasie ’s structure and proportions, borrowing selected musical materials and expanding them in new directions to express memory, distance, and the fleetingness of moments together.”

Additional tracks on the album include False Morning and The River-Lip by Iman Habibi, inspired by the quatrain poetry of Omar Khayyám, a medieval Persian polymath thought to have inspired mystic Sufi thinkers such as Rumi and Attar; Three Love Songs by Jean Coulthard, which sets to music poetry drawn from the 1948 collection “The Ill-Tempered Lover” by her UBC colleague Louis MacKay; Something Like That by Stephen Chatman, written in 2010 for Duncan and Australia’s pre-eminent chamber music ensemble Freshwater Trio; Plato’s Angel by Leslie Uyeda, which sets to music four introspective poems by Canadian Poet Lorna Crozier; and Snowflakes by Melissa Hui, drawing on the ethereal and quiet essence of the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The album is dedicated to composer Jocelyn Morlock (1969-2023) who composed Involuntary Love Songs consisting of three points – Thaw , Matches , and Script – in love which is denied and hidden, and finally, eventually, acknowledged and embodied.