Long Dissonant Romance is our 5^th album. If it were not for dissonance we’d never know what consonance is. We really ‘really’ know what consonance is!  Thank you for the support over the years. This disc represents the music we have been performing on our tours across the United States and at home in Western Washington. It reflects what have been our most successful audience pleasers. Our hope in presenting this music in a popular way, (no history lessons or ‘ you should have played it with your jaw like this’ )  is to promote chamber music so it may reach a larger audience and convert every one who hears it into passionate, heavy breathing, drool dripping chamber music aficionados like us and all other good people.

To musicians, composers, and people who own instruments,

                Most bass and cello music is… the majority of bass and cello music consists of… A lot of bass and cello music…Rossini and Dragonetti are the two composers who… Very few composers have dared to broaden their composing skills to feature the two coolest instruments in the world. Instead, they wrote fancy pieces for everyone else, made money, and lived happily ever after. The problem? They left all those poor bass and cello duos with nothing to play. Each of the selections in this album are our own arrangements created for… ear pleasure. Please forgive us for deviating from the two works that history left us and allow us to continue on this treacherous road to eternal… you get the idea. We hope that others will find inspiration and create new works for bass and cello.

                Thank yous for the recording project. To our babysitting community: Thanks be to  Lila Winters, Emery Winters,  Emily Farnham, Molly Zimmerman, John Zimmerman, Donna King, Charlotte Wood, David Wood, Amber Anderson, Ashley Anderson, Donald Tsang, Daisy Tsang, Josh Munson and Sarah Munson. To our engineers David Lange at www.davidlangestudios.com  and Paul Speer (mixing and co-producing too!) at Rainstorm Studio www.paulspeer.com

1. Brahms Kugel  -  Spencer Hoveskeland

                What happens when you cross the Brahms’ E minor cello sonata with a Norwegian-American composer who moonlights in a Klezmer band? Brahms Kugel  (Brahms Lutefisk didn’t have the same ring to it ). Kugel is a Jewish noodle dish that can contain nearly anything. Usually it is sweet.

2. Brandenburg Concerto #3 - 1^st movement – J.S. Bach

                What is a Bach hit (top ten for over 250 years) that every one knows, every string student learns, yet isn’t overplayed during the holidays? Our guess is a movement from his third Brandenburg Concerto. It is a happy and timeless piece that Traci arranged for the duo. Although the strength and beauty of the piece is enhanced with the violins removed (that’s the high squeaky sound at orchestra concerts), some of the modulations have been removed to protect those who are uncomfortable too far from the original key.

3. Blue Moon –

We chose this piece for our album because we like it and because we felt it represents how often an audience gets to hear a bass and cello duo perform a Richard Rogers tune. After much research (Google I think) we learned what a Blue Moon is and it occurs more often than we thought. A blue moon is the second of two full moons to occur in the same calendar month. Blue moons occur every 2.72 years. If this is the case perhaps it is not totally insane to make ones living as a bass and cello duo. Let’s see, 9 billion people on the planet, they’ll hear us every 2.72 years. Hopefully they won’t all come to the same concert.

4. Hungarian Rhapsody  Op. 68 – David Popper

The composer David Popper (1843-1913), a virtuoso cellist himself, wrote extensively for the cello. This Franz Liszt-inspired (or did he find the inspiration while married to one of Listz’s students?) piece shows its beauty in a true gypsy style. Each movement is joined to the next with a variety of tempos and moods. Mrs. Hoveskeland has a variety of moods too. We recorded this piece on July 28^th, 2005 in celebration of our 15^th wedding anniversary.  Then we had a late dinner, upset stomach, and went to sleep…just like our wedding night.

5. Morenita Santa – Bardomiano Flores Frias

                This is one of two of the Mexican folk pieces we fell in love with while on tour with the legendary Mexican Violinist Don Juan Reynoso in 2002. It is a beautiful Bolero that tells the story of a dark skinned girl who is loved very much.

6. Waltz in B major – Domenico Dragonetti

                Dragonetti was one of the early virtuosos of the double bass. He also had the world’s first famous bass and cello duo. We know of ten waltzes he composed for unaccompanied bass of which six we have performed. In our concerts there are many bass cadenzas. As such, we thought it only fair that you get to hear the cello on this piece. So, here is Dragonetti’s unaccompanied Waltz in A major regurgitated for bass and cello in B major.

7. Viva Tlapehuala – Isaias Salmeron Pastenas

                Our tribute to Juan Reynoso.  Maestro Reynoso opened every and closed many of his performances with this  piece. Nothing captures the spirit of our experience in Southwestern Mexico’s Tierra Caliente (hot lands) like Viva Tlapehuala – Tlapehuala is a city famous for its sombreros – particularly the sombrero of the Calentano musicians of that region.

8. Bambino Nuevo – Spencer Hoveskeland

                We promised each other long before we started a family that we wouldn’t go baby crazy with the duo. Well, as luck would have it, there we were the morning after our son was born. And as luck would have it, there was a guitar. And, with even more luck, Spencer picked up the guitar, started playing, Traci danced, and our ten hour old son heard live music for the first time. Bambino Nuevo is the only song we’ve ever written where we know it was composed at 7 AM on April 7^th, 2004. It is on the CD because it makes us think of our boy and that makes us very happy.

9 - 14.  Contrabajissimo – Astor Piazzolla

                We decided to take on this piece originally for quintet because, like all bass and cello duos, we wanted to sink our teeth into some of the most profound music composed in the twentieth century. Performing as part of a sextet we have had the opportunity to play the parts Piazzolla wrote for the bass and cello and enjoyed that very much and should have been satisfied. But, we kept asking ourselves, “Why can’t we play ALL the parts?”    Piazzolla captured the sound of our times and conglomerated the music of multiple cultures to create his own unique sound. Today his music is programmed by every major orchestra in the world. Piazzolla wrote this for bassist Hector Console. It is his third composition for contrabass. We took the liberty of separating and labeling the movements.

Long Dissonant Romance

4.   Hungarian Rhapsody  David Popper 12:53