CHAMBER FOLK:
Rounder Songs & Ephemera Ballads

fivebyfive with Emily Pinkerton

Described as “classical turned loose in the toy store,” “top-flight,” and “imaginative,” fivebyfive is an award-winning, artist-led ensemble known for its impeccable musicianship and adventurous spirit that permeates innovative, cross-genre programming and community engagement. 

Award-winning composer, ethnomusicologist, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Emily Pinkerton explores musical ties that bind the Americas. For two decades, she has traveled between the U.S. and Chile, playing fiddle, banjo, guitar, charango and guitarrón. 

The work of fivebyfive with Emily Pinkerton bridges old-time, folk, and classical worlds with two vibrant, exciting pieces, “Rounder Songs,” and “Ephemera Ballads” that cross North American folk and classical spheres. Emily and fivebyfive deliver powerful performances from the interlocking textures of “Red Rocking Chair” to the heart rending harmonies of Civil War-era tune “Three Forks of Hell.”

ROUNDER SONGS
 Rounder Songs is a song cycle for voice, banjo and chamber ensemble that brings together North American old-time music and 21st century classical music. The immersive, multi-movement work is based on tunes and folk tales from Kentucky and West Virginia that tell stories of several “rounders,” including a gambler, a murderer, and a mill worker who strikes a deal with the devil. Old-time and classical styles work hand-in-hand—rather than one dominating the other—and the arrangements are inspired by field recordings of the Hammons Family, Addie Graham, Arthur D. Johnson and Roscoe Holcomb.

Conceived and arranged by Emily Pinkerton and Patrick Burke (who are also a married couple), Rounder Songs focuses on the common ground between their musical worlds: driving rhythms; subtle melodic variation; and tense, captivating harmonies. In the murder ballad “Pretty Polly,” the darkness of the song is brought to chilling life by the paintings of Joanne Wiggins which are projected during concerts. Emily and fivebyfive deliver powerful performances from the interlocking textures of “Red Rocking Chair” to the heart-rending harmonies of Civil War-era tune “Three Forks of Hell.”

Emily Pinkerton and Patrick Burke

EPHEMERA BALLADS
Ephemera Ballads is a new chamber-folk song cycle grounded in archival work on 18th and 19th century broadside ballads. Broadsides are a body of street literature (or “ephemera”) that amplified current events and cultural concerns of their time. Women figured prominently in these narratives which were told through the voices of male poets and songsters. This composition includes original poetry in folk verse and inverts these stories, centering female-identifying perspectives and drawing connections between past and present that relate to bodily autonomy, gender identity and reproductive rights.

Ephemera Ballads is an exploration of feminine identities, and a “breaking open” of the representations of women in 18th and 19th century broadside ballads (the idealized mother drenched in sentimental nostalgia, the naive young girl who is not safe in the world, the frivolous socialites who should be more sedate, the ghosts of spurned lovers who haunt their partners). Original lyrics (in traditional folk verse) reimagine the individuals behind these narrative frames, and craft new stories to invert tropes that defined the cultural ethos of the era. The work searches for resonances between these narratives of the past, and the language used to tell stories about women and bodily autonomy today. As the title indicates, a dominant theme is “ephemeral”: moving from incorporeal to corporeal, invisible to visible, impermanent to permanent.