| Contemporary music |
Phillip Schroeder, Radiance Within: A Luminous, Deeply Spiritual Gift of Stillness.
Radiance Within, composer and pianist Phillip Schroeder’s superb release on Neuma Records, doesn’t just invite listening, it invites you to settle in and stay a while. Across seven original works for violin, piano and gongs, recorded with his wife, violinist Margaret Jones, and percussionist Alan Zimmerman, Schroeder builds a world that’s contemplative without turning static, spiritually serious without ever feeling austere. It’s one of the loveliest, most emotionally generous records on Neuma’s catalogue, a genuinely special album.
Phillip Schroeder was born in 1956 in Rancho Cordova, California, and raised in a military family that moved across twelve states, a restless upbringing that seems, decades later, to have resolved itself into exactly the kind of settled, earned stillness this album radiates. His musical life has been remarkably wide-ranging: trumpet in concert bands, singing in boys’ and mixed choirs, electric bass in rock bands, orchestral and chamber conducting, experimental improvisation ensembles, and a parallel career as a serious concert pianist. He studied composition intensively with Barney Childs, Larry Solomon, Michael Schelle, Thomas Janson and Frank Wiley, earning degrees from the University of Redlands, Butler University and a Ph.D. from Kent State, and went on to teach composition for thirty-five years across six institutions, including Henderson State University, Grinnell College and the University of Iowa, while also directing fourteen contemporary music festivals as an advocate for living composers. Having held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony and the Charles Ives Center, and with critics describing his work as “luminous, meditative, and deeply spiritual” (Signal to Noise) and “full of elegant nuance” (Textura), Schroeder has now left academia behind entirely. He lives today on forty acres outside Walsenburg, in southern Colorado, with Margaret Jones, and Radiance Within is, in every sense, the sound of that chosen quiet.
Schroeder has described his own compositional philosophy in simple, almost devotional terms: he writes music meant to affect a listener in spirit, intellect and emotion all at once, and finds nothing more fulfilling in composing than crafting pieces around the specific strengths and personalities of the performers who will bring them to life. That philosophy is everywhere on Radiance Within, this is music written not in the abstract, but for two musicians Schroeder knows intimately, and it shows in how completely the pieces seem to fit them.
Margaret Jones brings a career of genuine range to this recording. A founding member of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra who went on to perform with the Indianapolis Symphony, she spent five years touring as soloist and chamber musician with Mikhail Baryshnikov and the White Oak Dance Project, played Broadway pits for productions including Peter Pan and Swan Lake, worked with American Ballet Theatre and the Opera Orchestra of New York, and toured with The Lion King, Andy Williams, Perry Como and Natalie Cole. It’s a résumé that spans practically every corner of the performing arts world, and it gives her playing here – by turns tender, searching and quietly virtuosic – an extraordinary depth of expressive vocabulary to draw on.
Percussionist Alan Zimmerman, meanwhile, grew up in Texas, spent extended periods living in Japan and Jamaica, built over three decades of work in New York City, and relocated to Albuquerque in 2015. His own range is just as wide, having made music with figures as different as conductor Seiji Ozawa and the New Japan Philharmonic on one end and New Mexico’s gloriously strange Death Convention Singers on the other. His gongs appear sparingly across the album, but every entrance lands with real weight.
The album opens with its title work, “Radiance Within” (2023–24), and it’s a perfect introduction to everything that follows: elegant, unhurried piano motifs supporting Margaret Jones’s soaring violin line in what feels like an intimate chamber duet rather than a formal composition. Schroeder keeps his own piano playing sparse and deliberate throughout, letting the violin grow steadily more expressive and emotionally searching above it, with moments of real tension, high violin tremolos aching against the piano’s minimal grounding, that never once break the music’s underlying warmth. It’s a floating, deeply personal piece, and a genuinely beautiful way to open the record.
“An Awakening” (2024), for prepared piano, shifts the focus toward something more ritualistic: repeating high-toned chords answered by resonant silences, bell-like sonorities and subtle, almost ceremonial percussive strikes that together create an atmosphere closer to an echo across a vast canyon than a conventional piano piece. There’s real hypnotic power here, ancient and modern at once, and the French-language press around the album rightly singles it out for its sense of “awakening to a world of inner radiance”, a lovely description for a piece that keeps quietly gathering intensity through repetition rather than force.
“Avian Fields” (2014) is a genuine highlight, and the only work on the album for unaccompanied violin, a real departure for a composer so associated with the piano. Structured as a suite of short fragments echoing natural cycles and birdsong, it’s full of trills, pizzicati, fleeting melodic gestures and sudden interruptions, and Jones navigates its constantly shifting terrain with total command, drawing enormous emotional and psychological weight out of material that could easily feel slight in less sensitive hands. It’s minimalist in the best sense: spare, curious, and utterly absorbing.
“Being in Wonder” (2022), a solo piano work commissioned by Chris Opperman, is pure tenderness, as gorgeous, impressionistic motifs unfolding slowly, each chord and melodic fragment allowed to breathe fully before the next arrives, carrying a genuine sense of innocence and purity that justifies its title completely. It’s followed by “Nocturne” (2015), arguably the album’s keystone, pairing violin and piano in dark-hued, lower-register counterpoint that moves between graceful semi-ecstatic lyricism and sudden flashes of anxious tremolo before settling back into flowing calm, music that acknowledges real turbulence without ever surrendering to it, splendidly restrained and beautifully balanced.
“Stillness at Night” (2022) does exactly what its title promises: slow-blooming solo piano chords hang suspended in genuine silence, stretched across a wide register in what feels less like composition than pure, patient attention to sound itself. And the album closes with its boldest statement by far, “Shed the Pedestrian” (2019), scored for five-string electric violin, prepared piano and Zimmerman’s gongs. The gongs lend the piece an immediate Far Eastern coloration, quickly reshaped by the electric violin’s wilder, more unbound character and the prepared piano’s camouflaged, almost metronomic percussive pulse. It plays out like a strange, implacable ritual march, the album’s most cinematic, suspenseful moment, and a genuinely fearless way to close a record otherwise defined by inward calm.
What’s most remarkable about Radiance Within is how fully it earns the contemplative label without ever becoming background music. Tension and release, silence and sound, serenity and sudden unease all coexist throughout. Schroeder’s decades of experience across orchestral, experimental, rock and choral music never announce themselves directly, but they’re clearly what allows him to move so naturally between idioms here, distilling all of it into a voice that feels completely, recognizably his own.
Radiance Within is a genuine gift of an album, intellectually engaging and viscerally beautiful in equal measure, performed by three musicians operating at the absolute top of their craft, and shaped by a composer who has clearly spent a lifetime learning exactly what he wants to say and how little he needs to say it.
This is music that rewards being heard from beginning to end, in one unhurried sitting, with nothing else competing for your attention. In a noisy, restless moment, Phillip Schroeder has made something rare: real, earned quiet. An essential, deeply moving release.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, October 4th, 2026
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Tracklisting
- Radiance Within (2023–24) – Violin and Piano – 12:40
- An Awakening (2024) – Piano with Preparations – 8:09
- Avian Fields (2014) – Violin – 12:47
- Being in Wonder (2022) – Piano – 6:51
- Nocturne (2015) – Violin and Piano – 7:02
- Stillness at Night (2022) – Piano – 7:33
- Shed the Pedestrian (2019) – 5-String Electric Violin, Prepared Piano, and Gongs – 4:12
Total running time: 59:16
Musicians
Phillip Schroeder – piano
Margaret Jones – violins
Alan Zimmerman – gongs
Recorded, edited, mixed and mastered across six sessions between February 2023 and April 2025
Recording engineer and mastering: Scott Fraser, Architecture
Edits and mix: Scott Fraser and Phillip Schroeder
Producer: Phillip Schroeder
Design: Philip Blackburn
