Robert Beaser's Mountain Songs--an arrangement of Appalachian ballads for flute and guitar--is probably my favourite work by a living composer. It was commissioned by Eliot Fisk and Paula Robison, who gave its world premier at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1985. Fisk and Robison recorded the piece a year later, and as a teenager I stole my mother's copy and listened to it over and over again.
One of the things that makes the recording so wonderful is the incredible vocal quality of Robison's performance--her flute sings. I loved what I heard so much that the fortuitous discovery of anthology of Appalachian ballads in my undergraduate university's music library led to me spending a semester break teaching myself to sing as many of the ballads in Mountain Songs as I could. The House Carpenter is the only one I can still sing today.
Anyway, Robison and Fisk's recording is on Spotify, here. Should you lack access to Spotify, Youtube has a few recordings, too.
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