Artists: David Lang, composer; Molly Barth, flute, piccolo; and more

Released on Cantaloupe Records, 2017

About the title piece, David Lang writes: "My first idea for thorn was to embed a single spike somewhere in the middle of a long, slow, quiet melody. I thought that the listener would then spend the first part of the piece in fear and the second part in shock, and this would change the ways that the tune would be perceived. The problem was that the spike turned out to be the most interesting part of the piece, and, ultimately, I couldn’t resist the temptation to add many, many more of them."

The cover image is a photograph I created with thorns collected from my garden.