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Duo, Fives, Quintet, Trio
Born in Michigan but for most of his life a true Californian, Robert Erickson (1917-1997) had a reputation as a maverick. His musical path was never a straight line, nor, really, a line at all but a landscape, with ranges of features rather than mere points of interest. He was a profound and original musical thinker who embraced the expressive possibilities of all music, from the Western classics and moderns of his own early education to Indian and Balinese traditions and all manner of contempor…
The Arrow Of Time
We want to fabricate a new music. We imagine a situation in which the sounding together of tones is never taken for granted, is continually renewed and reinvented. We know that the effect of any set of simultaneous tones, by means of the multiplication implicit in the harmonic series, totals much more than the number of notes played. A room can be made to vibrate with hundreds of frequencies by a single chord. We want to enter into a universe of harmony in which it becomes possible to hear into …
Folding Music
Max Giteck Duykers (born 1972) stands out for his ongoing dedication to the sound worlds made possible by the Pierrot ensemble. Therefore it is fitting that the first recording devoted exclusively to Duykers's music should feature two of the four "Pierrot sextets" he has composed this far, that the remaining four works on the disc are playable by P6/P6+ subsets, and that everything here (except for the one vocal work which adds guest soprano Zen Wu) is performed by members of Ensemble Ipse, the …
Clusters: American Piano Explorations
Rory Cowal is a distinctive pianist, one who draws liberally on classical chops, ample experience with improvisation, and a predilection for the new and uncharted. This makes him especially attractive to composers who wish to blur the boundaries between traditional styles and genres. A musical adventurer at heart, Cowal seems drawn to challenging and unusual projects. The eight pieces on this CD reflect this willingness to experiment, to not just play the same old (now canonic) warhorses of the …
Dreamers of Pearl
Joseph Kubera, piano. Michael Byron (b. 1953) was a pupil of James Tenney, and later, of Richard Teitelbaum. The body of music he has composed over the past thirty years has been harmonically rich, rhythmically detailed, and increasingly virtuosic. Dreamers of Pearl (2004-05) evinces a sensitivity for the sound of the piano, a sensibility of extended playing-listening, and an interest in repetition and change through gradual and seemingly clandestine processes that transform and extend what we h…
On Procedural Grounds
In his compositions, composer/performer Kyle Bruckmann seeks to integrate rigor and internal logic with raw immediacy while fully engaging his fellow performers as not simply dutiful interpreters, but creatively invested collaborators. Aesthetically, the results evoke much from European modernism, but realized via idiosyncratic modular forms and process-oriented strategies equally indebted to the New York School and the jazz avant-garde. On Procedural Grounds (2010) is a half-hour work conceived…
Six Primes
Six Primes is composed using the first six prime numbers 2, 3, 5,
7, 11, and 13 to govern both its tuning and temporal structure,
including harmony, rhythmic subdivisions, and form. I wrote this music
to explore the limits of using the same integer ratios to simultaneously
provide melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic materials. The piano must be
retuned in just intonation using the tuning system factor of 2, three
ratios with highest prime of 3, and two ratios each with highest primes
of 5, 7,…
Some Center
Chris Brown’s (b. 1953) compositions Some Centre (2019) and First Light (2016), performed with such assured lucidity and subtle shading by the three members of The Chromelodia Project, engage with significant precursors in music and in literature, drawing upon their words and innovations, their insights and adventurous spirits while, in the process, transporting those uncompromising benefactors to a different frontier. Brown makes songs from poems by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) and Jackson Mac L…
Philomel
Compositions performed by Bethany Beardslee and Lynne Weber (sopranos), Jerry Kudern and Robert Miller (pianos). The four works on this recording span a period of a decade and are among the best of Milton Babbitt’s output, tape and otherwise. Philomel, for soprano, recorded soprano, and synthesized sound, is one of the undisputed classics of electroacoustic music and this is its definitive recording. Two versions of Phonemena —one for soprano and piano, the other for soprano and tape— another vi…
Loudspeakers
Charles Amirkhanian (b. 1945) can be regarded as a central figure in American music, and on several fronts. As a composer, he's been pervasively innovative in two genres: text-sound pieces, in which he can draw engaging rhythmic processes from wacky word assemblages such as 'rainbow chug bandit' and 'church car rubber baby buggy bumper'; and natural-sound electronic pieces which go far beyond the usual confines of musique concrète to create long, poetic sound narratives poised between collage an…
George Antheil: Piano Concerto No. 2
The Piano Concerto No. 2 is an experiment in classical form. The work contains the same sudden juxtapositions and abrupt contrasts of mood as his futurist music. But the excesses of his recent Ballet mécanique are compensated for by an almost spare, baroque orchestration and motifs that draw on Bach as much as on Stravinsky. In three movements, George Antheil employs a more restrained but still exuberant style. The beautifully meditative slow movement is followed by a virtuosic and compelling to…
Postcard From Heaven
The harp is a strange and compelling instrument that in its technological ancientness beckons composers and listeners alike to bask in its heavenly aura. Like hand drums and acoustic guitars, the immediacy of a harp's sound production demands an intimate, one-on-one relationship between listener and instrument/performer. This intimacy is why composers of all stripes write music for harp－it strips away habit and affectation. Its limits are challenges that distill the essence of a composer's style…
The Tamburas Of Pandit Pran Nath
2024 Stock. Much needed reissue of this seminal album, recorded by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela in 1982, one of his most sought-after classic is finally repressed in a limited print run, so....Hurry! Originally released in 2000, it is made available now in a limited edition on CD as an homage to their guru. This recording was used by Pandit Pran Nath for his own practice for many years. Accompanied by a booklet that includes two color and seven black and white photographs as well as extensi…
Ragas Of Morning & Night
At long last, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela reissue this seminal, hugely influential album on their Just Dream imprint, the legendary recording from 1968 India of Pandit Pran Nath titled 'Ragas Of Morning & Night'. The original studio session was produced in New Delhi, February 1968, by Jimi Hendrix associate Alan Douglas, it features recordings of "Raga Todi" and "Darbari", which showcase Pran Nath at his prime. Pran Nath's exquisite control between microscopically fine degrees of pitch ca…
The Well-Tuned Piano
2024 Stock, very last copies around. Deluxe DVD edition of The Well-Tuned Piano in The Magenta Lights, containing La Monte Young’s continuous 6 hour-24 minute performance of his masterpiece is now back in print for the first time since 2001. Comes with a 52-page booklet, which includes La Monte and Marian’s essays on their works. Edition of 500, one time pressing.High Minimalism - one of the great, revolutionary musical movements of the 20th century, is marked by a canon of towering and iconic w…
We, Like Salangan Swallows...: A Choral Gallery of Morton Feldma
The intense individuality of Morton Feldman's (1926?1987) art and its 'painterly' aspect have tended to push his rich output of works into a zone all of their own, surrounded by a moat of stillness. This recording attempts the reverse process -- to bring his choral works (the previously unrecorded Chorus and Instruments, Voices and Instruments 1, Voices and Instruments 2, and The Swallows of Salangan) into a 'gallery' of other choir compositions of his times. Through the interaction with works o…
Vladimir Ussachevsky: Electronic and Acoustic Works 1957- 1972
16-page booklet including liner notes in English. This composer portrait is dedicated to Vladimir Ussachevsky (1911–1990), a pioneering figure in electronic and choral music. The album features six of his groundbreaking works in electronic music alongside two significant choral pieces, highlighting the breadth of his creative output. The final two works on the CD, Three Scenes from The Creation (1960; rev. 1973) and Missa Brevis (1972), showcase Ussachevsky’s innovative use of the human voice.Th…
Spectrum Pieces
James Tenney (1934-2006) was one of the most versatile figures in contemporary American music. Apart from creating a large, wide-ranging, and fascinating body of compositions, more than a hundred of them, he was one of the key music theorists of the late twentieth century. This CD set offers complete recordings of one of the most important of Tenney's later sets of pieces-Spectrum Pieces 1-8, the first five of which were written in Toronto in 1995 and the last three in 2001, after he moved to Va…
Harmonium
Just Asked whether he would describe his music as “Sound for the sake of sound,” James Tenney (1934–2006) replied, “It’s sound for the sake of perceptual insight—some kind of perceptual revelation.” This release aptly demonstrates Tenney’s deep exploratory fascination with the nature and potentialities of aural perception. His attraction to these topics was simultaneously intellectual and sensuous, and its musical products at once invite both sustained reflection and the most immediate of corpor…
And the Butterflies Begin to Sing
Both works on this disc share the trademarks of his unique style: the relentless, pounding motoric energy that merges, sometimes with startling suddenness, into a dreamlike texture that seems to float, the continual sense of something magical occurring, often produced with no more paraphernalia than a desktop computer. And the Butterflies Begin to Sing [for string quartet, bass, MIDI keyboard, and computer (1988)], conceived as music for an imaginary ballet, is based on The Hundred Headless Wome…