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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…
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…
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…
Wind Shadows
The music on these CDs takes us into a new realm of music making, one that Alvin Lucier has defined for us and one that demands that we start to listen anew. His work has been more often described in terms of science than of art as if it were a series of quasi-scientific experiments, but to put the emphasis here is to miss the point, for its purpose is never “explanatory” (the goal of science) but, like all art, “revelatory.” This is not to suggest that the composer has some spiritual agenda in …
Motor Tapes
Closing the achingly long four years wait since her last full-length, the American composer/percussionist Sarah Hennies returns with “Motor Tapes”, her second release with New World Records. Comprising three astounding new pieces, made in collaboration with three acclaimed ensembles - ensemble 0, Talea Ensemble, and Ensemble Dedalus - that simultaneously encounter her moving into new uncharted territory, while remaining rooted in her singular practice, exploring musical, sociopolitical, and psyc…
Autonomous and dynamical systems
A relentless explorer, composer, performer and theorist, David Dunn (b 1953) uses electro-acoustic resources, voice, non-human living systems, as well as traditional instruments. A creator of text-sound compositions, environmental installations, works for radio and video, he has also written and published extensively. Underlying all his work is a common regard for music as a communicative source with a living world. Growing up in San Diego in the sixties and seventies, he encountered people lik…
Endangered Species
Endangered Species states, restates, correlates, instigates, inflates and deflates, elevates, formulates, disintegrates, interrogates, percolates, granulates, germinates, Kiss Me Kates, Tom Waits, Norman Bates and W.B. Yeats, horripilates, adumbrates, prestidigitates, sophisticates, enumerates, integrates and contraindicates songs from the standard repertoire, Standards they were called. Old French, Frankish, estendard "place of formation." If you asked a jazz musician what he played, he'd proba…
Maritime Rites
Featuring the foghorns and other maritime sounds of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and solo improvisations by John Cage, Joseph Celli, Clark Coolidge, Alvin Curran, Jon Gibson, Malcolm Goldstein, Steve Lacy, George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, and Leo Smith "In the middle 1970s I began to formulate ideas and projects leading to the making of music outside the concert halls-often in large open and naturally beautiful sites. Ports, rivers, lakes, caves, quarries, fields, and woods, always ready sources of …
The Zürich Concert
Just when you think you are grasping the breadth and quality of the music of Julius Eastman (1940 - 1990), a recording such as Julius Eastman: The Zürich Concert shows up, and you have to go back and reassess his work and wonder what will show up next. This recording is from a 1980 solo seventy-minute improvisatory concert in Zürich, a cherished cassette made by a friend of Eastman's, who recently realized its uniqueness and decided that he should share it. The Zürich Concert was performed on Oc…
The viola in my life
"The music on this recording illustrates the essential integrity of the work of Morton Feldman (1926-1987) and one of its fundamental strengths -- its continuously unfolding unanimity of purpose. There are few composers of his generation whose first and last published work (in Feldman's case 'Journey to the End of Night' of 1949 and 'Piano and String Quartet' of 1986) span youth and final years with such a concentrated viewpoint. There are, however, landmarks in the music of Feldman that are lar…