The Art Of Living Dies...
Lack of musical material, minimalism but not for it's purposes, patterns shifting in themselves...The Art of Living Dies...The piece is performed by Michael Moser, a cult figure in Austrian new music, whose work includes significant collaborations with bands like Polwechsel and Zeitkratzer and artist such as Bernhard Lang, Peter Ablinger, Fennesz, David Sylvian (Manafon). Very slow, extremely static, the piece drives into one direction, without specific target but also without tendency to be con…
Quartet / Octet
Taku Sugimoto, guitar and composition, with Klaus Filip (sine tones), Ko Ishikawa (sho), Moe Kamura (voice), Kazushige Kinoshita (violin), Radu Malfatti (trombone), Masahiko Okura (clarinet), Taku Unami (sine tones), Nikos Veliotis (cello). 2013.
Plays Brown, Cage & Feldman
An accomplished group in the world of chamber music, the Concord String Quartet, active from 1971-1987, gained almost immediate attention from the press as well as a dedicated following, after winning the prestigious Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award in 1972. Although the quartet was a classical string quartet, these rare 1973 recordings show the groups affinity for the "New York School" of avant-garde composers, like Earle Brown, John Cage and Morton Feldman, as well. Side B is entirely co…
Ensemble Works 3
'Palimpsest' (1979) for piano & ensemble. Cory Smythe, piano. 'Echange' (1989) for bass-clarinet & ensemble. Joshua Rubin, bass-clarinet. 'Akanthos' (1977) for soprano & ensemble. Tony Arnold, soprano. 'Thalleïn' (1984) for 16 instruments. 'O-Mega' (1997) for percussion & ensemble. Steven Schick, percussion & conductor. Steven Schick, conductor. 'Zythos' (1996) for trombone & 6 marimbas. Benny Sluchin, trombone.
An exhilarating Xenakis progran, built around works for soloist and ensemble. Most…
Onsets
Ici-bas' (2009) for ensemble & electronic sound. Hyperion Ensemble with members of Talea and the Bergersen Quartet. Tim Hodgkinson, conductor. 'Ulaaraar' (2005) for bass clarinet & strings. Tim Hodgkinson, bass clarinet and conductor. Ioan Marius Lacraru, Cornelia Petroiu, violas. Theodor Iancu, Andrei Kivu, cellos. Ion and Ciprian Ghita, basses. Anon, small gong. 'Amhas/Nirriti' [2001) for ensemble & electronic sound. Hyperion Ensemble. Tim Hodgkinson, conductor. 'Jo-Ha-Kyu' (2000-2010) for str…
Visitazioni
Two works from different periods come together in this "case-book": Ora (1997/2001) and Visitazioni (2011/ 2013). Times ... ways ... experiences intersect. Ora is a single stream of sounds and silences of 120 minutes. It can be "healed" (replaced) according to the feel of the listener. Its division into sections - like the same graphic score - have this unique feature. Headphone listening at a low volume is absolutely privileged. Visitazioni, referring to similar principles but changing the ways…
Pneuma
First CD featuring five mysterious works by a young English composer whose music gives voice to the secrets in sounds. 'Martin Iddon's music asks a lot of us. This disc, pneuma, asks even more, because it conceals the 'real, physical human bod[ies]' that are so important to this music. Iddon asks musicians to play instruments they do not play, articulate notes they will not hear, and perform independently of partners they cannot ignore. The music depends wholly on the relationships those bodies …
Piano Music
Two compositions exploring the decay of the piano from Wandelweiser composer Eva-Maria Houben. Fading sound is the link between life and art; between perception in daily life and perception while performing, while composing.“Fading sound is the link between life and art; between perception in daily life and perception while performing, while composing. And the awareness of fading sound may become the awareness of presence.” Halfway through Eva-Maria Houben’s abgemalt, the pianist unfurls a …
Matthew Shlomowitz and Peter Ablinger
Works by Matthew Shlomowitz and Peter Ablinger for piano and found sounds. Mark Knoop performs Matthew Shlomowitz's "Popular Contexts", for piano and sampler keyboard and selections from Peter Ablinger's ongoing cycle "Voices and Piano". Both works deal with collected sonic objects - Shlomowitz's widely varied samples, ranging from insect noises to airline safety announcements, and the recorded speech of Ablinger's subjects - forcing them into musical juxtaposition with the piano.
"Popular Conte…
Organ Works Vol. 1
I put my music into the space. I don’t want to send any messages, I think of nothing and I don’t want to purport any meanings. The listeners hear what they hear and behave to the music as they feel.
Austrian composer, Klaus Lang, describes himself as observer of tones. As stated himself, his roots belong to Gregorian tradition and his music definitely represents abstract way of perceiving it.
Though abstraction (of form and content), he is interested in clarity and truth.
His work includes piec…
Vessels
An extraordinary 76-minute work for solo piano, played by Philip Thomas, and composed by Bryn Harrison, a Huddersfield-based composer who is quietly building something of a cult reputation for his distinctively minimal and repetition-based music. Vessels works with threads of tones which are repeated with subtle variation until they attain a mysterious, labyrinthine quality. 'I tried to get across this sense of the music being perpetually regenerative, of constantly opening up but then finding o…
Logical harmonies
Seven recent pieces by the UK-based composer Richard Glover, whose music is a process music based on the exposition of simple harmonic patterns. 'I enjoy the nuanced transformation attainable through dealing with harmony: alterations from within the sound which cannot be identified as emanating from one particular element, or line, but gradually alter the nature of the overall sonority each time. The focus upon the global, the whole, allows deeper inspection of everything else.' Performers inclu…
The Piano Works 9
'Haiku' (1950-51), 'Sixteen Dances' (1950-51), 'Alternate versions for piano & percussion'. Jovita Zhl, piano. Thomas Meixner, percussion. 'It is rare to discover a previously unknown work by John Cage today. So, what are the chances to discover two major piano pieces from the same period of 1950-51? Thanks to the dedicated work of Don Gillespie (who was Cage's contact at his publisher, C. F. Peters Corp.) and composer Walter Zimmermann, we have the two works recorded here. Both works were disco…
The Works for Organ
This release is the first complete recording of all of Cage's works for organ, plus 4'33' (on the DVD version only). Gary Verkade, organ of Gammelstad Church, Sweden. 'Some of 'The Harmony of Maine' (Supply Belcher)' (1976). 'Souvenir' (1984). 'ASLSP' (1985). 'Organ2ASLSP' (1987). Bonus Track on DVD only: 4'33' (1952). The organ is ideally suited to Cage's aesthetic - its multitude of stops make it the ultimate 'prepared' instrument. The fact that sound emanates from a number of pipes placed at …
Violin & Orchestra
Carolin Widmann’s widely acclaimed ECM recordings have traversed a broad arc of music – from Schubert to Xenakis. Here she turns her attention to one of the pivotal compositions of Morton Feldman. Violin and Orchestra, composed in 1979, marked a new direction, with an almost painterly attention to detail in slowly unfolding music. It is not a concerto in the strict sense of the term, not soloist with orchestral support. The violinist must move inside the glowing colour-field of sound. In t…
Sonatas & Interludes
How rare, and valuable, it is to be able to experience one composer’s masterwork through the sensibility of another significant, stylistically distinct composer – via a performance that reveals unexpected aspects of both. that is to say, an approach to performance not as an act of self-conscious, flamboyant or dramatic interpretation, according to the concerns of technique, expression, and projection that are at the heart of an instrumentalist’s presentation of a musical score to an audie…
Music Of Changes
The title is a double pun. The score is the first that John Cage devised allowing the hexagrams of the I Ching to fully determin e how the music would procee d, event by event, gesture by gesture—the musical details (pitch, duration, dynamic s, density, tempi) being painstakingly, albeit fortuitously, derived through point-by-point con sultation from charts of possi bilities designed by the composer. (Christian Wolff, Cage’s young friend and musical associate, had presented Cage with a co…
Sinergy
The question of form is key in the music of Earle Brown, one of the foremost American composers of the past fifty years. It was a certain amount of serendipity and a shared interest in the liberation of musical form which brought Brown to gether, circa 1951, with John Cage, Morto n Feldman, Christian Wolff, and David Tudor, in what was for a time called the New York School. … There was a close identification between these composers and painters at this time, and Feldman and Brown, especially, to…
Perhaps
Limited double LP version. Recorded live on December 8, 2006 at a memorial event for James Tenney at California Institute of the Arts, Perhaps is Harold Budd sublimely distilled. Striking in its restraint and simplicity yet profoundly resonant in its depth and message, it is both eulogy to a departed friend and defining statement from an artist at the apotheosis of his career. Originally available only digitally (and only from Samadhisound's web site), Perhaps sees its first-ever and much-de…