Berlin Exercises
Christian Wolff on Berlin Exercises: "'Exercise' indicates relatively shorter pieces in which the process of work, of practicing and of trying things out within specified limits, in short a kind of discipline in process, are being attempted. I regard them as both exercises in composing and for performers, especially as the performers function as members of an ensemble." Your first encounter with the music of Christian Wolff leaves you with the impression you’ve just heard (or played, or re…
Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello
“Another Timbre has been contributing excellent recordings to the rapidly expanding universe of what might still be called “Classical” music, and nowhere more convincingly than in the shimmering beautiful tapestries woven by Morton Feldman. The label’s double set of Feldman’s earlier piano works would be an excellent place to begin for anyone wishing to slide into familiarity with his work, as it’s wonderfully performed by John Tilbury and Philip Thomas. Pianist Mark Knoop, violinist Aisha Orazb…
Liminal Studies
Wojciech Blecharz is somewhat an exhibitionist. An emotional one, of course. With his music, he doesn’t create a vision of the contemporary world burdened with disasters, being neither a “digital indigent” nor a fan of algorithmic passages. He’s not even recognized as a political rebel who discloses his outlook on life between the notes. In the centre of his interest remains what’s closest to him – the human psychological condition in the context of experiencing crises and break-ups, trauma…
Harmony
The fifth CD in the Canadian Composers Series is also the debut appearance on Another Timbre by the Jack Quartet. It features chamber music for strings by the Berlin-based composer Marc Sabat, whose compositions explore the world of Just Intonation. But, as Nick Storring argues in the booklet accompanying the Canadian Composers Series of CDs, “to fixate upon this aspect of his music conceals at least half of what makes it so beguiling and beautiful. From an aural perspective, what is most salien…
During a Lifetime
The fourth disc in the Canadian Composers Series features the music of Chiyoko Szlavnics. The CD contains three works, two of which use sinewaves in conjuncton with acoustic instruments. The title track ‘During a Lifetime’ is written for sinewaves and saxophone quartet, an instrument on which Szlavnics herself used to perform. The final piece, ‘Reservoir’, is composed for sinewaves and an unusual instrumental octet, including two accordions, two flutes and two percussionists. The middle piece ‘F…
The Spit Veleta
The second CD in the Canadian Composers Series contains three recent works by the Toronto-based composer Martin Arnold, played by Mira Benjamin (violin) and Philip Thomas (piano). In his introductory essay to the booklet accompanying the Canadian Composers CDs, Nick Storring quotes a comment that Arnold made about one of his earlier works, highlighting a quality which Storring feels applies to a large part of Arnold’s compositional output: "The piece is not intended to be demonstrative but rathe…
Drifter
The first in the Canadian Composers Series of CDs is a double album of chamber works by Linda Catlin Smith, who was born in New York, but studied in Canada and has lived in Toronto for over 25 years. The album ‘Drifter’ contains ten pieces dating from 1995 to 2015 played by Quatuor Bozzini and Apartment House. In his introductory essay to the booklet accompanying the Canadian Composers CDs, Nick Storring says that “One of the primary tensions in Linda Catlin Smith's music is between its equal a…
Bow
The third CD in the Canadian Composers Series contains seven pieces by Isaiah Ceccarelli, a composer-percussionist who lives in Montreal. The music Ceccarelli composes falls broadly into two categories: timbrally-based music in which he himself performs, and through-composed pieces that focus on harmonic progressions. His CD ‘Bow’ presents both of these sides of his work: the title track, ‘Falsobordone’ and ‘Dunstable’ are compositions for string trio or quartet, while the ‘Oslo Harmonies’ and ‘…
Streichquartett in 4 Sätzen
Recording of the first performance of the original 60 minute version of this new composition for string quartet in 4 parts. Recorded at the Hermann Nitsch Foundation, Vienna, 2016. Fullcolour 6-panel digipak. Edition of 300 copies.
Subvoice
Subvoice is a collection of nine recent works by composer Yannis Kyriakides for various ensembles ranging from single instrument to large orchestra, that represent an investigation into ideas of voice and language. The music is built on traces of voices and texts that seem to speak or sing in an intimate form of dialogue, either as text that is directly encoded into music, or in traces of voice that are embedded and dissolved into the musical fabric. Performers on this double CD include: MAZE, H…
Ariadne's Lament
The music of Mary Jane Leach on this album draws on several sources of inspiration. The first is early music, with its polyphony and modal harmonies. Modal writing, as adapted to twentieth-century thought, focuses on the prolongation of a fixed collection of notes, arranged into either a traditional or an invented scale. Melodies and harmonies are created freely from this collection, without forcing them into highly directional and strongly articulated phrases. The result is a luxurious stasis, …
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…
Superior Seven / Tract
“I am finally able to say that I write for orchestra— even if I have to make the orchestra myself.” — Robert Ashley Robert Ashley is known primarily for his theater-based pieces and television operas. This new release presents the world premiere recordings of two of his “orchestral” pieces, Superior Seven (concerto for flute), and Tract (for orchestra and voice), where the orchestra is provided by a MIDI synthesizer. In Superior Seven, the flute floats freely in and out of an atmospheric electro…
Musica per un Anno (March 28th, 6 pm)
Musica per un anno is a pivotal project by Italian pioneer of electronic music Enore Zaffiri. In 1968 Zaffiri devised a project to create music for each hour of the year, by providing precise instructions to organise various layers of sinusoidal sounds. Working in isolation but ideally sharing the same attitude of La Monte Young’s approach to sound in time and space of those same years, Zaffiri created some tape versions of his masterpiece. The version recorded in this album is a radically…
Musiques dans les spasmes – Ecrits (1951-2005)
French edition. Edited by Brunhild Ferrari and Jérôme Hansen. Foreword by Jim O’Rourke. Introduction by Brunhild Ferrari. Interview with Luc Ferrari by Pierre-Yves Macé and David Sanson. Luc Ferrari’s writings, most of them previously unpublished. A pioneer of musique concrète at the beginning of the Groupe de Recherche Musicales in Paris (GRM), Luc Ferrari (1929-2005) is one of the most important and intriguing figures of the last forty years.
F.C. Me Fecit
All music written and performed by Frederik Croene. Recorded, mixed and mastered by Christophe Albertijn – Studio Les Ateliers Claus. Produced by B.A.A.D.M. & Frederik Croene. Recorded under stormy clouds in August 2015 at St. Peter’s church in Gent, Belgium. Organ built by Pierre Van Peteghem (1847-48). Album design by Mathieu Serruys & Joris Verdoodt. Published in collaboration with Grafische Cel / LUCA School of Arts, campus St-Lucas Visual Arts Gent – funded by research unit Image.
T…
Les Espaces Électroacoustiques
Milestones of electroacoustic music – from Edgar Varèse’s Poème électronique (1958) to Brian Ferneyhough’s Mnemosyne (1986) – are investigated from a music-historical perspective and presented in a contemporary 5.1 surround edition.The selection of works on this double CD mirrors the development of electroacoustic music over a period of 30 years, from the early analogue studios to the shift to digital technology in the 1980s. It includes electronic compositions and works for instruments and e…
Explosion Of A Memory (A Literary Canvas For Orchestra)
An extended iterative, cycling, dissipating cloud of fragments, constantly shifting focus, which throws up detail, evolves, returns, settles and re-dissolves; it's a four-dimensional explosion in which stretches of baroque, folk themes and Byzantine liturgy exist contemporaneously alongside modern and (arguably) post-modern materials and techniques, all shaken loose out of the same experiential block, much as strata emerge as tectonic plates fold one time over another. Long, beautiful, to…
Gaps, Absences
A beautifully recorded and produced cycle of pieces that combine complexity and precision with rich and unfamiliar timbres. The ensemble pieces amplify and enrich a core piano with various combinations of harmonium, double bass, violin, percussion, Hungarian zither, citara bassa, bowed cymbals, alto clarinet, melodica, sampler and field recordings, all sparsely but powerfully deployed. This is a deep and powerful music with both crystalline clarity and cinematic low frequency power. And no fat o…
Spinet, 2016
Christoph Schiller, spinet.
Christoph Schiller was born in 1963 in Stuttgart. He studied fine arts at the Kunstakademie Stuttgart and HfBK Hamburg. He later studied piano with Daniel Cholette and music theory in Basel. He has been playing concerts of improvised music on piano since 1987. In recent years the piano has been abandoned in favour of the lighter spinet, for which he has developed specific playing techniques which are influenced by inside piano techniques. Besides keyboard instruments …