★Wergo

Essential first 1960 recording of the classic masterpiece for electronic sound, piano and percussion performed by the composer with David Tudor, Christoph Caskel and Gottfried Michael Koenig, released on Wergo's great "Studio Reihe Neuer Musik" experimental music series in the 70's.

Four post-serialistic "sound compositions" with elements of traditional Korean music from the 1960's, respectively for chamber ensemble, piano and violin, orchestra and solo organ, released on Wergo's great "Studio Reihe Neuer Musik" experimental music series in the 70's. With insert.

First volume of new music for choir by by some of the most inportant XXth Century composers (Anton Webern, Henri Pousseur, Dieter Schnebel, Luigi Nono, Sylvano Bussotti, Hans Otte, György Ligeti) performed by Schola Cantorum Stuttgart and released on Wergo's great "Studio Reihe Neuer Musik" experimental music series in the 70's. With insert.

Second volume of new music for choir by by Heinz Holliger, Dieter Schnebel, Krzysztof Penderecki and Friedrich Cerha, performed by Schola Cantorum Stuttgart and released on Wergo's great "Studio Reihe Neuer Musik" experimental music series in the 70's. With insert.

Three compositions from the early 1960's, respectively for for choir and orchestra, orchestra, and string quartet, by the eminent Polish composer, released on Wergo's great Studio Reihe Neuer Musik avat-garde music series in the early 1970's.

1971's apocalyptic oratorio for chorus, speaker, tape and grand orchestra backed with 1970's concerto for violin and orchestra, released on Wergo's great "Studio Reihe Neuer Musik" experimental music series in 1973. With insert.

Four 1970's sparse compositions for orchestra, ensembles and piano released on Wergo's great "Studio Reihe Neuer Musik" experimental music series in 1973. With insert (with notes by Peter Michael Hamel).

1972 album on Wergo's great "Studio Reihe Neuer Musik" experimental music series with two avant-garde solo piano pieces from the 1950's plus the classic partly indeterminated instrumental composition from 1971 performed by an all-star group including David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, Frederic Rzewski, David Behrman and the composer himself. With insert.

Three compositions from the early 1960's, respectively for for choir and orchestra, orchestra, and string quartet, by the eminent Polish composer, released on Wergo's great Studio Reihe Neuer Musik avat-garde music series in the early 1970's.

Unusual and rare 1972 EP on Wergo's "Taschendiskothek 20. Jahrhundert" contemporary music 7" series with recordings of sound sculptures.

Superb album of excellent electro-acoustic compositions by the founder of the Siemens Studio für elektronische Musik, realized between 1959 and 1970 released on Wergo's great "Studio Reihe Neuer Musik" experimental music series in 1972.

Original 1972 LP of Christian Wolff's seminal chance compositions featuring David Tudor, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, etc. on Wergo’s legendary Studio Reihe Neuer Musik series. Complete with insert.

Cage's 1963 piece for voices and percussion with solos plus three more experimental compositions from the 1960's by the other composers, performed by the San Francisco Conservatory New Music Ensemble and released on Wergo's "Große Interpreten Neuer Musik" series in 1971. Never re-issued on either LP or CD.

What?? was composed in 1967 in the electronic music studio of Swedish Radio, and was originally released on the German new music label Wergo with Bo Anders Persson 's Proteinimperialism , another static drone piece. What?? is based on Folke Rabe 's intense interest in monotony and harmonic overtones. The work is based on deep drones and their partials, where each partial is separately manipulated. Sometimes this coalesces into a beautiful chord, sometimes into more dissonant structures, but is c…

One of the best and most sought after Swedish electronic music records with two droning and minimalist masterpieces, released on Wergo in 1970. With insert. Rare.

One of the best and most sought after Swedish electronic music records with two droning and minimalist masterpieces, released on Wergo in 1970. With insert. Rare.

One of the best and most sought after Swedish electronic music records with two droning and minimalist masterpieces, released on Wergo in 1970. With insert. Rare.

The Italian soprano beautifully sings works for voice and instruments by Arnold Schönberg, Hanns Eisler, Luigi Dallapiccola, Arrigo Benvenuti and Luigi Nono on this 1970 LP on Wergo's great "Studio Reihe Neuer Musik" experimental music series.

Five avant-garde compositions for solo flute (two with piano) by European and Japanese contemmporary composers spanning from 1948 to 1969 performed by Aurèle Nicolet and released on Wergo's "Große Interpreten neuer Musik" series in 1969 (German edition). Never re-issued on either LP or CD.

Four post-serialist and aleatoric pieces composed by the Spanish composer in the 1960's, relased on Wergo's great "Studio Reihe Neuer Musik" avant-garde and electronic music series in 1969. With insert.

Two pivotal classic pieces from the 60's, respectively for piano and tape and for realistic sounds, released on Wergo's "Studio Reihe Neuer Musik" contemporary and electronic music series in 1969. Beautiful and essential.

condition (record/sleeve): VG (record looks near mint but has surface noise throughout) / VG (general yellowing + creases on lamination partly peeling off)  Includes 4-page  LP-size insert. Essential Berio! This exceptional Wergo release features Cathy Berberian in a virtuosic performance of Circles (1960), Berio's mesmerizing setting of e.e. cummings poetry for female voice, harp, and two percussionists. The album also includes three of Berio's celebrated Sequenze – solo works that pushed instr…

First edition on Wergo of "Version 1965" of the massive 1960's work for solo soprano, four mixed choirs, and thirteen instrumentalists (four trumpets, four trombones, three percussionists, and two electric keyboards) released on Wergo's great "Studio Reihe Neuer Musik" experimental music series in 1967.

Five of the Polish composer's extraordinary and intense compositions from the late 1950's and early 60's, conducted by Andrzej Markowski and released on Wergo's great Studio Reihe Neuer Musik avat-garde music series in 1965.

1963 introduction to electronic music with samples realized from 1952 at the WDR electronic music studio by its founder and mentor to Karlheinz Stockhausen, released on Wergo's great "Studio Reihe Neuer Musik" experimental music series. With insert.

*2022 stock* This work began life as a radio play in 1982, a commission from and for Klaus Schöning and Cologne’s WDR. Working on the principles of collage, Cage brought together 15 unlikely characters – Narrator, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Vocoder, Erik Satie, Jonathan Albert, Mao Tse Tung (as a child), Henry David Thoreau, Rrose Selavy, Thorstein Veblen, Buckminster Fuller, Brigham Young, and Robert Rauschenberg – who speak together, their dialogue comprised of literal quotations, freely ada…

'Composed in 1970, Mantra, for two pianos and ring modulation, was one of the decisive turning points in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s career. The 70-minute piece not only signalled a break with the text-based intuitive works, relying heavily on improvisation, that had come to dominate his output towards the end of the previous decade and a return to fully notated scores, but also introduced the idea of melodic formulae, the “mantra” of the title, which Stockhausen would eventually develop into the or…

*2022 stock* The Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki used to write chamber music even as a student in Krakow. He was writing the chamber music works for himself, then already an accomplished violinist, and his fellow students (The title "Sonata for Violin and Piano" from 1953 has only recently been published.). A specialty of these early works are Penderecki's inventions with which he altered the sound of the stringed instruments, indeed almost to the point of being completely unrecognizable. W…

*2022 stock* 'This collection of ensemble works, six altogether, ranges across the last two decades of Iannis Xenakis's life. It includes the last two pieces he composed, Zythos, for trombone and six marimbas, and O-Mega, for percussion and ensemble, both written in 1997, four years before his death. They are striking, small-scale examples of the bareness and drastic compression of his late style, but the finest music here is a bit earlier. In Échange, from 1989, a bass clarinet painstakingly un…

*2022 stock* Wergo presents Moton Feldman's compositions For Franz Kline · For Frank O'Hara · De Kooning · Piano Piece To Philip Guston. Performed by Ensemble Avantgarde.

György Ligeti's only opera, Le Grand Macabre, is an entertaining, taut piece of musical theatre that sits somewhere between parody and ominous seriousness, between clowning and wisdom. Based on Michel de Ghelderode's play and set in the imaginary land of Breughelland, it follows Nekrotzar, alias the Grand Macabre, who has not only ambitions to suck blood but apocalyptic visions: he wants to bring about the end of the world personally, and fails. Ligeti himself said its bizarre, exaggerated music…

*2022 stock* John Cage's first manifesto, written in 1937, was called The Future of Music: Credo, and the future it described was an "all-sound music" open to every kind of noise. This volume of Wergo's Edition John Cage follows that idea across three decades, from the prepared piano of the 1940s to the vocal and spoken works of the 1970s. Sonata XIII, from the Sonatas and Interludes, and Music for Marcel Duchamp are pieces for prepared piano, played by Peter Roggenkamp: screws, bolts and rubber…

*2022 stock* It may come as a surprise but one of the leading creators of keyboard music in the twentieth century is a composer by the name of John Cage. Cage’s reputation is so deeply associated with the avantgarde, with chance music, graphic notation, performance art, technology and Zen Buddhism that is early, conventionally-notated music for percussion ensemble and keyboards is sometimes neglected. Or was until recently. In the last few years – with the advent of performances and recordings l…

*2022 stock* Magnetic tape for serial use is not the prerogative of Stockhausen or the French members of the GRM. On the other side of the Alps, at the RAI Studio di Fonologia in Milan, Luigi Nono worked for a long time on the development of a new form of theatrical composition. In the 1960s, his research led to the creation of a series of works that are difficult to classify: A floresta è jovem e cheja de vida (1966), Y entonces comprendió (1969-70), but especially La fabbrica illuminata from 1…

Circles is one of Luciano Berio's most captivating works: a setting of three poems by e.e. cummings for female voice, harp and two percussionists, in which the words are gradually taken apart into their sounds and the singer moves physically among the instruments, so that voice and percussion end up trading roles. It was written for Cathy Berberian, the "Callas" of new music, and her performance here remains the reference. Around it are three of the Sequenzas, Berio's lifelong series of virtuoso…

*2022 stock* Several of György Ligeti's best-known and most characteristic pieces, in recordings made within a few years of their composition by the musicians closest to them. Atmosphères for large orchestra without percussion and Lux aeterna for sixteen-part mixed choir a cappella are the two works that Stanley Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and they are still the purest examples of Ligeti's micropolyphony: dense webs of lines that merge into slowly shifting clouds of sound. Atmosphères…

*2022 stock* This CD of works by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti represents an extremely interesting combination of several of his serene works for harpsichord, organ, and wind quintet with two electronic compositions from the late 1950s.

*2022 stock* This recording deals with works composed between 1944 and 1958, including several of Cage's lovely and masterful prepared piano pieces, which will come as a major surprise to those familiar only with his chance compositions. Joshua Pierce is the principal pianist (assisted by Dorothy Jonas on the Three Dances, written for two pianos) and attacks the pieces with a nice balance of delicacy and aggression, although compared to the earlier Angel recording of the abovementioned Three Dan…

*2022 stock* Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, a cycle of 20 short pieces for prepared piano (a piano modified by inserting nuts and bolts and other objects between the piano strings in order to produce percussive and otherworldly sound effects) by American composer John Cage. Created in 1946–48 after the composer had been introduced to Indian visual and performing arts, the cycle was intended to represent the so-called permanent emotions—the heroic, the erotic, the wondrous, the comic,…

*2022 stock* It's over 70 years since John Cage wrote his pivotal Music of Changes, and it's beginning to show its age. It feels very much of its time, with its uncompromising adherence to the 64 hexagrams of I-Ching, the Chinese book of changes, determining the direction of the piece and its use of sudden, percussive attacks on the strings or the body of the instrument. But for all that there is no denying the extreme stamina and concentration required of the performer, and here Herbert Henck e…