Malcolm Goldstein, Fred Lerdahl, Yehudi Wyner

Featuring: Musical Elements

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Composers Recordings Inc. was one of the most remarkable institutional projects in the history of recorded music: a composer-run, non-profit label founded in 1954 with the explicit mission of documenting American contemporary music that would otherwise go unrecorded. Over its half-century of activity it released more than six hundred LPs and CDs - an archive without which whole chapters of 20th-century American music would be practically inaccessible. This LP, marking the label's tenth anniversary, is a document of that ambition at its most concentrated: Malcolm Goldstein, the violinist-composer whose extended technique work explored the physical boundaries of the instrument with a rigour and inventiveness that few matched, developing a language rooted in breath, pressure, and the unstable edges of tone; Fred Lerdahl, later known for his theoretical work on tonal pitch space but here represented as a composer at an early and formative stage; and Yehudi Wyner, whose elegant and intellectually precise music navigated between neo-classical clarity and a more chromatic harmonic world. A self-portrait of CRI's first decade, and of the breadth it had managed to hold.