Salvatore Martirano, George Rochberg

condition (record/cover): VG+ (occasional surface noise / G+ (sleeve modified attaching the insert with tape repair)

Salvatore Martirano is best known today for the Sal-Mar Construction, the room-sized electronic music instrument he designed and built at the University of Illinois between 1969 and 1972: a network of logic circuits and switches that generated and transformed electronic sound in real time, operated from a control surface that functioned as a kind of improvisation environment. But Martirano's vocal and theatrical music, represented here on CRI, shows the dimension of his practice that the technological legend has tended to obscure - a deep engagement with literature and performance, a sense of drama that connects his work to a broader tradition of American music-theatre. George Rochberg's presence on this LP carries its own weight of historical significance. Trained as a serialist, Rochberg experienced the death of his son in 1964 and concluded that serial technique was incapable of expressing grief - incapable, more broadly, of addressing the full range of human experience. He began incorporating tonal quotation and neo-romantic gesture into his work, a decision that made him one of the most contested figures in American music for two decades. His String Quartet No. 2 With Soprano is an early document of this turn - a work that positions itself within and against the modernist legacy simultaneously. Two composers whose trajectories tell a great deal about the pressures American musical life exerted on its practitioners across this period.