Over The Edge
Eric Chasalow (b 1955), who grew to aesthetic maturity as Postmodernism was evolving, points (not at all surprisingly) to jazz as part of the family tree. In 1983, Chasalow created a set of three works for soloist and electronic sounds. The composer fashioned each, for cello, for soprano, and for flute, with particular accomplished performers in mind, taking his inspiration, he says, "from their personal styles and energy."
Chasalow composed Hanging in the Balance (1983) for the redoubtable cell…
American Works For Balinese Gamelan Orchestra
This recording is the product of a remarkable intercultural musical experiment. It contains five strikingly varied works, each one the fruit of musical cross-pollination between America and the island of Bali. The three American composers represented here－Evan Ziporyn, Michael Tenzer and Wayne Vitale, along with their peers in the Sekar Jaya ensemble－have, since 1979, devoted an extraordinary amount of effort, intelligence, and talent to the study and performance of traditional Balinese music. T…
Doppio Concertino / Flamenco Cyclothymia / Concerto For String Orchestra / Piano Quartet
Carlos Surinach (b 1915) is an American composer whose Spanish heritage, together with the rigors of German musical training, has enabled him to produce an oeuvre that "achieves an effect of novelty by exploiting all the familiar clichés of the `Spanish idiom' with new technical resources and with a completely non-impressionistic sensibility," as Gilbert Chase wrote in Music of Spain.
Like Manuel de Falla's Harpsichord Concerto, the Doppio Concertino (Double Concerto) of 1954 is basically neocla…
Songs, Capriccios, and Octoechoes
Michelle Ekizian (b 1956) and Louis Karchin (b 1951) represent a generation of American composers that has seen postwar American serialism enriched by other compositional approaches, both new and old. The process of stylistic synthesis and individualization, evidenced in the works presented here and in others, continues unabated today.
Written in between the first and second installments of her ongoing orchestral cycle, The Exiled Heart Series, which now includes “The Exiled Heart” (1986), “Morn…
H'un (Lacerations) And Other Works
The music of the Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng (b 1955) sometimes floats like delicate fragrances on a breeze and sometimes screams and writhes in actual or remembered agony. This is music, to paraphrase William Blake, of innocence and of experience. The innocence and experience are not simply those of a boy growing up amid the terrors of China's Cultural Revolution—they are also components of a well-trained composer's creative equipment: the beloved folk music of a land left behind and…
Paula Robison, Ransom Wilson, Carol Wincenc, Solisti New York, Alasdair Neale, Brian Zeger, Douglas Webster, Robert Beaser, Paul Schoenfield, Joseph Schwantner
FlutesIn 1986, three composers and three flutists met in a novel commissioning project supported by a National Endowment Consortium Commissioning Grant. Flutists Ransom Wilson, Carol Wincenc, and Paula Robison, each a longtime supporter and performer of new music, asked Joseph Schwantner, Paul Schoenfield, and Robert Beaser to write new works for flute and orchestra. On this recording, each solo artist presents the orchestral work composed for him or her, as well as a flute and piano "encore" by the s…
Works By Irving Fine, Gian Carlo Menotii, Carl Ruggles, Harold Shapero
At the outset of his career, Harold Shapero (b in 1920) was widely recognized as one of his generation's most promising composers. While in his twenties, he undertook to study closely the musical phraseology and rhetoric Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, as a discipline to help him sharpen melodic contours and better manipulate larger musical forms. When the brief piano sonata he set out to compose based on classical principles took only a few days to finish, he decided to write two more. Although t…
The Flight Into Egypt ·The Natural World · Double Brass Concerto
A few years ago a German presenter asked me for my "artistic Credo," which seemed a characteristically European request, but in the spirit of international cooperation I furnished the following: "to make each piece different from the others, to find clear, fresh large designs, to reinvent traditions." Grand and general though it is, the statement seems a good place to begin describing the music on this record.
Sketches for all the pieces preceded their commissions, but the institutions and frie…
Violin Works
Modern music－especially American music, with its tendency to invite various traditions to share the same compositional space－can be a generous art, an art which welcomes inclusivity. Here are works by John Cage (b 1912), Yehudi Wyner (b 1929), John Harbison (b 1938), and Stephen Hartke (b 1952)－four American composers from different generations with different sensibilities, representing very different approaches to writing for the violin. Yet however much these works represent various facets of …
Aftertones of Infinity, Chiaroscuro, Into Eclipse
Of the three composers recorded here, it is Jacob Druckman (b 1928) who has changed the most in his approach to composition. After years of involvement with serial techniques, it was in Windows (1972) that he began to readmit elements of the musical past into his work.
The titles of Druckman's works—Incenters, Windows, Aureole, Prism—often display an interest in visual or spatial concepts. In Chiaroscuro, scored for a fairly large orchestra, including electric piano and electric organ, he set o…
Works By Stephen Paulus
Stephen Paulus's musical style is melodic and highly rhythmic. He tends to work in traditional forms, and his music is accessible to listeners possessing a wide range of tastes. Those seeking well-crafted contemporary music with a decidedly neo-Romantic bent will find these three orchestral works very much to their liking.
As its title implies, Concertante is chiefly concerned with contrasts between solo instruments, small groups of players, and the full orchestra. Although, as the composer note…
An Idyll For The Misbegotten / Vox Balaenae / Madrigals, Books I-IV
George Crumb's (b 1929) music often juxtaposes contrasting musical styles. The references range from music of the Western art-music tradition, to hymns and folk music, to non-Western musics. Many of Crumb's works include programmatic, symbolic, mystical and theatrical elements, which are often reflected in beautiful and meticulously notated scores.
Crumb's expressive content is heard to good effect in the works on this recording, which reflect several obsessions: the four books of Madrigals (th…
Works By Faye-Ellen Silverman And Ralph Shapey
Faye-Ellen Silverman has been prolific throughout her career. She has written a wide variety of orchestral and chamber-music works, which have been performed by major ensembles throughout America and in Europe and Asia. A graduate of Barnard College, Harvard University, and Columbia University, she studied composition with, among others, Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Leon Kirchner, and Jack Beeson. Silverman's Passing Fancies (1985), whose patron, Paul Fromm, is remembered in the initials …
String Symphony / Sunday Morning / Eagles
Perhaps best known for his vast catalogue of vocal music－operas, song cycles, and choral works－Ned Rorem (b. 1923) also has composed three symphonies, four piano concertos, and an impressive array of other orchestral and chamber works. He received the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for the orchestral suite Air Music.
This collection features three of his orchestral works, String Symphony, Sunday Morning, and Eagles. String Symphony dates from 1985 and was completed in the space of just eight weeks. Mr. Ro…
Symphony No. 7/Balada: Steel Symphony
William Schuman was born in 1910 in New York. His earliest musical interests were at first confined to current popular music. In 1930, after hearing his first concert of symphonic music－Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic in a program of music by Wagner, Kodaly, and Robert Schumann－he redirected his life. Schuman later graduated from Columbia University and studied privately with Roy Harris. Symphony No. 7 premiered on October 21, 1960, under the direction of Charles Munch, who succeeded Kou…
Piano Concerto / Variations For Orchestra
While a student at the Horace Mann School, Elliott Carter came to know Charles Ives. Carter continued his education at Harvard and then studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Ives and Boulanger were formative influences: Carter's music draws on American experimentalism (Ives, Cowell, Crawford, Nancarrow, Varèse) and European modernism (Debussy, Stravinsky, the Viennese). Ever since he reached his stylistic maturity with the String Quartet No. 1 of 1951, Carter has continued to pursue an original…
Works By: Hugh Aitken, Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, Paul Schoenfield, Gunther Schuller
Perhaps from the habit of our nineteenth-century parlor-music tradition, perhaps from the frustration of trying to get orchestral works performed, American composers seem to have remained more active in the genre of the chamber sonata than their European counterparts. In America, the genre has received particular attention from composers of a classical or neoclassical bent, as the works on this recording, varied as they are in style and technique, bear out.
In 1945, when he wrote the Sonatina, W…
Hidden Sparks
This recording contains four works for violin by four disparate American composers with unique conceptions of the instrument and its possibilities, technical and expressive. Elliott Carter's Riconoscenza is a short work for unaccompanied violin imbued with a craggy, rough-hewn grandeur and arching melodic lines characteristic of his mature music. Fantasy for Violin and Piano by Ralph Shapey (b. 1921) typifies the unusual blend of astringency and lyricism of his dense, passionate and deeply rewa…
Sinfonia / Symphony No. 1
John Harbison's music draws together gestures and ideas from musical worlds that reflect such favorite composers as Robert Schumann and Heinrich Schutz, the songs of George Gershwin, and the hieratic qualities of Igor Stravinsky. His work has always been expressive, though never with a heart-on-sleeve emoting of personal angst, a mode that simply does not interest him. Recently Harbison has shown an interest in recapturing such historical genres as the formal set of variations (as in his Variati…
Concerto For Clarinet And Orchestra / Third Essay For Orchestra, Opus 47
The Third Essay was Samuel Barber's last completed work and its drama and lyricism are entirely characteristic of the neo-Romantic style he composed in for his entire life, a style which won him a large and faithful audience. In his avowed concern for writing music that communicates with the listening public, John Corigliano could be seen as an inheritor of Barber's mantle. The Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra is a large-scale work that demonstrates his eclectic style at its finest. Corigli…