Composition / Contemporary

Two-CD set of Stockhausen's music for flute, piccolo and alto flute played by Kathinka Pasveer, including Kathinkas Gesang with electronic music, Zungenspitzentanz, Flautina, Ypsilon and Xi. Stockhausen-Verlag, 1992.

Single CD of the Invisible Choirs, Stockhausen's 1979 a cappella choir tape for Donnerstag aus Licht, made on 16 channels for eight-channel playback and sung by the WDR choir. Stockhausen-Verlag, 1992.

Three-CD set of Stockhausen's music for clarinet, bass clarinet and basset horn with Suzanne Stephens, with Laub und Regen, Tierkreis, Libra, Mondeva, Xi, Wochenkreis, Sukat, Freia and other pieces. Stockhausen-Verlag, 1994.

Single CD with Aries for trumpet and electronic music (Markus Stockhausen) and the solo piano version of Klavierstück XIII, Luzifers Traum (Majella Stockhausen), both WDR recordings of 1983. Stockhausen-Verlag, 1994.

Single CD with three chamber works by Stockhausen: Oberlippentanz (1983), Ave (1984 and 1985) and the trio version of Tierkreis, played by Markus Stockhausen, Suzanne Stephens, Kathinka Pasveer, Michael Svoboda and others. Stockhausen-Verlag, 1993.

Five-CD set of Stockhausen's opera Monday from Light (1984 to 1988) with greeting, three acts and farewell, premiered at La Scala in 1988, with Nicholas Isherwood, Annette Meriweather, the WDR Choir and Peter Eötvos.

Choir version of the first act of Montag aus Licht (Stockhausen, 1987), for a cappella choir and tape of sound scenes. WDR Rundfunkchor Köln, conducted by Stockhausen, who also mixed the tape. Stockhausen Edition no. 37, 1994.

Birth-Arias from Act 1 of Montag aus Licht and the Mädchenprozession from Act 2, the latter in two versions: for girls' choir and piano, and with choir, orchestra and tape. Stockhausen Edition no. 38, 1994.

Haydn's Trumpet Concerto and Mozart's Flute and Clarinet Concertos, with cadenzas by Stockhausen, played by Markus Stockhausen, Kathinka Pasveer and Suzanne Stephens. Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Stockhausen conducting. Two CDs, 1993.

Dienstag aus Licht, the Licht opera for Tuesday: Dienstags-Gruss, Act 1 Jahreslauf and Act 2 Invasion-Explosion mit Abschied. Recorded in Cologne in 1993 under Stockhausen, mixed until 1995. Two CDs, English or German booklet.

Music for trumpet, piccolo trumpet and flugelhorn from Licht, played by Markus Stockhausen: Eingang und Formel, Examen, Drachenkampf, Oberlippentanz and Pietà (solo and duo). Two CDs with a 128-page booklet, 1994.

Solo (1966) in versions for flute (Dietmar Wiesner) and synthesizer (Simon Stockhausen), and Spiral (1968) in a version for oboe, voice, didgeridoo and short-wave receiver (Cathy Milliken). Stockhausen Edition no. 45, 1995.

Tierkreis (twelve melodies for music boxes, 1974-75) and Musik im Bauch for six percussionists (1975), played by Les Percussions de Strasbourg and recorded in 1977.

In Freundschaft, Signale zur Invasion and Kinntanz, music for trombone and euphonium by Stockhausen, with trombonist Michael Svoboda. Recorded 1995 to 1996, released by Stockhausen-Verlag in 1997.

Mantra (1970), Stockhausen's piece for two ring-modulated pianos, played by Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky in the 1971 recording made under the composer's supervision.

Stockhausen Edition no. 8: Mixtur (1964), for orchestra, sine-wave generators and ring modulators, in the reduced version of 1967, played forwards and backwards by Hudba Dneška under Ladislav Kupkovič.

Fifteen recordings from Aus den sieben Tagen (1968), Stockhausen's cycle of intuitive text compositions, played by his Cologne group and a Paris group in Darmstadt in 1969, plus Goldstaub from 1972.

*In process of stocking* “Tolimieri makes a universe of micro-nuance audible, with each piece consisting of hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of points of contact. Each point is just a little different from its predecessor. One by one, the points carry the music outwards, until the sound canvas is radiantly filled with the sensation of a particular touch. The succession of Monochromes on these discs has a beautiful logic. I hear it as an attempt to “begin again”, to rediscover the pi…

Rotterdam-based composer/pianist Reinier van Houdt created six pieces from March 22 to August 22, 2020 for a monthly 'quarantine' series of the online festival AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine, commissioned by Jon Abbey. Each of the six pieces on 'drift nowhere past' was recorded on the 22nd of each month (#18, #75, #128, #155, #194, #211). "I've made these pieces from what I played, listened to, recorded, played back, read, watched, heard, or imagined, each during one specific day in the quarantine of …

Paradigm-shifting percussionist Valentina Magaletti stops time on 'La Tempesta Colorata', a long-form set that rolls thru tempos and time signatures with gymnastic flexibility, offering another spectacular entry to A Colourful Storm’s gravity-defying recent run of releases.   Magaletti is a regular and constant presence on these pages as a member of Moin, Vanishing Twin, Tomaga and CZN, as well as thru endless collabs with everyone from Floating Points to Nicolas Jaar, Jandek to Helm. For our mo…

The American composer Christian Wolff (b. 1934) is the last living representative of the New York School (Rauschenberg, Rothko, etc.). Wolff was not even an adult when he studied with Grete Sultan and John Cage. Wolff’s music was much more politically motivated than that of Feldman and Cage, which is evident on this new Wergo album by Trio Accanto. The album features first recordings made in close collaboration with Wolff in the studios of Deutschlandfunk Cologne/Germany. Wolff's great “Trio IX …

*2022 stock* 'Halleluja, Peter Eötvös’s “stuttering oratorio”, with a text by the novelist Péter Esterházy, was first performed in 2016. It’s built around the historical figure of Notker Balbulus, Notker the Stammerer, a ninth-century Benedictine monk who was a chronicler and composer. But, Eötvös insists, “It is not so much a portrait of Notker as of the times in which we live … At first the choir represents a society that says ‘hallelujah’ to everything: they have to be satisfied with everythi…

*2022 stock* 'Hans Werner Henze was, during his lifetime, probably the most-performed composer of western modern music, and his advanced yet sensuously traditional music remains an important presence on stages around the world today. Henze was deeply attached to Italy, where he spent a large part of his life. The roots of this album go back to a personal meeting between Henze and the Italian double bass virtuoso Daniele Roccato when Roccato was attempting to obtain Henze’s blessing for a theater…

Frederic Rzewski’s work “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” is based on the Chilean protest song, “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!,” written by Sergio Ortega a few months before Pinochet’s military coup in September of 1973.Frederic Rzewski came to Europe as a young man, lived in Cologne and Rome, and created a sensation as an avant-garde pianist with his premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Klavierstück X”. He worked with the leading composers of the time and was himself a composer.…

Yiran Zhao makes use not only of musical elements but also of objects, bodies, movements and light-sources as compositional material. Many of her pieces inhabit the various boundary states between instrumental music, performance, sound-installation, and video-art. Leonie Reineke describes the composer in the CD-booklet as a “prudent researcher“, who encounters the sonic cosmos of her environment with great earnestness, and comes microscopically close to things. In the composition “Piep“ she focu…

"String quartet” seems a rather reductive way of describing any of the four utterly compelling works by Clara Iannotta that the Jack Quartet play here. For as well as demanding that the string players employ every conventional technique, the Italian composer extends their sound world farther, both with electronics and with “found objects” applied to the strings and bodies of the instruments. The four pieces all date from the last seven years. The earliest, A Failed Entertainment, borrows the wor…

*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…

*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* The origins and technical content of Strahlen (‘Rays’), a work left incomplete at the time of Stockhausen’s death, are complicated. It’s best to watch the documentary about the work before hearing it through, so that your mind’s eye is tuned in to what is going on, and what lies behind the concept and techniques used in its realisation. Part of the genesis of Strahlen was a desire to create a ‘virtual vibraphone’ with the ability to play extended notes, dynamic crescendos and freaki…

First complete recording of Lou Harrison's reconstructed suites for just-intonation guitar and of the Ditone Set, played by John Schneider, with the first recording of Harrison's Handel homage for guitar and gamelan.

Morton Feldman's complete music for violin and piano, from Piece for Violin and Piano (1950) to For John Cage (1982), which spans both discs, played by Marc Sabat and Stephen Clarke.

Four works by Alvin Lucier played by the Italian ensemble Alter Ego: Two Circles, Fideliotrio and Three Translations of the Works of Maurizio Mochetti, plus a new recording of I Am Sitting in a Room with the composer.

Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 2, a work of more than six hours, played by the FLUX Quartet on a deluxe five-CD box with liner notes by Christian Wolff and FLUX founder Tom Chiu.

First recordings of Roger Reynolds's recent string quartets FLiGHT (2012-16) and not forgotten (2007-10), by the JACK Quartet under the composer's supervision. First of two volumes marking his 85th birthday.

Since the mid-1960s, Jon Gibson has played a key role in the development of American avant-garde music. As a versatile reed player, he has performed with everyone from Steve Reich and Philip Glass to Terry Riley and La Monte Young. In the 1970s, Gibson would emerge as a minimalist composer in his own right and release two exceptional albums, Visitations and Two Solo Pieces, on Glass' Chatham Square imprint.Songs & Melodies brings together recordings from 1973 to 1977 (mostly previously unrelease…

Nitsch loved the countryside where he lived, the austrian „wine county“ – with this release he wanted to combine his music, his art and the landscape. Recorded on 28th August 2021, Nitsch Museum, MistelbachConductor: Michael MautnerPerformers: Members of the Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna (RSO Wien)Mix and Master by Christoph Amann, Vienna

Philip Corner was an active member of Fluxus, a founder of the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble, the resident musician and composer for the Judson Dance Theatre, and co-founder of Gamelan Son of Lion. The musical opportunities that these ensembles and their performances offered Corner ensured that he was both prolific and had or developed a deep understanding of the important artistic influences of that time. Corner uses a variety of scoring methods. He is truly the equal of John Cage in forcing us t…

Andrew Batt-Rawden is a Sydney based composer, performer & publisher. His practice is cross-platform & all-embracing. Though initially stemming from an almost traditional sense of ‘the composer’, Andrew fuses elements of gesture, choreography, new technology, text, performance art & mixed-media into his work & has a wide-ranging history of inter-disciplinary collaboration. His current focus is on incorporating all the senses into the audience experience by integrating data feeds to affect live e…

Zubin Kanga is a modern day David Tudor. He is at the forefront of 21st century avant-garde piano music, not only as a performer but also as a prolific commissioner of new works. Zubin has collaborated with many of the world’s leading composers including Steve Reich, Beat Furrer, Thomas Ades & Michael Finnissy. His teacher & mentor Rolf Hind was a pianist signed to the infamous Factory Records (Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire) who instilled a borderless view of ‘classical’ music in him. Zubin has…

Jack Symonds is a composer, conductor, pianist & the Artistic Director of Sydney Chamber Opera. SCO is a resident company at Carriagworks, Australia’s answer to The Park Avenue Amoury. His productions are always daring, both musically & theatrically. They tend to garner 5-star reviews and affronted walkouts in equal measure. He studied composition at the Royal College of Music, London & the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where he received the university medal. He has written pieces for Jane She…