Composition / Contemporary

Frédéric Acquaviva's new album - a record sleeve with QR Code but no record, limited to 100 copies: a 69-minute opera for voice (with Joël Hubaut, author of the text, Dorothy Iannone and Loré Lixenberg), "dead electronics" and video.

The acclaimed recording of Arvo Pärt’s Lamentate with which Onutė Gražinytė marked her recording debut is now released on vinyl in a limited and numbered 180g edition of 1,000 copies. It is supplemented with Gražinytė’s wonderful interpretation of Pärt’s piano works Pari intervallo and Für Anna Maria - Nachdenklich.  “Onute Grazinyte and the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra under Modestas Pitrenas play Pärt’s music – especially the main work Lamentate – very expressively and communicativel…

**300 copies** Konsequenz has released a new anthology that offers another incredible window into the Napoli’s remarkable experimental endeavours, another essential artifact for any fan of Italian border and avant-garde musics. Avant-garde and experimental musics are intrinsically connected to community, collectivism, support, and collaboration. Audiences and artists, stretching to every corner of the globe, continuously rely on each other to push into ever more ambitious realms. This spirit of …

Toshio Hosokawa explains his special interest in the flute as follows: “For me the  flute  is  the  instrument  which  can  most deeply realise my musical ideal. The flute can produce a sound by means of the breath, and can be a vehicle by which the breath transmits the sound’s life-power.“  When playing the flute, the breath  flow  is  directed  upon  a  sharp  edge or notch. The resulting vibrations excite the air contained in the resonant cavity  within  the  flute,  which  can  be  heard as …

This CD by Alessandro Perini combines electronic sound manipulation with the creation of electromechanical and electroacoustic instruments and a reflection on sound environment, tending toward the exploration of unusual compositional solution. In short, it is experimental music and as such, it deserves to be listened to and commented upon.  A few words about the composer. Alessandro Perini is a young musician: he studied composition (with Luca Francesconi and Ivan Fedele among others), electroni…

Inspired by frescos by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo painted in the residence of Würzburg, again two so rich universes of intoxicating sonorities. Let us quote the composer: “Nothing is more inclined to suggest space than color, which becomes the true mean of the musician”. Difficult to imagine two pieces as dissimilar as this Africa and this Asia. Tiepolo's allegorical depictions of Africa and Asia inspired the French composer Hugues Dufourt (*1943) to write two of his most powerful ensemble works.…

**300 copies** Starting with an open dialogue seems like a good way to approach a collaboration. Almost a decade ago, that’s how Joana Gama (piano) and Luís Fernandes (electronics) started to work together, and both quickly understood that it was an ideal moment to develop and explore new paths in their music. “There’s no knowing” is their fifth album, 50 minute piece in which the two artists' have a dialogue while interacting with the void and silence around them. The origin of this work explai…

Five first recordings of works by composer and harpist Anne LeBaron, 1975-1986, including Lamentation/Invocation, Rite of the Black Sun, Planxty Bowerbird, Noh Reflections and Concerto for Active Frogs, played by the New Music Consort and others.

With their 2018–2019 Isang Yun Recording Project, ItalianCellist Luigi Piovano and Pianist Aldo Orvieto pay homageto the late Korean composer and the tragic course of his life. “The events that marked Isang Yun’s life emblematically show the miserable short-sightedness of the human being, unable to act authentically and with love towards others, in striving for a common good and reach a common spiritual elevation. When confronted with the exceptional musical depth and the dramatic power of Isang…

"Salvatore Sciarrino's Musiche per il "Paradiso" di Dante is divided in three movements: Alfabeto OscuroThe alphabet mentioned in the title (as if speaking, it’s written at the top of the score) refers to the language of sounds that desperately tries to transfigure into words: the orchestra seems to want to talk,” writes Sciarrino. “The nature of the instruments would not allow it, yet they obsessively act, and we hear almost without understanding. Almost. In their lack of humanity, the machines…

"In the works of Martón Illés from the early 2000s, physically perceptible energy, gestural force, and visual conceptions of the sonic are already present. After 2010 the composer drew further implications from these for his work: since then, his musical thinking has no longer been based on fixed pitches, but rather on sounds – either as acoustic manifestations of imagined lines or as gestures modeled on the physical. The way he actually implements this by means of instruments is impressively de…

Defining the character of a composer’s music is always hazardous, especially if the composer is restless. But around Stefano Scodanibbio’s music we often return to the concept of wandering, which moreover reflects his life. This is testified by his writings, which tell us how travel, lack of stability, desire were factors to be found written or improvised in his works. An important and restless philosopher introducing the volume that collects those writings (Not enough for me, Quodlibet, 2019) g…

Painted Lights, a new album of compositions by Kui Dong is now available on Kairos Music. The record, which features performances by Juliet Petrus, Deirdre Brenner, Third Coast Percussion, Arditti Quartet, Koehne Quartett, Volti, Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir, Robert Geary, and Raphael Schlüsselberg, comprises four pieces of chamber and choral music written by Dong between 2009 and 2017. California Shoreline (2017) for soprano, string quartet and prepared piano opens the album, followed by …

Tip! A collection of stunning Persian-tuned piano pieces cut from Iranian national radio broadcasts made for the Golha programmes between 1956 & 1965... Morteza Mahjubi (1900-1965) was a Iranian pianist & composer who developed a unique tuning system for the piano which enabled the instrument to be played in all the different modes and dastgahs of traditional Persian art music. Known as Piano-ye Sonnati, this technique allowed Mahjubi to express the unique ornamental and monophonic nature of Per…

Robert Hughes, composer and author, is a graduate of the University of Buffalo (now SUNY Buffalo) and composition student of Aaron Copland, Carlos, Chavez, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Lou Harrison. He has written for symphony orchestra, chamber ensemble, voices, performance art events and a wide variety of media, including twenty film scores and a large body of electronic music. His compositions include commissions from the San Francisco Symphony, Cabrillo Music Festival, Oakland Symphony, Arch Ense…

*2022 stock* Robert Hughes, composer and author, is a graduate of the University of Buffalo (now SUNY Buffalo) and composition student of Aaron Copland, Carlos, Chavez, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Lou Harrison. He has written for symphony orchestra, chamber ensemble, voices, performance art events and a wide variety of media, including twenty film scores and a large body of electronic music. His compositions include commissions from the San Francisco Symphony, Cabrillo Music Festival, Oakland Sympho…

Other Minds is excited to bring you an EP of two archival works from Bay Area composer Charles Boone. Both pieces take their inspiration and titles from man-made landmarks across California. Solar One from a monumental power station near the desert city of Barstow, The Watts Towers from Simon Rodia’s outsider art masterpiece in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. In much of his work, the composer seeks to create sonic landscapes that are simultaneously static and dynamic. Certain elements, ha…

Long out of print, Diamanda Galás' incendiary 1984-released second album is available once more, remastered by Brooklyn's Heba Kadry

The Plains at Gordium was composed from June to August 2004 and is dedicated to Charlotta Kotik. The incentive to compose the piece came from a percussion group in Brno, Czech Republic, who asked me for a piece of music. Not being a commission-disciplined composer, I wrote a piece for six percussionists, while the Czech group, DAMA-DAMA had only four members and could not perform it. The size of the piece also defies the scale of a standard percussion piece, 1,290 measures over a 108-page score.…

George Crumb's Makrokosmos, Books I and II (1972-73), both complete on one disc, in composer-supervised recordings by pianist Margaret Leng Tan, a leading exponent of extended piano techniques.

Temporary Super Offer! "‘Hieroglyph’ is a word that history has gradually prised away from its linguistic roots as the Greek term for sacred carvings. Over time it came to be associated principally with the enigmatic symbols found in Egyptian burial sites and because these symbols resisted translation for so many centuries the word hieroglyph became a synonym for incomprehensibility. It was the discovery of an artefact – the socalled ‚Rosetta Stone‘, containing both hieroglyphs and parallel text…

music for bowed string instruments consists mostly of music composed by Malcolm Goldstein (b. 1936) between 2018 and 2019 while living in Montréal, Québec. The impulse to compose this series came from Goldstein’s experience as a teacher and performer of Béla Bartók’s 44 Duos for Two Violins (1931). Whereas Bartók’s series features a clear progression to the pieces, gradually increasing in technical and musical complexity from beginning to end, music for bowed string instruments has no such seque…

Starting with his music of the 1960s and early 1970s, with works such as For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964), the Prose Collection (1968–71), and Changing the System (1974), Christian Wolff (b. 1934) quietly re-invented chamber music. He created music in which the activities of the performers— timing, cueing, assembling and selecting materials—were foregrounded. Although to some extent these activities were always a part of classical music, Wolff opened them up for creative decision-making by the musici…

Tip! After its reading of Julius Eastman's Feminine, released in 2021, the Ensemble 0 revisit the repertoires of Pauline Oliveros and György Ligeti from another angle. From the works of Oliveros, they exhumed a deeply meditative piece for accordion and voice, giving it a new life in the form of vaporous, cloud-riding chamber music. With Ligeti, the piano radicalism of the Musica Ricercata miniatures crops up again in a new and as yet unreleased orchestration.

With each composition, Annesley Black embarks courageously on a new experiment with an open future; while at the beginning of the compositional process the material can still mean many things, it gradually ceases to do so. And at some point, all ambiguities are cleared up: the piece stands. The paths that have led to this point are ultimately paradoxical: they are “immensely labyrinthine and completely logical at the same time” (Black). In their own unique way, the pieces gathered on this CD pre…

One  could  take Wolfram Schurig's Ultima  Thule  for  five  ensembles,  a  work  whose  mere  instrumentation  in-vokes  that  utopian  place  which,  according  to  the composer, should automatically be the goal of any authentic  artistic  activity,  as  a  motto  for  Wolfram Schurig‘s  entire  compositional œuvre.  In  ancient Greece,  the  name  Thule  referred  to  the  northern-most part of the world, whose accessibility and actual existence, however, remained uncertain. Since Virgil,  th…

Approdi is a cultural operation involving thirteen composers and numerous other artists from heterogeneous segments of the Neapolitan visual arts. The guest composers of the first volume are Carlo Vignaturo, Enzo Amato, Max Fuschetto, Girolamo De Simone, Giusto Pappacena, Piero Viti, Vito Ranucci, Gabriele Montagano, Patrizio Marrone, Enrico Iannaccone, Alessandro Petrosino, Carlo Mormile and Gaetano Panariello. The album was then joined by the poet Luca Buonaguidi, with a lyric for the late com…

Documenting a reunion of Musica Elettronica Viva's founders Frederic Rzewski (piano and vocals), Richard Teitelbaum (keyboards and computer) and Alvin Curran (keyboards, computer and shofar) at the 32nd International Festival Of Current Music in Victoriaville, Canada in 2016.

In 2018 experimental festival Organ Reframed commissioned Éliane Radigue to write her first work for organ, 'Occam Ocean XXV'. Radigue worked closely with organist Frédéric Blondy at the Église Saint Merry in Paris before transferring the piece to Union Chapel for its premiere at Organ Reframed on 13 October 2018. The recording on this compact disc was made at a private session at Union Chapel on 8 January 2020. 'Occam XXV' inaugurates the very special record series of works exclusively commissi…

2022 Stock * With the legendary “Studio Reihe Neuer Musik” series, Wergo created a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the Sixties of the past century already. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the label now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality on CD for the first time. The "Studio Reihe” starts with a CD with works by Bernd Alois Zimmermann. His complex “pluralistic” style fuses past, present and future into a musical unit of the h…

With the legendary “Studio Reihe Neuer Musik” series, Wergo created a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the Sixties of the past century already. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the label now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality on CD for the first time."Studio Reihe” now continues with a work by Karlheinz Stockhausen:  His “Momente” [Moments] for soprano, four choral groups, and thirteen instrumentalists have not been designed a…

*CD gatefold wallet with tip in booklet* Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuire’s Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europe’s angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock seria…

The story of six soulmate musicians meeting at the intersection of classical composition, pop, electronic and minimal music begins in 2016 with their celebrated performance at the Cologne Philharmonie. After follow-up performances at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn as well as the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Gregor Schwellenbach, Daniel Brandt, John Kameel Farah, Paul Frick, Erol Sarp and Kai Schuhmacher made a guest appearance at the invitation of Radio Berlin Brandenburg in the iconic Haus des Rundfunks…

"In September 2019 I was asked by cellist Leo Svensson Sander and harpist Stina Hellberg Agback if I would be interested participating in a project together with them, violinist Eva Lindal and a couple of visual artists, a poet and a scenographer, which would deal with questions concerning how to make art in times of crisis, something I gladly and curiously accepted. The project would take Messiaen's ’Quatuor pour la fin de temps’ and its genesis, creation and historical context as a point of de…

A concert-length work for pipe organ, piano and percussion, created by the composer and the GBSR Duo (Siwan Rhys and George Barton) at the recent Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Wonderfully brooding music, beautifully played.

"The four pieces on the CD cover a broad time span. The first piece, which is the most recent, is a clear example of the kind of entwinement between technologies, affect, space and listening that I’ve been working on for a while. This piece plays with the role of different conditions of sound production in shaping the way we pay attention to sound - how we engage in listening to it. In its live version the piece involves other layers which are not present in the recording. This entails both the …

"The three works on the CD were written between 1988 and 1994.  It is a long time ago and there were many factors that played in to these pieces becoming somewhat hidden for a couple of decades.  In 1994 I had some CDs manufactured that represented some of my work at the time.  Most of the discs were mailed out to various people and institutions internationally with the hope of generating some interest in the music.  And I distributed many others to local musicians.  Thanks to my good friends at…

Kunsu Shim’s compositions explore the beauty of imperfection and fragility, of simplicity and complexity in natural life, operating at the peripheries of sound and noise. Perception, not purpose, lies at the core of this music. The creation of such sounds is happening in extremely soft and quiet volumes with small changes of character either in a structural or textural form.  In his scores Shim asks his musicians to act with tenderness, care and warmth, lightness or gracefulness - thereby evokin…

Nicholas Bussmann was born in 1970 and is a very diversified artist. He first made a name for himself in the real-time music scene as an improvisational instrumentalist, then he devoted himself to electronic music and now he moves quite freely between artistic styles. His works are usually highly praised and are mostly part of exhibitions or other types of total artworks.The News Triology fills the first page of this work and is thus the first part of this extraordinary project released on vinyl…

*In process of  stocking* The score for ‘Truth, exercise for a listener’ comprises a catalogue of options for a musical performer. In four parts each focusing on a different facet of our faculty to listen, it offers open ended material for the performer to deal with; sounding actions, silent actions, still actions, moving actions, interpretative actions. All can be selected, combined, omitted or extended at will. Multiple exercises can happen simultaneously. In a general sense the piece is an at…