- "Masters at crafting alluring sonic landscapes from the most unlikely found objects, So Percussion explores the idea of home with bold experiment in collaborative art-making. Where (we) live is a multi-media, multi-artist, fully-staged theatrical event and album featuring music written by Brooklyn-based quartet So Percussion (Adam Sliwinski, Eric Beach, Jason Treuting, Josh Quillen) and special guest singer/songwriter/guitarist Grey McMurray (Itsnotyouitsme, (k)nights on earth). A celebration of community and collaboration, Where (we) Live is an exploration of So's outermost artistic boundaries, as well as a re-examination of comfort zones.
"For eight years, So Percussion has made our home in Brooklyn amid two million five hundred thousand others. In our city, each of the group's four members has constructed a personal ecosystem we call home. These homes are bound by space, time, sound and image. Equally, these spaces house rewarding, frustrating, supporting, damaging, tangible and never understood relationships. When we leave those homes, our four members unite to create another artistic home, with its own unspoken rules and expectations; its own rhythm of interaction, it's own banalities and mystery. Where (we) Live questions all these homes by purposefully inviting the unknown to 'come on over'."
As a live event, So Percussion has invited video artists, songwriters, painters, choreographers, directors (including Martin Schmidt (Matmos), Ain Gordon and Emily Johnson) and others to substantively alter their process. The resulting performance contains a society of possibilities: composed pieces, chance elements, visual associations, and theatrical interactions.
The core of the experience, however, is the album itself; a distillation of the performance as it has evolved. Where (we) Live represents the 8th album release from So Percussion on Cantaloupe Music,spanning nearly a decade of creating music that explores all the extremes of emotion and musical possibilities."
- Cantaloupe Music - Soundcloud
- "Paul Lansky's burgeoning career shift from composer of computer-generated music, to composer of music written for, as he humorously puts it, "carbon-based life forms" is documented on the present recording, comprising three symphonic works created during the past five years. Shapeshifters for two pianos and orchestra was commissioned by The Alabama Symphony and Justin Brown for the piano duo Quattro Mani. The title, Shapeshifters, denotes a kind of homage to music's ability to change and morph itself in uncanny and unusual ways. With the Grain was composed for the guitarist David Starobin. The concerto's four movements are named after wood grains and their kinetic qualities. Imaginary Islands was commissioned by Justin Brown and the Alabama Symphony. The work is in three movements, each a kind of sonic landscape for an imaginary island. Lansky's music freely mixes popular and classical elements in works full of energy and fantasy."
- Bridge Records
- "As any filmmaker knows, one of the most powerful aspects of music is its ability to construct emotional arcs and guide narrative by purely sonic means. Simultaneously ethereal and concrete, both spectral and textural, Planet X—the debut collaboration between guitarist Erdem Helvacioglu and violist Ulrich Mertin—tells the story of the appearance in the sky of a new heavenly body and follows one hapless explorer’s quest to discover what lies at its heart. Over the course of two years, Helvacioglu and Mertin composed and crafted this project, building up layers of jagged scratching sounds, plaintive melodies, percussive hits, and dark drones. The two artists grounded the sound of the album in strings but also employed unorthodox recording techniques, sophisticated processing algorithms, and multi-tracking to achieve a rich, complex, resonant texture. Throughout, the sound is unmistakably forward-looking, evocative of the project’s science fiction themes and redolent of the eerie, sometimes dark feel of sci-fi films like “Alien,” “Moon,” and “2001.”
- "Erdem Helvacioglu is one of the most renowned contemporary composers of his generation in Turkey. His music has been called “revolutionary,” “groundbreaking,” “luscious and unique,” and “completely arresting and disarmingly beautiful.” He has received awards from the Luigi Russolo, MUSICA NOVA, Insulae Electronicae Electroacoustic Music Competitions and has been commissioned by numerous organizations, from the 2006 World Soccer Championship to the Bang on a Can-All Stars. Helvacioglu is also actively involved in composing for films, multimedia productions, contemporary dance and theatre. He won the “Best Original Soundtrack” award in the 2006 Mostramundo Film Festival, and his film scores have been heard at Cannes, Sarajevo, Locarno, Seoul, Sao Paulo, and Sydney film festivals. Ulrich Mertin’s musical activities cover a wide swath, from classical and contemporary to electronic and club music. He graduated from the esteemed “Hanns Eisler Academy for Music“ in Berlin, Germany, and has worked with composers like Pierre Boulez, György Kurtag, Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm, Brian Ferneyhough and with groups like Ensemble Modern and musikFabrik. With his award-winning Hezarfen Ensemble (the leading contemporary music ensemble of Turkey) he has been influencing and enlarging the Turkish contemporary scene for several years. - Innova Recordings
- "The eight works on this recording fall into two, slightly overlapping groups: pieces that respond to the natural world (Dark Wood, Changing Light and Trembling Air), and pieces that allude to or respond to other music (like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment, Arioso/ Doubles and Nocturne/Doubles, Traces). The first group is connected to Broening's experiences in Estonia. A Fulbright brought Broening to Tallinn in 2007 and in the following years he returned a number of times for concerts, lectures and to compose, spending much of his time in the forests, islands and fields. Broening's music couples his interest in the expressive power of sound with a sense of line derived from his background as a singer, the music here combining acoustic instruments with electronic processing. This recording marks the debut on Bridge of the brilliant Chicago-based, two-time Grammy Award-winning sextet, eighth blackbird." - Bridge Records
Benjamin Broening - "(b. 1967) is a composer of orchestral, choral, chamber and electroacoustic music. In the past few seasons his music has been performed in Japan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, Estonia, Romania, Slovenia, Ukraine, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada and across the United States. Recent works include a piece for flute and electronics for Camilla Hoitenga, a clarinet concerto for Richard Hawkins, a multi-movement work for Zeitgeist, a sextet for Ensemble U: (Estonia), two works for clarinet and electronics for Arthur Campbell and choral/instrumental works for the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, the James River Singers as well pieces for pianist Daniel Koppelman and eighth blackbird.
Other recent works include works for cello and electronics and flute and electronics for members of eighth blackbird, a piece for soprano and electroacoustic music commissioned by the Arts Now Series at North Carolina State University, a cantata for the Charlotte Symphony and the Oratorio Singers of Charlotte, pieces for the Connecticut Choral Society, the Grace Choral Society of Brooklyn, and a multi-media cantata for Hampton-Sydney College among others. Other commissions a chamber work for Quorum Chamber Arts Collective, three choral works for the Virginia Glee Club, music for theater and dance, as well as numerous solo works for performers around the United States.
A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Estonia, Broening has also received recognition and awards from the American Composers Forum, Virginia Commission for the Arts, ACS/Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Presser Music Foundation as well as a teaching award from the University of Richmond.
Recombinant Nocturnes, a disk of music for piano recorded by Duo Runedako (Daniel Koppelman and Ruth Neville) recently released on innova recordings, has been called a “gorgeous disc of music” and “thoughtful, eloquent, and disarmingly direct” by New Music Box, "deep, troubling” by François Couture François Couture and “Lovely, delicate, calming” by Los Angeles’ KFJC.
Other current recording projects include two works recorded by clarinetist Arthur Campbell for release in Fall 2012 on everglade, and gathering light, recorded by violinist Lina Bahn for Naxos.
Broening is founder and artistic director of Third Practice, an annual festival of electroacoustic music at the University of Richmond, where he is Associate Professor of Music. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Cambridge University, Yale University, and Wesleyan University." - http://benjaminbroening.net/index.html
] Eighth Blackbird Tim Munro, flutes • Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinets* Yvonne Lam, violin & viola • Nicholas Photinos, cello Matthew Duvall, percussion+ • Lisa Kaplan, piano
- "eighth blackbird lives dangerously. The Chicago-based, two-time GRAMMY Award-winning sextet combines the finesse of a string quartet with the energy of a rock band and the audacity of a storefront theater company. Its musical aerobatics delight, provoke and entertain audiences around the world.
The lure of wet ink draws eighth blackbird into collaborations with a motley crew of composers, young and old, modernist and indie. Recent commissions include Steve Reich's Double Sextet, Jennifer Higdon's On a Wire and Steve Mackey's Slide, and future collaborators include Amy Beth Kirsten, Brett Dean, Aaron Jay Kernis, John Luther Adams and Mayke Nas.
During the 2011/12 season eighth blackbird tours Australia twice, making debuts at the Sydney Opera House and the Brisbane Festival, and with the symphony orchestras of Melbourne and Tasmania. The ensemble plays in New York (SONiC festival), Kansas City, Ithaca and Mexico City. Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire is presented at the Kennedy Center and the McAninch Arts Center. Chicago performances include a Reich-fest in Millennium Park, Composition Competition finals, a premiere by Nico Muhly, and a mini-festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
eighth blackbird holds ongoing Ensemble in Residence positions at the University of Richmond and the University of Chicago, and will commence a three-year, Mellon Foundation-funded term as Ensemble in Residence at the Curtis Institute of Music in Fall 2012. A fruitful, ongoing relationship with Chicago's Cedille Records has produced four acclaimed recordings. The ensemble has won two Grammy Awards, for strange imaginary animals (Best Chamber Music Performance, 2008) and Lonely Motel: Music from Slide (Best Small Ensemble Performance, 2012).
eighth blackbird's members hail from America's Great Lakes, Keystone, Golden and Bay states, and Australia's Sunshine State. There are four foodies, three beer snobs and one exercise junkie. The name "eighth blackbird" derives from the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens's evocative, aphoristic poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1917)." - http://www.eighthblackbird.org
New from Innova Recordings: - A debut album from a most brilliant and innovating cello virtuos:
Composers: Andy Akiho, Sean Friar, Daniel Wohl, Alex Mincek and Tristan Perich
- "At 24, Mariel Roberts has emerged as one of the most electrifying cellists on the New York scene. Her debut CD, nonextraneous sounds, is an audacious statement from a fearless musician. Where others might play it safe, Mariel tests the limits of contemporary cello technique in a group of five exhilarating solo works by New York-based composers in their late 20s and early 30s. Two are for cello alone, three incorporate electronics. Diverse in style, these pieces – all commissioned especially for Mariel – showcase her technical assurance, interpretive élan, and distinctive quicksilver tone."
Regarding the title, Mariel says: - “Novice listeners are sometimes made to feel extraneous by new music – they assume they can’t identify with it on a personal level. I think the cello is the perfect instrument to connect with audiences, not just because of its huge range of sound-making possibilities, but because of its very human and expressive qualities.
“Each piece on this album lives in a distinct and unique sound world that is like no other. This is what I want people to know about contemporary music – that it is fantastically diverse and flexible and changing all the time… I wanted to make an album that sounds like the city I live in.”
The disc opens with Andy Akiho’s punningly titled Three Shades, Foreshadows, inspired by Auguste Rodin’s sculpture “The Three Shades” – a sculpture composed of three identical bronze casts positioned so that the viewer can observe multiple perspectives simultaneously. Says Akiho, “My goal was to create a similar effect acoustically while blurring any distinction between the live performer and the three digital playback parts.” Akiho makes generous use of percussive cello sounds, including bell-like tones created by placing mini-clothespins near the base of the fingerboard.
Sean Friar’s playful Teaser spotlights Mariel’s ability to turn on a stylistic dime. It “idiosyncratically leads the listener along a path filled with surprise, sleight of hand, abrupt about-faces, and mischievous reinterpretations of its own material.” Daniel Wohl derived the material of his mysterious piece Saint Arc “from very faint noises: the bow almost silently brushing against the strings, as well as the harmonics that accidentally pop out as the cellist’s hand glides across the neck of the instrument. The electronic element, which consists in prerecorded and processed cello, enhances, distorts or offers an alternate perspective on these two sounds.”
Alex Mincek’s Flutter “is a piece about restless energy; mental and physical. It is constructed with a number of rapidly oscillating gestures that gradually accumulate and then pass quickly and abruptly from one to another. Overwhelming activity finally gives way to calm.”
Tristan Perich’s driving, hypnotic Formations closes the disc. Perich is best known for his ingenious, self-packaged 1-Bit Music and 1-Bit Symphony. “I am interested in the threshold between the abstract world of computation and the physical world around us,” says the composer. “The simplest electronic tones can be created by sending on and off pulses of electricity to a speaker, effecting an oscillation at the desired pitch. While 1-bit sound is also the palette of aggressive electric alarm clocks, I find its primitive timbre inspiringly fresh and mysteriously organic when combined with these traditional instruments.” Innova Recordings
I had a serious discussion with myself whether I should post these here or on the other News thread. I decided that these, with their almost Jóhann Jóhannsson'ish melancolic beauty, here is where they rightfully belong:
Olan Mill - Home
Home is the third album by Olan Mill. - "Olan Mill is the recording project of UK composer and producer Alex Smalley, who to date has received rapturous acclaim for his work that holds a sublime measure between the realms of modern neo-classical composition and ambience. On Home, Smalley has mined his most expansive territory yet to create a thrillingly evocative and deeply felt body of work.
The tender clusters of sound that have defined Olan Mill’s tonal space take on a new soaring quality in using voice to propel Home with a new emotional surge. Alongside soprano Patricia Boynton featuring throughout, Smalley has assembled an ensemble of musicians playing woodwind, piano, pipe organ and violin to augment his guitar and field recordings. Together they combine for both moments of heart-rending intimacy and bursts of flowering, floating orchestral sound. Inspired by travels abroad, Home is a both an urban and exotic panorama, keening with waves of joyous energy and direct pulse, as well as the ultimate comedown from such pure euphoria. Recorded by Smalley in his home – a place lived in by his family in generations past – the album has an earthy air that magically weaves through its otherworldy radiance to portray the compelling dynamic at the heart of Olan Mill." - Preservation - Soundcloud
- And so far only on Bandcamp, released by Facture in may: Olan Mill - Paths
- ‘Paths’, the new album from Olan Mill, sees the un- ashamedly romantic music of Alex Smalley and Svit lana Samoylenko moving away from piano based vi gnettes towards broader compositions of processed guitar, pipe organ and violin. The album displays a striking economy of instrumentation that is the logical progression from their earnest neo-classical debut ‘Pine’, released on Serein in 2010.
The focus of ‘Paths’ is the manipulation of boundaries, a direction embarked on more by necessity than choice - reconciling the ambition of an orchestra with the limitations of a duo. The restraint in sound stems from a foray into the previously unexplored realm of live performance - the pair also admitting they were “supporting some serious piano dentists and we were never up to their kind of surgery, so it was as much a white flag maneuver as it was artistic decision”.
‘Paths’ represents a growth in both sound and style, with each song possessing its own identity within the record - the exploration of both structure and composition revealing new events each time the listener delves into the immersive narrative of their communication.
The end result is a richer harmonic sound field, in- tended to physically move an audience as much as it aimed to devastate them emotionally. The six pieces were captured from two live performances in Bristol and Reading in late 2010, and have been sewn together from the multi-track recordings into a run of 300 limited edition 180gm vinyl mastered by Shawn Hatfeld. This release is presented with a 4 panel letter pressed CD, a booklet written by Olan Mill in collaboration with Alexander Ross Petersen, limited edition 12x12 prints, A2 poster and interconnected artwork by Jurgen Heckel. All collated in the characteristic hand stamped, sealed and numbered Facture fashion.
Direct and melodic without the obsession of minimal- ism, ‘Paths’ is an honest and engaging account of both melancholy and euphoria.
- "The major pieces of the record, Art of Metal I and Art of Metal III, both belong to a cycle devoted to the metal contrabass clarinet. The cycle’s connecting thread, the driving idea, is a metaphorical approach to what metal brings to mind, this alloy often synonymous with strength, power, solidity, energy, brilliance, shine… The instrument itself is totally made of metal; Selmer designed a special metal mouthpiece for the piece to replace what is usually made of ebonite. The sound of both pieces is full of explosive moments and phrases of furious virtuosity. “Vulcano”, a piece for ensemble, fits perfectly in those metallic soundscapes of the “Art of Metal” pieces. Inspired by ancient myths on Vulcanos and the volcanos themselves the piece is about buried and erupting powers. Different definable volcanic states and volcanic activities – from lava flows to earthquakes - stimulate the imagination and provide directions, trajectories, for what can be done with sound."
img YANN ROBIN (*1974)- "The French composer Yann Robin, began his musical studies in Aix-en-Provence. He later enrolled in the jazz class at the National Regional conservatory in Marseilles, while simultaneously integrating the composition class of Georges Boeuf. He was awarded first prizes from the Paris National Conservatory in the composition class of Frédéric Durieux and the analysis class of Michaël Levinas. He received a grant from the Meyer Foundation, and was awarded a first prize from the Beaux_Arts Academy as well as from the Salabert Foundation, and in 2011 the Sacem presented him with the GrandPrix de la Musique Symphonique. From 2006 to 2008, he attended the twoyear cursus program at IRCAM. The Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain commissioned him to write Art of Metal, a concerto for metal contrabass clarinet and ensemble, the first of a three piece cycle for the instrument, prepared in close collaboration with Alain Billiard, clarinettist and soloist of Ensemble intercontemporain. Next came Art of Metal II (for metal contrabass clarinet and electronics) as well as Art of Metal III (for metal contrabass clarinet, ensemble and electronics), premiered at the Agora Festival in 2008 by the Ensemble intercontemporain, and conducted by Susanna Mälkki. Between 2006 and 2008, he was guest composer with the National Orchestra of Lille. During 2008 and 2009, he contributed, as research composer at IRCAM in conjunction with Gérard Assayag and d’Arshia Cont, to the continuing work on the Omax program. His music is performed in France and other countries in concert halls such as Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam), the KKL (Lucerne), the Benaroya Hall (Seattle) or Lincoln Center (New York) as well as in festivals such as Agora, Donaueschingen, Musica, Biennale de Venise, Présences, Gaudeamus, Festival de Lucerne… In addition to chamber music works, in particular a second string quartet for the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2011, he received a co-commission from IRCAM and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France for Inferno, a work for large orchestra and electronics based on the cartography of Hell by Dante, which will be premiered at the Festival ManiFeste-2012. He received another co-commission for the same year, but this time from the New York Philharmonic and the Casa Da Musica in Porto. In 2013, he will compose a large orchestral piece for the SWR Baden-Baden and Freiburg that will be presented at the Musica Festival in Strasbourg. In 2014, he will pursue his orchestral work with a newly commissioned piece for the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. In 2005, he and other composers founded the Multilateral Ensemble, and later became the artistic director." -http://www.kairos-music.comb
THIS SERIES OF EIGHT WORKS - "Created between 1978 and 1981 and presented on these discs in chronological order of their composition, demonstrate a remarkable extension of David Rosenboom’s techniques from his …Plymouth Rock…1 series of 1969–71 using the harmonic and subharmonic series. Basic numerical relationships are used here to structure not only the melody and harmony of a piece, but also such other primary musical parameters as rhythm, timbre, and musical form. The In The Beginning pieces are artifacts in the development of a fullblown musical model based in all its dimensions on simple harmonic proportions. This can be understood as a kind of total harmonicism, similar but based on a different principle than the total serialism of the 1950s-60s Euro-American avant-garde, where a single generative method is used to structure all possible aspects within a body of music. While such compositional discipline imparts a unity to the core of the music, its musical fertility is revealed by the expressive diversity a composer achieves in applying it. The In the Beginning series provides a narrative of the flowering of such an approach.
The story begins in Toronto at York University where Rosenboom taught a class based on the seemingly impossible-to-compare musics of Harry Partch, America’s grass-roots instrumentbuilder and pioneering harmonist, and Iannis Xenakis, the modernist European technologist of stochastically generated sound-clouds of primal rhythms and noise. But Rosenboom was dreaming of a music that could integrate them, and the class provided the opportunity to discover how. The shape of Partch’s “One-Footed Bride: A Graph of Comparative Consonance” in his classic Genesis of a Music2 is formed by tracing the “psychological classification” of interval ratios, mapping a correspondence between their “qualitative and quantitative factors,” including “approach,” “emotion,” “power” and “suspense.” This posits a linkage between the mathematics of the ratios that define harmony and the human feelings that they engender, not unlike the association of modes and feelings that Rosenboom knew from North Indian raga theory. The music he imagined was based on intertwining resonant clouds, and Xenakis’ Formalized Music3 provided techniques for rendering them. Important among these were the Gaussian distribution, the bell-shaped curve associated with the phenomena of resonance. Rosenboom’s own research in the 1960–70s4 using brainwaves and other physical transducers to control analog synthesizers provided another key element to the mix. Influenced by the work of the scientist-musician Manfred Clynes identifying universal, primary dynamic forms that determine expressions of emotion, he recorded the output of pressure transducers touched by Method actors who were asked to express specific feelings, along with their brainwaves. The outcome was a small library of expressive shapes associated with these emotions that he could apply to control horizontal musical parameters like melody and timbral or dynamic envelopes. This made possible the linking of mathematically defined harmonic relationships and melodic shapes through the similarity or contrast of their emotional associations. Stochastic techniques could be used to create smooth transitions from one set of associations to another. The spinning out of the potentials of this rich system of relationships becomes the story we can track in his composition of the In the Beginning series." - From the linernotes @ New World Records
David Rosenboom - "Since the 1960s David Rosenboom (b. 1947) has explored the spontaneous evolution of musical forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques in scoring for ensembles, multi-disciplinary composition and performance, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art and literature, interactive multi-media and new instrument technologies, generative algorithmic systems, art-science research and philosophy, and extended musical interface with the human nervous system. His work is widely distributed and presented around the world." - Much more @ http://davidrosenboom.com/about
This one is from 1991 but new on Emusic and very notable, so . . .
- "The debut recording of Newband, an ensemble specializing in microtonal music and focused around a unique instrument, the zoomoozophone. Invented by Dean Drummond (who was a student of Harry Partch and played in his legendary Gate 5 ensemble), the zoomoozophone looks somewhat like a marimba withwith aluminum tubes-except that it is about 20 feet long and consists of 129 tubes tuned to a 31-note scale in just-intonation.
All of the works on the CD are first recordings, including Drummond's arrangement of Partch's Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales for Newband's instruments. The Cage, LaBarbara and Drummond works were composed for the group." - Mode Records
Dean Drummond's Zoomoozophone:
Newband - "Widely regarded as the world's preeminent microtonal music ensemble, NEWBAND was founded in 1977 by composer Dean Drummond and flutist Stefani Starin who continue as Artistic Directors. With Drummond's invention of the 31-tone zoomoozophone in 1978, NEWBAND began to explore music using microtonality and alternative tuning systems in an innovative and eclectic repertoire influenced by classical, jazz and world music. In 1990, NEWBAND received custodianship of the original Harry Partch Instrument Collection. The typical NEWBAND concert involves a stage filled with some of the world's most amazing musical instruments performed upon by an ensemble of virtuosos who move from instrument to instrument with incredible ease.
NEWBAND consists of a core of virtuosic multi-instrumentalists, equally at home in concert performances and in productions involving theater, dance and film. Newband productions have included: Harry Partch's Delusion of the Fury (Directed by John Jesurun, with choreography by Dawn Akemi Saito), Oedipus (directed by Bob McGrath with Ridge Theater), The Wayward (directed by Tom O'Horgan); Daphne of the Dunes (choreographed by Alice Farley); Henry Cowell's Trickster Coyote with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company; and a live soundtrack by Dean Drummond for F.W. Murnau's landmark silent film, Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh).
NEWBAND has performed throughout North America and Europe including at New Music America in Houston, The Library of Congress and the Kennedy Center in Washington, Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, World Music Days in Oslo, Festival de Lille in France, USARTS Festival in Berlin and The Icebreaker in Amsterdam. In its New York home base, NEWBAND has performed at the New York Philharmonic Horizons New Virtuosity Series at Avery Fisher Hall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Bang on a Can Festival, La Mama Experimental Theater, Merkin Concert Hall and Columbia University. NEWBAND has premiered works by Harry Partch, Dean Drummond, John Cage, John Zorn, Ezra Sims, Muhal Richard Abrams, James Pugliese, Elizabeth Brown, Anne Le Baron, Lois V Vierk and Julia Wolfe and recorded on Mode, Music and Arts, Point, Aurora and Wergo Records.
The Harry Partch Instrument Collection is the largest component of the Newband Instrumentarium, including all of the instruments built by the composer-inventor during the period 1930-1974, as well as several instruments replicated by the Harry Partch Foundation and Newband since 1974. Other instruments in the Newband Instrumentarium are the zoomoozophone and juststrokerods, both invented by Dean Drummond, a microtonally programmed synthesizer, and a large collection of exotic percussion instruments. NEWBAND performs on the Instrumentarium as well as standard Western instruments - flute, cello and percussion regularly - voices, clarinet, brass and strings as repertoire demands." - http://www.newband.org
Released in april on Yannis Kyriakides Unsounds label:
- "“Medea” by Calliope Tsoupaki is the first in a series of chamber music compositions focusing on drama; a “melodrama for 8 instruments”. The composition is written for Ensemble MAE, that distinguishes itself for its colourful, direct, physical and improvisatory character. Tsoupaki uses the ensemble's palette, composing solos, duets, trios, wrapped in larger sonic fields, with a strong associative and visual impact. Further there is no story-telling for the listener to be led into the piece; the music material itself is suggestive, and the melodies have a leading role, as characters in a theater play. Coming back as in different scenes in a film, each time changed and transformed, they are the vectors of tangible dramatic development.
Next to an exploration of the myth, “Medea” attempts to compose a self-portrait, the composer briefly shedding light onto a deep, unspoken part of herself. Pasolini's “Medea” was an inspiration for writing this piece, and most of all Maria Callas in the role of Medea, “so tragic that she did not sing a word.” - Unsounds
- "Calliope Tsoupaki was born in Piraeus, Greece. She studied piano and music theory at the Hellinicon Conservatory in Athens and composition with Yannis Ioannithis. She continued her studies with Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and graduated in 1992.
After ending her studies, Tsoupaki settled in Amsterdam and began a career as a pianist and composer. Her works have been performed in Europe and in the United States and at international music festivals. In 1993 she lived and worked in Budapest on a three-month residency from the Pepinières Foundation for young artists. In 2007 she took a position teaching composition at Koninklijk Conservatorium" - Wikipedia
From what seems to be a jointventure between two netlabels, No Type and Panospira:
Gunshae - The Lost Cascadian Suite
Kuma (Transmissions)
Lady Eve (Oboe)
Vanessa Stovall (Harp)
- "The Lost Cascadian Suite is Gunshaes celestial anthem for the Pacific Northwest, in four parts. This is a collection of sub-aquatic ambient for the tribes of the Cascadian revolution. Far more laden with sub-bass than anything Gunshae has done to date, The Lost Cascadian Suite is what happens when free improv collides with classical orchestral training and is topped off with a life long passion for sound system music. Drift that can also make you vibrate." http://www.notype.com/drones/cat.e/pan_070/ - http://archive.org/details/pan070
This is from a series of selfreleased digital only releases from American Composers Orchestra, added to Emusic this summer:
Conductors: Bradley Lubman; Jeffrey Milarsky; Steven Sloane
Artists: Evan Ziporyn (Bass Clarinet); Fred Ho (Baritone Saxophone); Todd Reynolds (Violin); Seth Josel (Electric Guitar); Ned McGowan (Contrabass Flute)
- "An album that explores the extreme ends of whats possible when some uncommon solo instruments join the orchestra as soloist. This album contains five works by as many composers featuring music for unusual instruments that extend the range and sonic possibilities of an otherwise acoustic orchestra.
Three of the pieces are what we might call bottom-feeders, as they explore and gather their power from the extreme low register. Evan Ziporyn demonstrates the virtuosic possibilities of the bass clarinet, integrating his own ideas with influences ranging from Balinese Gamelan to jazz to Stravinsky, in his Big Grenadilla. Fred Ho makes real dragons fly in a tour-de-force and call-to-action for baritone saxophone and orchestra that combines Chinese folk song with an avant-jazz perspective. Perhaps the most unusual instrument on this album is the seldom-heard contrabass flute, an instrument that, in the hands of Ned McGowan, is capable of everything from near breathless calm to driving bass riffs that propel the orchestra forward.
The other two works on the album partner electric instruments with the orchestra. Keeril Makans Dream Lightly features the electric guitar of Seth Josel. But you wont find any amped-up power chords here, only the most delicate and ethereal of guitar harmonics, making the piece an almost anti-concerto. Finally, Neil Rolnick, a pioneer in electronic music, introduces us to the cyborg-fiddle he created with soloist Todd Reynolds, an instrument that seamlessly takes us from flashy Pagagini-esque pyrotechnics to cyberspace.
Each of the five pieces was commissioned and premiered by ACO for Orchestra Underground, its entrepreneurial ensemble and concert series at Carnegie Halls Zankel Hall that seeks to re-invent and re-imagine the orchestra with unusual instruments, eclectic influences, new collaborations and technologies, and important new compositional voices."
- From the linernotes @:
- "This new Pogus 2 CD compilation, curated by Luis Alvarado (writer, journalist, sound poet), presents some of the most important pieces of the Peruvian musical vanguard of the 1960s and 70s, offering a representative sample of works and composers from this important period in Peruvian music.
Thirteen works by thirteen different composers 5 tape pieces and 8 instrumental works give an excellent introduction to some fascinating composers who are known outside of Peru in varying degrees, if at all. These composers explored serial, electronic, electroacoustic, and aleatoric music during a time of tension between politics and the avant-garde in academic music in Latin America. The 1960s and 1970s were particularly difficult years for Latin American social movements, and a time when the concepts of vanguard, revolution and universalism enter into complex interactions. These works and their composers ask not how much experimentation occurred, but what the use of these techniques represent and to what extent did these musicians and their music engage critically with modernity?
Our hope is that the listener will find some or all of these composers and their works of interest, and will further explore the music made by these fine composers as it hopefully becomes more available over time."
- Pogus Productions.
Full streaming @ Soundcloud
Released on the French Brocoli label but not yet on Emusic: - "Pierre-Yves Mace is a young French composer - he was born in 1980 - who has already released four albums on famous labels such as Tzadik and Sub Rosa. Miniatures - Song Recycle is his second album for the parisian imprint Brocoli, following the acclaimed Passagenweg. Miniatures - Song Recycle, as the title suggests, alternates musique concrete studies and songs in the form of lieder, where the voice is made of recycled, chopped and transformed a cappella vocals from YouTube, accompanied by the composer/pianist. Pierre-Yves Mace lives in Paris and has been working with musicians Sylvain Chauveau, ON, Rainier Lericolais, That Summer, Minizza, Louisville, Quatuor Pli, writers Mathieu Larnaudie, Philippe Vasset, Christophe Fiat, contemporary artists Hippolyte Hentgen, Gaëlle Boucand, Clotilde Viannay. He's also member of the collective L’Encyclopedie de la Parole, and a researcher in the field of musicology : His book Musique et document sonore (Music and recording), has just been released on Presses du Réel." - Experimedia @ Soundcloud
Nico Muhly, added to Emusic a couple of weeks ago: - "Drones consists of the Nico Muhlys three EPs Drones & Piano, Drones & Viola and Drones & Violin, with a special bonus composition. Performing the pieces are Bruce Brubaker, Nadia Sirota and Pekka Kuusisto along with Muhly himself. Drones was recorded and produced by Valgeir Sigurðsson in the Greenhouse studios in Iceland."
- "I started writing the Drones pieces as a method of developing harmonic ideas over a static structure. The idea is something not unlike singing along with ones vacuum cleaner, or with the subtle but constant humming found in most dwelling-places. We surround ourselves with constant noise, and the Drones pieces are an attempt to honor these drones and stylize them."
-Nico Muhly @ Bedroom Community.
From Avant Media on Bandcamp with brilliant piano performance by Vicky Chow: Cage, Unlocked Released 05 September 2012
- "The Music of John Cage. Recorded live, February 11, 2012 at the Avant Music Festival at Wild Project, New York City."
"The 2012 Avant Music Festival celebrated John Cage's 100th birthday with a day of music entitle "Cage, Unlocked." This album features music recorded that day." http://avantmedia.org/ Emusic
- "Canadian pianist Vicky Chow has performed extensively as a classical and contemporary soloist, chamber musician, and ensemble member, and has been described as “brilliant” (New York Times), “a monster pianist” (Time Out New York) “virtuosic” (New Jersey Star Ledger), “sparkling” with a “feisty technique” (MIT Tech) and “new star of new music” (Los Angeles Times) . She is the pianist for the New York based eclectic contemporary sextet, Bang on a Can All-Stars and has performed with other groups such as Wordless Music Orchestra, Opera Cabal, Wet Ink Ensemble, ai ensemble and AXIOM. She is also a member of two other groups: DUO X88, a piano duo with the Dutch pianist Saskia Lankhoorn, and piano trio called Typical Music with violinist Todd Reynolds and cellist Ashley Bathgate.
Her passion has propelled Vicky to work with an A-to-Z of leading composers and musicians such as John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Nik Bärtsch, Don Byron, Bryce Dessner (The Nationals) Michael Gordon, Glenn Kotche (Wilco), David Longstreth (Dirty Projectors), David Lang, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), Julia Wolfe, Evan Ziporyn". . . . . . - Much more @ http://www.vickychow.com/Vicky_Chow/about.html
- "Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt is a multi-media chamber opera by composer Missy Mazzoli and filmmaker Stephen Taylor, created in collaboration with librettist Royce Vavrek and director Gia Forakis.
Mazzoli’s first opera is inspired by the life and writings of fiercely independent explorer Isabelle Eberhardt. Born in Geneva in 1877 to an aristocratic mother and an anarchist father, Isabelle took to donning men’s clothing at an early age in order to enjoy greater freedom and mobility. In 1897, she and her mother travelled to North Africa where they were converted to Islam and started to create a new life. Before their new life took hold, Isabelle’s mother passed away. Shortly after her mother’s death, Isabelle’s father succumbed to throat cancer and one of her brothers committed suicide. Propelled by an overwhelming sense of loneliness and loss, Isabelle moved permanently to Algeria in 1899.
Dressing as a man and calling herself Si Mahmoud Essadi, Isabelle travelled easily in Arab society. While there was no mistaking her true gender, the Africans, by all accounts treated her as a man. She joined a secret Sufi brotherhood, roamed the desert on horseback and even fought in street battles against French colonists. During different periods in history, Isabelle has been lionized and demonized for her disinterest in the social mores of her era and for engaging in numerous love affairs throughout her life. Soon after moving to Africa, Isabelle fell in love with an Algerian soldier, Slimene Ehnni and married him in 1901. The two had an erratic and passionate relationship, but in 1904, after a long separation, they made plans to settle down in Ain Sefra, Algeria. Isabelle rented a house in the town and awaited her husband. On October 21, 1904, a flash flood tore through the town, destroying the house and drowning Isabelle.
Song from the Uproar explores the timeless themes of Isabelle's story: the desire to break with one's past and forge a new identity, and the confusion of falling in love and the conflict between eastern and western culture. Isabelle transcends her trying circumstances in each scene, transforming from a depressed Swiss woman to a fearless Moroccan man, from a patient wife to a restless adventurer and, in her final aria, from life to death. Song from the Uproar moves beyond a chronological description of Isabelle's life and immerses the audiences in the emotional, dream-like landscapes of her astonishing journals. Traditional opera conventions are turned on their heads: a five-piece amplified chamber ensemble replaces the pit orchestra, and ghostly electronics waft in and out of the musical textures, layering the voices in unexpected and seemingly impossible ways. Stephen Taylor's haunting films and Gia Forakis's repetitive, dance-like staging add to the timeless, immersive nature of the work. . . ." - G. Schirmer inc.
Missy Mazzoli - Born: 1980 - "A fast-rising composer on the contemporary music scene, Missy Mazzoli’s talent draws audiences equally into concert halls and rock clubs.Her unique music reflects a trend among composers of her generation who combine styles, writing music for the omnivorous audiences of the 21st century. She inhabits a gorgeous and mysterious sound-world that melds indie-rock sensibilities with formal training from Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding, Richard Ayers and others. Practically speaking, she amasses music in layers not normally found together but in ways that create matchless vertical harmonies.
Recently deemed "one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York" by The New York Times, and "Brooklyn's post-millennial Mozart" by Time Out New York, her music has been performed all over the world by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, the American Composers Orchestra, New York City Opera, the Minnesota Orchestra, the South Carolina Philharmonic, NOW Ensemble, and many others.
Upcoming projects include a new orchestral work for the Detroit Symphony, another quartet for Kronos and a piece for Ensemble ACJW. She was recently appointed Composer-In-Residence for the Opera Company of Philadelphia. In this position she will have the opportunity to follow a personalized, three-year development track focused on the advancement of her career as an operatic composer.
In addition to the critically acclaimed premiere of her opera Song from the Uproar during the 2011-12 season, Mazzoli was a Composer-Educator Partner for the Albany Symphony. There she heard the premieres of an expanded version of her orchestral work Violent, Violent Sea as well as world premiere of Holy Roller which Albany Symphony commissioned
Her music has been featured on numerous festivals including the 2007 and 2009 Bang-on-a-Can New Music Marathon, the Cabrillo Festival (Santa Cruz), the Gaudeamus New Music Festival (Amsterdam), the Ecstatic Music Festival (New York) and the ZOOM Young Composers series at New York's Merkin Concert Hall.
She is the recipient of four ASCAP Young Composer Awards (2007 through 2010), a Fulbright Grant to the Netherlands (2002–2004), and grants from the Jerome Foundation, American Music Center, and the Barlow Endowment. In 2006 Mazzoli taught composition in the Music Department of Yale University, and from 2007–2010 was Executive Director of the MATA Festival in New York City, an organization dedicated to promoting the work of young composers
Mazzoli is an active pianist, and often performs with Victoire, an "all-star, all-female quintet" (Time Out New York) she founded in 2008 dedicated exclusively to her own compositions. Their debut EP was named one of 2009's 10 best classical albums by Time Out New York. Their debut full-length CD, "Cathedral City," featuring eight of Mazzoli's new works, was released on New Amsterdam Records in September 2010 and received positive reviews from the classical and indie rock communities alike. Mazzoli attended the Yale School of Music (M.M. 2006), the Royal Conservatory of the Hague (post-graduate studies 2002–2004) and Boston University (B.M. 2002). Her principal teachers were Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding, Richard Ayres, David Lang, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Charles Fussell, Richard Cornell, Martin Amlin, and John Harbison." - G. Schirmer inc.
News from Sub Rosa by one of the groundbreaking pioneers in electronic/electroacustic (and much more) music:
These two volumes are being released together and simultaneously, as a sign of continuation.
-"For Luc Ferrari, this is the first full-length CD to come out after the trilogy we developed with him Les anecdotiques /2002, a fifteen-part suite (CD SR207), Son Mémorisé /1976-2002 (CD SR252) and Didascalies /2007 (CD SR259). What we have here is three substantial pieces: Programme commun pour clavecin et bande magnétique/1972 performed by Elisabeth Chonacka, Didascalies 2 /1993 performed by Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven, Claude Berset, and Vincent Royer (in 2009) and available only on vinyl SRV305 (note that Didascalies and Didascalies 2 are two different compositions), and another previously unreleased piece that he held dear: Les émois d'Aphrodite/1986-1998, performed by San Francisco's MC Band under his direction."
- "We are pleased to release for the first time, the solo works of Brunhild Ferrari: Derivatif/2008, Brumes du reveil/2009, Tranquilles Impatiences/2010 forming a trilogy on reconstruction from a memory that is still quite alive. To us, these works are new bricks in the erection of a liberating oeuvre." - Sub Rosa
Biography from Other Minds: - "On February 5th, 2002, Luc Ferrari celebrated his 73rd birthday in Paris. The work and aesthetics of Ferrari continue to have a singular impact on several generations of American avant-garde composers. Like Alvin Lucier, Ferrari first obtained a thorough, traditional technique in composition. He took piano lessons with Alfred Cortot, composition lessons with Arthur Honegger and musical analysis with Olivier Messiaen. But he proceeded to become interested in the recording process to such a degree that he began to make tape pieces using altered ambient sounds and later incorporated electronics into his work in an effective and original manner.
In 1954, his life altered radically when he boarded a ship and traveled to New York to meet Edgard Varèse, after having been impressed by live radio broadcast of his Déserts for tape and orchestra. From Varèse, Ferrari learned to treat sound as a thing in and of itself; also to place sound objects in the right time and space, from both an audio and psychological point of view. By 1963-4 he had begun Hétérozygote, an extended tape piece in which ambient sounds unfold in narrative form, suggesting a dazzling variety of incidents, all unexplained. The composer’s program notes for these scores, themselves works of a poetic imagination, only added to the fascination.
By 1970 he had completed Presque Rien No. 1, a kind of musical photography, in which unassuming ambient sounds of a small village in Yugoslavia, recorded throughout a long day, are telescoped by means of seamless dissolves into a 21-minute narrative in which no apparent “musical” sounds are included. When the work was issued on a Deutsche Grammophon LP worldwide the response was first one of shock and then revelation. Finally, John Cage’s exhortation that “music is all around us if only we had ears,” had been taken seriously by a fellow composer.
Shortly thereafter, Ferrari appeared on KPFA Radio in Berkeley, and his interviewers, Richard Friedman and Charles Amirkhanian, decided to follow his lead and solicit ambient sound recordings from individuals all over the globe. The World Ear Project of KPFA proceeded to broadcast hundreds of such tapes, made on then-new cassette machines in the field, and numerous composers on the West Coast began to incorporate such sounds into their electronic works.
Beyond the mere acceptance of ambient sounds as musical, Ferrari found that his forays with the professional tape recorder into public places added a level of social engagement to his work. This led him to compose pieces in which the audience becomes voyeuristically involved with a kind of audio home movie. In such a state, a great deal is suggested, which is why radio remains such a powerful medium, even in the face of the wide acceptance of television. The disembodied voice of a human being in Ferrari’s work lures in the listener into an intimacy which is palpable.
Beyond his work involving technology, Ferrari has composed a large body of instrumental music, ranging from very early piano solos to works for large orchestra, such as Histoire du plaisir et de la désolation (1979-81), a towering 35-minute work in three movements which won the International Koussevitsky Prize for recordings when it was released in 1990. And among his important credits are a series of invaluable television films which he made about the rehearsal processes of Varése, Messiaen, Stockhausen and others.
Luc Ferrari died of pneumonia in Arezzo, Italy, in August 2005."
New year, new page, new breathtaking album from Bill Ryan's Billband on Innova Recordings. - What a great way to start the new year !
Description: Music to awaken to.
Bill Ryan, composer • Ashley Bathgate, cello • Vicky Chow, piano • David Cossin, percussion Michael Lowenstern, bass clarinet • Pablo Mahave-Veglia, cello • Jonathan Nichol, saxophone • Todd Reynolds, violin • Paul de Jong, ?.
- "A lot has happened since the 2004 release of Billband’s debut album on innova, Blurred. Where that album was called “gritty and funky” by Gramophone, the group’s new album, Towards Daybreak, turns more personal and showcases the broad palette of composer/leader Bill Ryan. Though still firmly rooted in the minimalism of Steve Reich and Terry Riley (Ryan is the founder and director of Michigan’s Grand Valley State University’s New Music Ensemble, the group behind innova's releases of In C Remixed by Riley and Music for 18 Musicians by Reich), Towards Daybreak is by turns contemplative, roiling, spacious, and aggressive, reflecting experiences in Ryan’s life from the birth of a child to the loss of his parents.
Opening with the elegiac “Simple Lines,” the ensemble of Ashley Bathgate (cello), Vicky Chow (piano), David Cossin (percussion), Michael Lowenstern (bass clarinet), Pablo Mahave-Veglia (Cello), Jonathan Nichol (saxophone), and Todd Reynolds (violin) leads the listener through the album’s open doors into a lush work for strings that sets a reflective tone. The record then builds slowly, piano entering alongside vibraphone on the title track before the sandy susurration of brushed drums opens up “Rapid Assembly.” As the rhythms settle into a percolating groove, this is where the album begins to open up its depths.
Grammy-winner Silas Brown engineered and co-produced the album with Ryan, their third collaboration, and the attention to the sound shines through. The strings are rich and woody, the percussion viscerally captured, the winds as present as if in your living room. As a whole, Towards Daybreak blends the precision and craft of the best minimalism with the distinct humanism and interplay of a small chamber group. This is a music that reveals itself gradually, working its way deeper into you with each listen." - Innova Recordings - Track 7 @ Soundcloud
- "For the past twenty years Bill Ryan (b.1968) has been a tireless advocate of contemporary music. Through his work as a composer, conductor, producer and educator, he has engaged diverse audiences throughout the country with the music of our time. In recognition of these efforts, in 2008 he won the Michigan Governor’s Award in Arts Education, and in 2009 the American Composers Forum's Champion of New Music Award for his significant contributions to the work and livelihoods of contemporary composers throughout the country. In 2012 he was a finalist for the Michigan Distinguished Professor of the Year award.
Bill’s own music has roots in minimalism, jazz and popular music. It is energetic, evocative and deeply personal, and has been described as “…constantly threatening to burst at the seams, were those seams not so artfully structured...rarely has music this earthy been so elegant." [Gramophone Magazine]
Bill’s music has been performed in major cities and venues across the country including (le) Poisson Rouge, Galapagos, Symphony Space, and Lincoln Center (New York), Woodruff Arts Center (Atlanta), the Atlas (Washington D.C.), Initman Theater (Seattle), and the Hobby Center (Houston), and internationally in Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia. His music has received awards from Meet the Composer, ASCAP, and New Music USA.
In addition to the concert stage, Bill’s music is regularly used by choreographers and dance companies throughout the country. Most recently he composed the music for The Secondary Colors, an evening-length collaboration with Karen Stokes Dance which was called “The most adventurous, if not spectacular, work this year” by Culture Map Houston.
Also active as a concert producer, Bill has presented over 50 events in his Open Ears and Free Play concert series, gaining national recognition with three ASCAP/Chamber Music America Adventurous Programming Awards. Notable guests have included eighth blackbird, Prism, So Percussion, Ethel, Lisa Moore, Todd Reynolds, Julia Wolfe, Talujon, Michael Lowenstern, and the Michael Gordon Band.
As a conductor Bill has commissioned and premiered dozens of works by such notable composers as Phil Kline, Marc Mellits, Belinda Reynolds, Jad Abumrad, Zoe Keating, Evan Ziporyn, and David Lang. In 2006 he founded the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, who have been profiled in numerous publications including Newsweek, the New York Times, and Billboard Magazine, and featured on NPR's Weekend Edition, All Things Considered, and WNYC's Radiolab. Beyond their many campus events they have performed concerts in Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington D.C., at New York’s Bang On a Can Marathon, as members of the all-star ensemble assembled by the Kronos Quartet to perform on the In C 45th Anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall, and at the Make Music New York summer festival.
Bill has produced three critically acclaimed recordings by the ensemble, named to top year-end lists by the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Weekly, Time Out Chicago, and many others. A track from their second CD, In C Remixed, was recently heard on MTV's new hit series Teen Wolf. Music from their first CD, Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, was recently named one of the top five classical recordings of the decade by WNYC’s John Schaefer.
Bill resides in West Michigan with his wife and three children. When not working on music Bill can usually be found in the woods, washing his truck, or watching the Detroit Tigers. - http://www.billryanmusic.com - 5 questions to Bill Ryan @ ICIYL
- "Cold Blue Two is an eclectic anthology of 14 new, previously unrecorded works—many of them written specifically for this CD—by a diverse collection of composers whose personal musical visions usually blend intuition with process. The composers include both the well-known and the not-so-well-known, most with longtime associations with Cold Blue, and two making their first appearance on the label: John Luther Adams, Gavin Bryars, Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, Jim Fox, Peter Garland, Daniel Lentz, Ingram Marshall, Read Miller, Larry Polansky, David Rosenboom, Phillip Schroeder, Chas Smith, and James Tenney.
Sometimes stark, sometimes lush, this is music in which subtle emotions lurk just below cool surfaces. Among the tracks are dramatic pieces, drifting pieces, and pieces that simply defy easy categorization. From a dozen cellos to a solo just-intonation National steel guitar, from a Harry Partch diamond marimba with strings to a solo accordion, from music featuring celesta or hammered dulcimer or densely layered tracks of steel guitar and Hammond organ or classical guitar with electronics to string quartets, solo piano, and a variety of small chamber ensembles, this collection contains something to surprise (and delight) just about everyone.
Like most of the music on this West Coast label, this album’s pieces tend to focus on the various aspects of music’s inherent sensuality, which some critics have suggested is a uniting aesthetic interest among the composers whose work appears on the label.
Among the featured performers are many renowned new-music champions, including Sarah Cahill, Guy Klucevsek, John Schneider, ETHEL, the Formalist Quartet, Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, and a host of other fine players, including a number of the composers themselves.
Cold Blue Two is also the long-awaited sequel to the label’s popular previous anthology simply entitled Cold Blue (CB0008), an album of thirteen short works that San Francisco’s Other Minds founder Charles Amirkhanian called "a classic anthology of American new music." - http://www.coldbluemusic.com/
- "Time Loops, a collaboration with cello innovator Maya Beiser, is the second CD of Harrison's works for Bang on a Can's Cantaloupe Music label (October 2012 release), and includes the Young People's Chorus of New York City (YPC), and Payton MacDonald (founding member of Alarm Will Sound) on tabla & percussion. The featured work Just Ancient Loops builds up to 20 layers of pre-recorded cellos, and was premiered by Beiser at the Bang on a Can Marathon in June 2012 along with an art film that was created for the project by multimedia artist Bill Morrison. Also on the CD is Hijaz, which was commissioned by conductor Francisco J. Nunez and YPC, and featured on YPC's 10th Anniversary Transient Glory program at the 92nd St. Y in New York in May 2011, and subsequently broadcast nationwide on American Public Media." Soundcloud
Michael Harrison, - "Composer and pianist, has been called "an American Maverick" by Philip Glass. Through his expertise in "just intonation" tunings, Indian ragas and rhythmic cycles, Harrison has created "a new harmonic world of vibrant sound" (The New York Times). With a uniquely personal style that transcends the ages, his music is both forward-looking and deeply rooted in different forms of traditional music. This unique perspective, alongside a simple and elegant gift for melody, makes him a composer who can reach a wide range of audiences. . . ." - Much more @ Cantaloupe Music
- "Composer/percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky (b. 1953) has premiered and recorded some of the most important percussion works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, working with composers such as Stockhausen, Wolff, Cage, Feldman and Xenakis.
Armadillo (19902007) is one large-scale piece in four sections, the first of which, at around forty-two minutes, is about three times the duration of the other three combined (these are more or less the same duration, five-plus minutes each). One might think of the image of a Mayan temple, with a large broad base rising pyramid-like to smaller structures at the top. Almost all of the musics sound is from drums, in a full range from high to very low. The trios playing is virtuosic, precise and finely modulated in color and dynamics.
This is a music at once variously complex and unified or simplified by the prevailing sonority of the drums. What gives the music its complexity and richness, what makes it distinctively engaging, is not just the stretches of intricate, overlaid patterningthere are a number of moments when textures thin out and simplifybut the continuous structural shifts, the unpredictable but somehow right moves from one kind of texture and procedure to another. It is a mysterious music, at once highly disciplined and controlled and at the same time full of energy and movement. It is the result of an intense and controlled focus in its composition and performance, a focus that because of its very intensity somehow allows the release of a sense of freedom."
- New World Records
Robyn Schulkowsky - "Born and raised in South Dakota, percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky has been an innovator and collaborator throughout her life. Already during her studies in Iowa and Germany and later on her international solo tours, Robyn Schulkowsky has dedicated herself to revealing the wonders of percussion to people all over the world. Her continuous exploration of new sound dimensions has led to the development of many new and unusual instruments.
An active musician on five continents, Robyn Schulkowsky moved to Germany during a heyday of experimental and adventurous classical composition. She has premiered and recorded some of the most important percussion works of the 20th and 21st centuries, working with composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kevin Volans, John Cage, Morton Feldman and Iannis Xenakis, presenting their works during tours that included the former Soviet Union, India, Africa, South America, Korea, Japan as well as at major European music festivals.
Robyn Schulkowskys adventurous nature connects her with exceptional project partners and alternative performance spaces. She has collaborated on multi-media projects with legendary African drummer Kofi Ghanaba, avant-garde visual artist Guenther Uecker, the actress Edith Clever and groundbreaking choreographer Sasha Waltz, and has founded - together with Stephan Andreae - the annual festival Drums Summit Bonn.
Robyn Schulkowsky is particularly passionate about education. Since 1998, as founder of Rhythm Lab, she has taken drumming workshops to countless cities, incorporating indigenous drumming styles and patterns from around the globe, and involving students, professionals and aficionados alike in workshops and concerts. Primarily directed at children and teenagers, the project focuses on the idea of music as the experience and not the product, aiming to make rhythm tangible by experimenting with music, sound and movement. To this end, Robyn Schulkowsky works closely with the sound artist Lukas Kuehne, with whom she developed new percussion instruments. In spring 2009 she worked with 100 young budding musicians on her new music-theater project based on the story of Antigone which was presented in July in a former cattle-market hall in Ingolstadt (Germany) with resounding success.
Schulkowskys virtuosity has been captured on over 20 recordings, including CDs with violist Kim Kashkashian and trumpet players Reinhold Friedrich and Nils Petter Molvaer, and seminal recordings of compositions by Christian Wolff and Morton Feldman. She is a composer herself, and in 2005, she performed improvisations and her own compositions twice daily for two weeks on a sound sculpture in New Yorks Grand Central Station. In 2008 her opera The Child of the Sea Otter was premiered in Oldenburg (Germany) and repeated in Mannheim and Berlin.
Last season in Sweden, together with the Gothenburg Symphony and fellow renowned solo percussionists Anders Loguin, Mika Takehara, Eirik Raude and Anders Haag, Robyn Schulkowsky performed the critically-acclaimed premiere of Glorious Percussion by Sofia Gubaidulina under the baton of celebrated young conductor Gustavo Dudamel. This new ensemble has since named itself after the piece and has been appearing with several important orchestras, most recently with the Berlin Philharmonic.
This season, Robyn Schulkowskys frenetic global pace continues with a month-long tour of South America with trumpet player Reinhold Friedrich featuring concerts and workshops, as well as a US tour of an Armenian project with violist Kim Kashkashian."
- Drummerworld.
Excellent news from Signature / Radio France and a must for everyone with a soft spot for Musique Concrete: - "In this trilogy, space is the fundamental element in which music is developed and sounds are deployed. The three works were constructed by using certain sounds fixed in the acoustic space in relation to other sounds that are continually displaced, orbiting like satellites around the fixed ones and thus creating great spatial complexity"
- Cezame Music Agency - With streaming.
- "Daniel Teruggi (11 March 1952, La Plata, Argentina) is a French composer.
While taking a degree in physics at the National University of La Plata, he also studied music at the La Plata Conservatory (197377). He moved to France in 1977 and entered the electro-acoustics class at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique (CNSM) in Paris, gaining his diploma in 1980.
In 1983 he joined the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM). As a specialist in computer-generated music, he is particularly concerned with teaching, and with the SYTER (système en temps réel) audionumeric system. In 1984 he took over artistic responsibility for the group, and became its director in 1997. He has pursued a parallel career teaching at the Sorbonne since 1986.
Managing director of GRM (in 2012)."
- Discogs
- "Gerald Resch, born in 1975 in Linz, Austria, developed his economical approach to composition during his studies with Beat Furrer in Graz. Expanding upon this, Resch states, Encounters, junctures, abstract patterns etc. are all able to inspire the beginning of a composition. I like superimpositions, unforeseen changes of perspective and hidden symmetry. I also like to invent logical but surprising developments of simple material. This release demonstrates his preoccupation with plastic forms in Cantus Firmus, the perception of nature in Ein Garten and the omnipresence of a burdensome, loaded tradition. (Wolfgang Fuhrmann)
At the center of this release is the work for viola and seven instruments, Ein Garten. Pfade, die sich verzweigen. The German word verzweigen translates to ramification and this process is more than apparent upon listening to the piece. However, despite its daringness, Reschs music is always centered and accessible: as Wolfgang Fuhrmann puts it, one has the impression that the musical movement circles again and again around certain tonal centers or constellations of intervals not necessarily in the sense of diatonic tonality, but rather, in the sense of a disposition in the pieces ambit of pitch and sound, which ensures orientation. (Wolfgang Fuhrmann)" Kairos Music - http://www.geraldresch.at/
- "Out Of Darkness, Light is the second studio album from Gunshae (pronounced Gun-shai), the Panambient orchestra compromised of Canadian dubstep pioneer, Kuma; and internationally renowned oboist and DJ, Lady Eve. The album presents eight tracks developed from improvisations recorded over a four year span in Vancouver, Cancun, Seattle, Uculet, San Francisco, Tokyo, Melbourne and New Smyrna Beach. Live performances were recorded and taken back to the Den Studios in Vancouver were they were over-dubbed, invoked and expanded upon.
Gunshae is live ambience at its most beguiling, an exploration of the grey area between electronic and classical musics. Its molten woodwinds and Satie in dub. Its heavy drones and music played by a band sitting on a veranda with Wong Kar-Wai. While these works certainly drift in the same musical sky as Stars Of the Lid, Zoviet France and Murcof, they are as the album's penultimate suite suggests, both celestial and oceanic. Happily content to be carried gently between the chill out room, the concert hall and the art gallery, Out Of Darkness, Light has no qualms in reminding you that sometimes, it just is.
While Gunshae's backbone is built on Kuma's loops and Lady Eve's woodwinds, Gunshae has never has never turned away from playing with others on an international scale. Australian poet Graham Colin opens the album with an invocation for experience on Air Into Gold while Tokyo analogue synth legend, Hataken, brings added drift to Celestial, Yet Oceanic, a song based on a performance he followed at the Soundwave Music festival in 2008. 2046 and What Would Wong Kar Wai Do? feature Vancouver clarinet virtuoso Shawn Earle and the shoegazer bass and vocals of Hong Kong's Pari Kishi. Vanessa Stovall's harp underpins Oceanic, Yet Celestial, beats out rhythm and sends shards of light everywhere. The album concludes with a remix of I Left My Heart At Arena Mexico by Mexicali electronic music icon and Static Discos label founder, Fax." Ohm Resistance / Darla
- "Gunshae (pronounced Gun-shai) is the Panambient project of Canadian dubstep pioneer, Kuma, and renowned Oboist and DJ, Lady Eve.
Bridging a gap between two very distinct contemporary practices, Gunshae is what happens when a classically trained musician and a veteran DJ and producer with a thing for improvising jam on the sound of stuff and things.
Gunshae is live ambience at its most beguiling, an exploration of the grey area between electronic and classical musics.
Its molten woodwinds and Satie in dub. Its heavy drones and show tunes played by a band sitting on a veranda with Wong Kar-Wai. Its discrete music for the wifi generation.
Tossing aside classical musics obsession with adherence to the written score and live electronic performances stereotype of one guy behind a laptop checking his email, both members of Gunshae have been known to start the show on stage and finish up in the audience. Gunshae are not your average sound art duo or ambient performance act.
Breaking down barriers between audience and performer, Gunshae is as happy in the chill out room as it is the art gallery or concert hall. Each performance is completely unique, site/audience specific and completely devoted to embracing the moment.
These are Cascadian lullaby makers, crafting soundtracks made for trans-continental smudged sunsets." The Conspiracy Group
- "Through several decades, the composer Birgitte Alsted (b. 1942) has been a pioneer of electro-acoustic music, finding the main inspiration for her music in literature and poetry. This album presents four of Alsted's key works for the first time on CD with the dramatic sound collage Agnete's Laughter as the captivating title work."
- "The Danish composer Birgitte Alsted (b. 1942) is inspired and fascinated by the sound and noise of everyday life, the implicit music of the surroundings, and the terms of the nonverbal communication between humans and other living creatures. In 2002 she combined 'Whhoommm', 'Sssscchhh' etc. with the words of a letter written by the poet Rilke in her work "Zu Versuchen, Die Fragen".
Birgitte Alsted is an experimental artist. She plays the violin and graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Music with final examination/debut concert in 1971. In 2006 she got her Master's degree in electronic music composition from the Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus, - but she began her compositional work as soon as 1972.
Birgitte Alsted has received numerous awards and scholarships, including National Arts Foundation 3-year scholarship in 1980, Borresen Prize in 1992, the Ancker Award scholarship ('Det Anckerske legat', a travelling-scholarship for artists) in 2003, and the National Arts Foundation 3-year scholarship in 2006. In 2011 she received The National Arts Foundation's Composer Prize for female composers.
Birgitte Alsted still plays the violin. Her work as a musician also influence her compositions, which often have dramatic and expressive character, and she works with acoustic instruments, computer and tape. Alsteds activities are extensive: from alternative modes of collective improvisation and composition with children to theater music, from music for modern dance to visual installations, solo works, vocal music, chamber music and orchestral music. For several years, Birgitte Alsted has worked with multimedia performances. This has enabled her to start working with electroacoustic music, where she has been particularly attracted to computer music's ability to manipulate sound, and she has experimented with the creation of multi-faceted sensory experiences with the use of literature and poetry, dance and light installations." - Dacapo Records
This is from one of my all time favourite Danish artists ever since he cried his heart out in the Danish punk band Ballet Mecanique in 1981. (Youtube link, - That song is still shivering my spine).
Musicians:
Andrea Pellegrini: mezzo-soprano
Tanja Zapolski: piano
Alexander Zapolski: 1st violin
Anja Zelianodjevo: 2nd violin
Grigoriy Khodos: viola
Mette Spang-Hanssen: cello
Ida Bach Jensen: double-bass and strings
Thea Vesti Pedersen: acoustic guitar
Eskild Skovbakke Winding: percussion, harmonium and percussive piano
Johnny Stage: electric guitar, mandolin, autoharp and sitar
Ketil Duckert: trumpet and flugelhorn
Hans Nybo: bassoon
Martin Hall : music box, tapes and details
- "If Power Asks Why features a line of new Martin Hall songs performed by the mezzo-soprano Andrea Pellegrini and the classical pianist Tanja Zapolski. The Danish avant-garde ensemble Lydenskab also appears on the recordings and so does the double-bass player Ida Bach Jensen. The album is produced by Martin Hall and the greater part of the songs is arranged by the internationally acclaimed violinist Alexander Zapolski (the latter also performs as such on the recordings).
The production is based on a series of piano-based hybrid lieder, a collection of songs all characterized by a high degree of sombre drama titles such as MILFs, Cum and Schopenhauer, Rather Quotable than Honest and Hope is a Lack of Information might serve to illustrate the lyrical nature of the project. The songs are probably best described as passionate objections against the cultural imperatives of our times and culture and in particular the standardised parameters of desire. All in all the album contains some of Martin Halls most exuberant lyrical work ever.
Andrea Pellegrini is one of Denmarks most praised and awarded younger mezzo-sopranos. Tanja Zapolski has likewise gained great positive attention as a concert pianist during the 10?s, performing with most Danish symphony orchestras. Hall and Pellegrini have earlier collaborated on albums such as Camille (2002), Das Mechanische Klavier (2004) and Hospital Cafeterias (2009), whereas it is the first time Hall works with Zapolski."
Martin Hall - "Began his musical training at the age of ten at the Piano and Music Academy of Copenhagen. First record release at the age of 17 as singer and composer in the avantgarde ensemble Ballet Mécanique whose debut album The Icecold Waters of the Egocentric Calculation from 1981 is regarded as a cornerstone in contemporary Danish music history (figures on the list over the 50 most important releases in Danish rock ever in the esteemed Danish rock encyclopedia Politikens Rockleksikon).
In 1995 Martin Hall was awarded with the prestigious three-year grant as a composer from The National Fund for the Endowment of The Art. He used the price to break with his current record company and single-handedly finance the production of Random Hold (1996), an album generally regarded as his most significant record release during the 90?s (the album being his second title to figure on the already mentioned Politiken chart).
During the 00?s Hall has collaborated with younger Danish artists such as Efterklang, Marybell Katastrophy, Bjørn Svin and Tone. His album Hospital Cafeterias from 2009 is considered to be yet another milestone in a still evolving career.
Halls current album If Power Asks Why was nominated for the Danish National Radios P2 Award 2013 Lyt til Nyt. http://www.martinhall.com/
The obligationthe morality, if you wishof all the arts today is to intensify, alter perceptual awareness and, hence, consciousness. Awareness and consciousness of what? Of the real material world. Of the things we see and hear and taste and touch.
Joseph Byrd
- "The imaginative and carefully crafted music of Joseph Byrd (b. 1937) assumes an astonishing variety of guises: he was an integral part of the experimental arts scene in New York and Los Angeles in the 1960s and he founded the psychedelic rock band The United States of America, and its successor Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies, to name just the most salient. Byrds career resists easy categorization because his collective activities encompass a broader sound world than is typically admitted within the confines of a single genre. In this sense, Byrd possesses the spirit of radical exploration that has long characterized composers of the American experimental tradition. He initially moved to New York in 1960 to study with John Cage, but among the most influential of his experiences during this period were his two lessons with Morton Feldman, whose delicately floating music enchanted the young composer. The works on this recording provide a rich musical document of Byrds activities in New York between 1960 and 1963, when he studied with Feldman, served as an apprentice to Cage, and participated in the Fluxus group. Crafted with technical precision, all of the works were designed to explore the singularity of sound that was central to Byrds lessons with Feldman.
When Byrds music was performed at Carnegie Recital Hall in the spring of 1962, Eric Salzman of The New York Times described the concert as a thimbleful of tiny sounds that were generally just this side of the threshold of inaudibility. Initially, the thimbleful of tiny sounds assembled on this recording may not appear to anticipate the extraordinary diversity of Byrds subsequent work, but they reveal the key to his early studies and the foundation of his artistic development. As with much of Feldmans music, the low dynamic levels and subtly shifting timbres and textures persuade the listener to attend to the sounds more carefully, thereby enriching the perceptual experience." New World Records
- "Recordings of works by Joseph Byrd, student of Morton Feldman and John Cage and frontman for The United States Of America, are being released by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble via New World Records.
Byrd collaborated with a number of Fluxus artists in the 1960s, and also formed Joe Byrd And The Field Hippies, recording psych-rock album The American Metaphysical Circus in 1969.
This release, Joseph Byrd NYC 19601963, recorded by contemporary music ensemble ACME, includes new recordings of "Animals", "Loops And Sequences" (written for Charlotte Moorman), "Water Music" (written for Max Neuhaus), "Four Sound*Poems" (each of which is dedicated to a woman from the experimental art scene at the time), plus "String Trio, Densities I".
- The Wire - Wikipedia.
- We have been playing the music of Derek Bermel for several years, returning to it time and again because its eclectic influences are rich and varied. Canzonas Americanas, released on Cantaloupe Music, brings the stylistic variety of his work together in one album, capturing the many musical traditions of North and South America that are part of Derek'sand ourworld.
Derek Bermel synthesizes the diverse musical languages of his time into a unique, thoroughly individual American voice that is tuneful and rich, engaging and sophisticated, says Alan Pierson, our Artistic Director. Canzonas Americanas establishes Derek as a composer firmly in an American tradition like Copland, Ives, Gershwin, and Ellington before him.
We are joined by the remarkable Luciana Souza whose voice evokes a Latin dreamscape in the last movement of the title track. Timothy Jones performs the song collection Natural Selection with theatricality. And Kiera Duffy adds her soprano to the arresting At the End of the World." http://www.alarmwillsound.com/ - Cantaloupe Music - Soundcloud
- Described by the Toronto Star as an "eclectic with wide open ears", Grammy-nominated composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel has been widely hailed for his creativity, theatricality, and virtuosity. Bermel's works draw from a rich variety of musical genres, including classical, jazz, pop, rock, blues, folk, and gospel. Hands-on experience with music of cultures around the world has become part of the fabric and force of his compositional language.
Bermel has worked with a diverse array of musicians including Wynton Marsalis, Midori, John Adams, Paquito D'Rivera, Philip Glass, James Galway, Gustavo Dudamel, Luciana Souza, Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), and Stephen Sondheim. . . . ."
- http://www.derekbermel.com/bios.cfm
Comments
- "Masters at crafting alluring sonic landscapes from the most unlikely found objects, So Percussion explores the idea of home with bold experiment in collaborative art-making. Where (we) live is a multi-media, multi-artist, fully-staged theatrical event and album featuring music written by Brooklyn-based quartet So Percussion (Adam Sliwinski, Eric Beach, Jason Treuting, Josh Quillen) and special guest singer/songwriter/guitarist Grey McMurray (Itsnotyouitsme, (k)nights on earth). A celebration of community and collaboration, Where (we) Live is an exploration of So's outermost artistic boundaries, as well as a re-examination of comfort zones.
"For eight years, So Percussion has made our home in Brooklyn amid two million five hundred thousand others. In our city, each of the group's four members has constructed a personal ecosystem we call home. These homes are bound by space, time, sound and image. Equally, these spaces house rewarding, frustrating, supporting, damaging, tangible and never understood relationships. When we leave those homes, our four members unite to create another artistic home, with its own unspoken rules and expectations; its own rhythm of interaction, it's own banalities and mystery. Where (we) Live questions all these homes by purposefully inviting the unknown to 'come on over'."
As a live event, So Percussion has invited video artists, songwriters, painters, choreographers, directors (including Martin Schmidt (Matmos), Ain Gordon and Emily Johnson) and others to substantively alter their process. The resulting performance contains a society of possibilities: composed pieces, chance elements, visual associations, and theatrical interactions.
The core of the experience, however, is the album itself; a distillation of the performance as it has evolved. Where (we) Live represents the 8th album release from So Percussion on Cantaloupe Music,spanning nearly a decade of creating music that explores all the extremes of emotion and musical possibilities."
- Cantaloupe Music - Soundcloud
- "Paul Lansky's burgeoning career shift from composer of computer-generated music, to composer of music written for, as he humorously puts it, "carbon-based life forms" is documented on the present recording, comprising three symphonic works created during the past five years. Shapeshifters for two pianos and orchestra was commissioned by The Alabama Symphony and Justin Brown for the piano duo Quattro Mani. The title, Shapeshifters, denotes a kind of homage to music's ability to change and morph itself in uncanny and unusual ways. With the Grain was composed for the guitarist David Starobin. The concerto's four movements are named after wood grains and their kinetic qualities. Imaginary Islands was commissioned by Justin Brown and the Alabama Symphony. The work is in three movements, each a kind of sonic landscape for an imaginary island. Lansky's music freely mixes popular and classical elements in works full of energy and fantasy."
- Bridge Records
- "As any filmmaker knows, one of the most powerful aspects of music is its ability to construct emotional arcs and guide narrative by purely sonic means. Simultaneously ethereal and concrete, both spectral and textural, Planet X—the debut collaboration between guitarist Erdem Helvacioglu and violist Ulrich Mertin—tells the story of the appearance in the sky of a new heavenly body and follows one hapless explorer’s quest to discover what lies at its heart. Over the course of two years, Helvacioglu and Mertin composed and crafted this project, building up layers of jagged scratching sounds, plaintive melodies, percussive hits, and dark drones. The two artists grounded the sound of the album in strings but also employed unorthodox recording techniques, sophisticated processing algorithms, and multi-tracking to achieve a rich, complex, resonant texture. Throughout, the sound is unmistakably forward-looking, evocative of the project’s science fiction themes and redolent of the eerie, sometimes dark feel of sci-fi films like “Alien,” “Moon,” and “2001.”
- "Erdem Helvacioglu is one of the most renowned contemporary composers of his generation in Turkey. His music has been called “revolutionary,” “groundbreaking,” “luscious and unique,” and “completely arresting and disarmingly beautiful.” He has received awards from the Luigi Russolo, MUSICA NOVA, Insulae Electronicae Electroacoustic Music Competitions and has been commissioned by numerous organizations, from the 2006 World Soccer Championship to the Bang on a Can-All Stars. Helvacioglu is also actively involved in composing for films, multimedia productions, contemporary dance and theatre. He won the “Best Original Soundtrack” award in the 2006 Mostramundo Film Festival, and his film scores have been heard at Cannes, Sarajevo, Locarno, Seoul, Sao Paulo, and Sydney film festivals. Ulrich Mertin’s musical activities cover a wide swath, from classical and contemporary to electronic and club music. He graduated from the esteemed “Hanns Eisler Academy for Music“ in Berlin, Germany, and has worked with composers like Pierre Boulez, György Kurtag, Helmut Lachenmann, Wolfgang Rihm, Brian Ferneyhough and with groups like Ensemble Modern and musikFabrik. With his award-winning Hezarfen Ensemble (the leading contemporary music ensemble of Turkey) he has been influencing and enlarging the Turkish contemporary scene for several years.
- Innova Recordings
- http://www.ulrichmertin.com/english.html
http://www.hezarfenensemble.com/musicians.php?id=2
- "The eight works on this recording fall into two, slightly overlapping groups: pieces that respond to the natural world (Dark Wood, Changing Light and Trembling Air), and pieces that allude to or respond to other music (like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment, Arioso/ Doubles and Nocturne/Doubles, Traces). The first group is connected to Broening's experiences in Estonia. A Fulbright brought Broening to Tallinn in 2007 and in the following years he returned a number of times for concerts, lectures and to compose, spending much of his time in the forests, islands and fields. Broening's music couples his interest in the expressive power of sound with a sense of line derived from his background as a singer, the music here combining acoustic instruments with electronic processing. This recording marks the debut on Bridge of the brilliant Chicago-based, two-time Grammy Award-winning sextet, eighth blackbird."
- Bridge Records
Benjamin Broening
- "(b. 1967) is a composer of orchestral, choral, chamber and electroacoustic music. In the past few seasons his music has been performed in Japan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, Estonia, Romania, Slovenia, Ukraine, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada and across the United States. Recent works include a piece for flute and electronics for Camilla Hoitenga, a clarinet concerto for Richard Hawkins, a multi-movement work for Zeitgeist, a sextet for Ensemble U: (Estonia), two works for clarinet and electronics for Arthur Campbell and choral/instrumental works for the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, the James River Singers as well pieces for pianist Daniel Koppelman and eighth blackbird.
Other recent works include works for cello and electronics and flute and electronics for members of eighth blackbird, a piece for soprano and electroacoustic music commissioned by the Arts Now Series at North Carolina State University, a cantata for the Charlotte Symphony and the Oratorio Singers of Charlotte, pieces for the Connecticut Choral Society, the Grace Choral Society of Brooklyn, and a multi-media cantata for Hampton-Sydney College among others. Other commissions a chamber work for Quorum Chamber Arts Collective, three choral works for the Virginia Glee Club, music for theater and dance, as well as numerous solo works for performers around the United States.
A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Estonia, Broening has also received recognition and awards from the American Composers Forum, Virginia Commission for the Arts, ACS/Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Presser Music Foundation as well as a teaching award from the University of Richmond.
Recombinant Nocturnes, a disk of music for piano recorded by Duo Runedako (Daniel Koppelman and Ruth Neville) recently released on innova recordings, has been called a “gorgeous disc of music” and “thoughtful, eloquent, and disarmingly direct” by New Music Box, "deep, troubling” by François Couture François Couture and “Lovely, delicate, calming” by Los Angeles’ KFJC.
Other current recording projects include two works recorded by clarinetist Arthur Campbell for release in Fall 2012 on everglade, and gathering light, recorded by violinist Lina Bahn for Naxos.
Broening is founder and artistic director of Third Practice, an annual festival of electroacoustic music at the University of Richmond, where he is Associate Professor of Music. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Cambridge University, Yale University, and Wesleyan University."
- http://benjaminbroening.net/index.html
Eighth Blackbird
Tim Munro, flutes • Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinets*
Yvonne Lam, violin & viola • Nicholas Photinos, cello
Matthew Duvall, percussion+ • Lisa Kaplan, piano
- "eighth blackbird lives dangerously. The Chicago-based, two-time GRAMMY Award-winning sextet combines the finesse of a string quartet with the energy of a rock band and the audacity of a storefront theater company. Its musical aerobatics delight, provoke and entertain audiences around the world.
The lure of wet ink draws eighth blackbird into collaborations with a motley crew of composers, young and old, modernist and indie. Recent commissions include Steve Reich's Double Sextet, Jennifer Higdon's On a Wire and Steve Mackey's Slide, and future collaborators include Amy Beth Kirsten, Brett Dean, Aaron Jay Kernis, John Luther Adams and Mayke Nas.
During the 2011/12 season eighth blackbird tours Australia twice, making debuts at the Sydney Opera House and the Brisbane Festival, and with the symphony orchestras of Melbourne and Tasmania. The ensemble plays in New York (SONiC festival), Kansas City, Ithaca and Mexico City. Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire is presented at the Kennedy Center and the McAninch Arts Center. Chicago performances include a Reich-fest in Millennium Park, Composition Competition finals, a premiere by Nico Muhly, and a mini-festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
eighth blackbird holds ongoing Ensemble in Residence positions at the University of Richmond and the University of Chicago, and will commence a three-year, Mellon Foundation-funded term as Ensemble in Residence at the Curtis Institute of Music in Fall 2012. A fruitful, ongoing relationship with Chicago's Cedille Records has produced four acclaimed recordings. The ensemble has won two Grammy Awards, for strange imaginary animals (Best Chamber Music Performance, 2008) and Lonely Motel: Music from Slide (Best Small Ensemble Performance, 2012).
eighth blackbird's members hail from America's Great Lakes, Keystone, Golden and Bay states, and Australia's Sunshine State. There are four foodies, three beer snobs and one exercise junkie. The name "eighth blackbird" derives from the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens's evocative, aphoristic poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1917)."
- http://www.eighthblackbird.org
- A debut album from a most brilliant and innovating cello virtuos:
- "At 24, Mariel Roberts has emerged as one of the most electrifying cellists on the New York scene. Her debut CD, nonextraneous sounds, is an audacious statement from a fearless musician. Where others might play it safe, Mariel tests the limits of contemporary cello technique in a group of five exhilarating solo works by New York-based composers in their late 20s and early 30s. Two are for cello alone, three incorporate electronics. Diverse in style, these pieces – all commissioned especially for Mariel – showcase her technical assurance, interpretive élan, and distinctive quicksilver tone."
Regarding the title, Mariel says:
- “Novice listeners are sometimes made to feel extraneous by new music – they assume they can’t identify with it on a personal level. I think the cello is the perfect instrument to connect with audiences, not just because of its huge range of sound-making possibilities, but because of its very human and expressive qualities.
“Each piece on this album lives in a distinct and unique sound world that is like no other. This is what I want people to know about contemporary music – that it is fantastically diverse and flexible and changing all the time… I wanted to make an album that sounds like the city I live in.”
The disc opens with Andy Akiho’s punningly titled Three Shades, Foreshadows, inspired by Auguste Rodin’s sculpture “The Three Shades” – a sculpture composed of three identical bronze casts positioned so that the viewer can observe multiple perspectives simultaneously. Says Akiho, “My goal was to create a similar effect acoustically while blurring any distinction between the live performer and the three digital playback parts.” Akiho makes generous use of percussive cello sounds, including bell-like tones created by placing mini-clothespins near the base of the fingerboard.
Sean Friar’s playful Teaser spotlights Mariel’s ability to turn on a stylistic dime. It “idiosyncratically leads the listener along a path filled with surprise, sleight of hand, abrupt about-faces, and mischievous reinterpretations of its own material.” Daniel Wohl derived the material of his mysterious piece Saint Arc “from very faint noises: the bow almost silently brushing against the strings, as well as the harmonics that accidentally pop out as the cellist’s hand glides across the neck of the instrument. The electronic element, which consists in prerecorded and processed cello, enhances, distorts or offers an alternate perspective on these two sounds.”
Alex Mincek’s Flutter “is a piece about restless energy; mental and physical. It is constructed with a number of rapidly oscillating gestures that gradually accumulate and then pass quickly and abruptly from one to another. Overwhelming activity finally gives way to calm.”
Tristan Perich’s driving, hypnotic Formations closes the disc. Perich is best known for his ingenious, self-packaged 1-Bit Music and 1-Bit Symphony. “I am interested in the threshold between the abstract world of computation and the physical world around us,” says the composer. “The simplest electronic tones can be created by sending on and off pulses of electricity to a speaker, effecting an oscillation at the desired pitch. While 1-bit sound is also the palette of aggressive electric alarm clocks, I find its primitive timbre inspiringly fresh and mysteriously organic when combined with these traditional instruments.”
Innova Recordings
Mariel Roberts home:
Soundcloud
I decided that these, with their almost Jóhann Jóhannsson'ish melancolic beauty, here is where they rightfully belong:
Olan Mill - Home
Home is the third album by Olan Mill.
- "Olan Mill is the recording project of UK composer and producer Alex Smalley, who to date has received rapturous acclaim for his work that holds a sublime measure between the realms of modern neo-classical composition and ambience. On Home, Smalley has mined his most expansive territory yet to create a thrillingly evocative and deeply felt body of work.
The tender clusters of sound that have defined Olan Mill’s tonal space take on a new soaring quality in using voice to propel Home with a new emotional surge. Alongside soprano Patricia Boynton featuring throughout, Smalley has assembled an ensemble of musicians playing woodwind, piano, pipe organ and violin to augment his guitar and field recordings. Together they combine for both moments of heart-rending intimacy and bursts of flowering, floating orchestral sound. Inspired by travels abroad, Home is a both an urban and exotic panorama, keening with waves of joyous energy and direct pulse, as well as the ultimate comedown from such pure euphoria. Recorded by Smalley in his home – a place lived in by his family in generations past – the album has an earthy air that magically weaves through its otherworldy radiance to portray the compelling dynamic at the heart of Olan Mill."
- Preservation - Soundcloud
- And so far only on Bandcamp, released by Facture in may:
Olan Mill - Paths
- ‘Paths’, the new album from Olan Mill, sees the un- ashamedly romantic music of Alex Smalley and Svit lana Samoylenko moving away from piano based vi gnettes towards broader compositions of processed guitar, pipe organ and violin. The album displays a striking economy of instrumentation that is the logical progression from their earnest neo-classical debut ‘Pine’, released on Serein in 2010.
The focus of ‘Paths’ is the manipulation of boundaries, a direction embarked on more by necessity than choice - reconciling the ambition of an orchestra with the limitations of a duo. The restraint in sound stems from a foray into the previously unexplored realm of live performance - the pair also admitting they were “supporting some serious piano dentists and we were never up to their kind of surgery, so it was as much a white flag maneuver as it was artistic decision”.
‘Paths’ represents a growth in both sound and style, with each song possessing its own identity within the record - the exploration of both structure and composition revealing new events each time the listener delves into the immersive narrative of their communication.
The end result is a richer harmonic sound field, in- tended to physically move an audience as much as it aimed to devastate them emotionally. The six pieces were captured from two live performances in Bristol and Reading in late 2010, and have been sewn together from the multi-track recordings into a run of 300 limited edition 180gm vinyl mastered by Shawn Hatfeld. This release is presented with a 4 panel letter pressed CD, a booklet written by Olan Mill in collaboration with Alexander Ross Petersen, limited edition 12x12 prints, A2 poster and interconnected artwork by Jurgen Heckel. All collated in the characteristic hand stamped, sealed and numbered Facture fashion.
Direct and melodic without the obsession of minimal- ism, ‘Paths’ is an honest and engaging account of both melancholy and euphoria.
Alain Billard metal contrabass clarinet
Ensemble intercontemporain / Susanna Mälkki
IRCAM-Centre Pompidou
- "The major pieces of the record, Art of Metal I and Art of Metal III, both belong to a cycle devoted to the metal contrabass clarinet. The cycle’s connecting thread, the driving idea, is a metaphorical approach to what metal brings to mind, this alloy often synonymous with strength, power, solidity, energy, brilliance, shine… The instrument itself is totally made of metal; Selmer designed a special metal mouthpiece for the piece to replace what is usually made of ebonite. The sound of both pieces is full of explosive moments and phrases of furious virtuosity. “Vulcano”, a piece for ensemble, fits perfectly in those metallic soundscapes of the “Art of Metal” pieces. Inspired by ancient myths on Vulcanos and the volcanos themselves the piece is about buried and erupting powers. Different definable volcanic states and volcanic activities – from lava flows to earthquakes - stimulate the imagination and provide directions, trajectories, for what can be done with sound."
YANN ROBIN (*1974)- "The French composer Yann Robin, began his musical studies in Aix-en-Provence. He later enrolled in the jazz class at the National Regional conservatory in Marseilles, while simultaneously integrating the composition class of Georges Boeuf. He was awarded first prizes from the Paris National Conservatory in the composition class of Frédéric Durieux and the analysis class of Michaël Levinas. He received a grant from the Meyer Foundation, and was awarded a first prize from the Beaux_Arts Academy as well as from the Salabert Foundation, and in 2011 the Sacem presented him with the GrandPrix de la Musique Symphonique. From 2006 to 2008, he attended the twoyear cursus program at IRCAM. The Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain commissioned him to write Art of Metal, a concerto for metal contrabass clarinet and ensemble, the first of a three piece cycle for the instrument, prepared in close collaboration with Alain Billiard, clarinettist and soloist of Ensemble intercontemporain. Next came Art of Metal II (for metal contrabass clarinet and electronics) as well as Art of Metal III (for metal contrabass clarinet, ensemble and electronics), premiered at the Agora Festival in 2008 by the Ensemble intercontemporain, and conducted by Susanna Mälkki. Between 2006 and 2008, he was guest composer with the National Orchestra of Lille. During 2008 and 2009, he contributed, as research composer at IRCAM in conjunction with Gérard Assayag and d’Arshia Cont, to the continuing work on the Omax program. His music is performed in France and other countries in concert halls such as Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam), the KKL (Lucerne), the Benaroya Hall (Seattle) or Lincoln Center (New York) as well as in festivals such as Agora, Donaueschingen, Musica, Biennale de Venise, Présences, Gaudeamus, Festival de Lucerne… In addition to chamber music works, in particular a second string quartet for the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2011, he received a co-commission from IRCAM and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France for Inferno, a work for large orchestra and electronics based on the cartography of Hell by Dante, which will be premiered at the Festival ManiFeste-2012. He received another co-commission for the same year, but this time from the New York Philharmonic and the Casa Da Musica in Porto. In 2013, he will compose a large orchestral piece for the SWR Baden-Baden and Freiburg that will be presented at the Musica Festival in Strasbourg. In 2014, he will pursue his orchestral work with a newly commissioned piece for the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. In 2005, he and other composers founded the Multilateral Ensemble, and later became the artistic director." -http://www.kairos-music.comb
- "Created between 1978 and 1981 and presented on these
discs in chronological order of their composition, demonstrate a remarkable extension of David
Rosenboom’s techniques from his …Plymouth Rock…1 series of 1969–71 using the harmonic
and subharmonic series. Basic numerical relationships are used here to structure not only the
melody and harmony of a piece, but also such other primary musical parameters as rhythm,
timbre, and musical form. The In The Beginning pieces are artifacts in the development of a fullblown
musical model based in all its dimensions on simple harmonic proportions. This can be
understood as a kind of total harmonicism, similar but based on a different principle than the
total serialism of the 1950s-60s Euro-American avant-garde, where a single generative method
is used to structure all possible aspects within a body of music. While such compositional
discipline imparts a unity to the core of the music, its musical fertility is revealed by the
expressive diversity a composer achieves in applying it. The In the Beginning series provides a
narrative of the flowering of such an approach.
The story begins in Toronto at York University where Rosenboom taught a class based on the
seemingly impossible-to-compare musics of Harry Partch, America’s grass-roots instrumentbuilder
and pioneering harmonist, and Iannis Xenakis, the modernist European technologist of
stochastically generated sound-clouds of primal rhythms and noise. But Rosenboom was
dreaming of a music that could integrate them, and the class provided the opportunity to discover
how. The shape of Partch’s “One-Footed Bride: A Graph of Comparative Consonance” in his
classic Genesis of a Music2 is formed by tracing the “psychological classification” of interval
ratios, mapping a correspondence between their “qualitative and quantitative factors,” including
“approach,” “emotion,” “power” and “suspense.” This posits a linkage between the mathematics
of the ratios that define harmony and the human feelings that they engender, not unlike the
association of modes and feelings that Rosenboom knew from North Indian raga theory. The
music he imagined was based on intertwining resonant clouds, and Xenakis’ Formalized Music3
provided techniques for rendering them. Important among these were the Gaussian distribution,
the bell-shaped curve associated with the phenomena of resonance. Rosenboom’s own research
in the 1960–70s4 using brainwaves and other physical transducers to control analog synthesizers
provided another key element to the mix. Influenced by the work of the scientist-musician
Manfred Clynes identifying universal, primary dynamic forms that determine expressions of
emotion, he recorded the output of pressure transducers touched by Method actors who were
asked to express specific feelings, along with their brainwaves. The outcome was a small library
of expressive shapes associated with these emotions that he could apply to control horizontal
musical parameters like melody and timbral or dynamic envelopes. This made possible the
linking of mathematically defined harmonic relationships and melodic shapes through the
similarity or contrast of their emotional associations. Stochastic techniques could be used to
create smooth transitions from one set of associations to another. The spinning out of the
potentials of this rich system of relationships becomes the story we can track in his composition
of the In the Beginning series."
- From the linernotes @ New World Records
David Rosenboom
- "Since the 1960s David Rosenboom (b. 1947) has explored the spontaneous evolution of musical forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques in scoring for ensembles, multi-disciplinary composition and performance, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art and literature, interactive multi-media and new instrument technologies, generative algorithmic systems, art-science research and philosophy, and extended musical interface with the human nervous system. His work is widely distributed and presented around the world."
- Much more @ http://davidrosenboom.com/about
- "The debut recording of Newband, an ensemble specializing in microtonal music and focused around a unique instrument, the zoomoozophone. Invented by Dean Drummond (who was a student of Harry Partch and played in his legendary Gate 5 ensemble), the zoomoozophone looks somewhat like a marimba withwith aluminum tubes-except that it is about 20 feet long and consists of 129 tubes tuned to a 31-note scale in just-intonation.
All of the works on the CD are first recordings, including Drummond's arrangement of Partch's Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales for Newband's instruments. The Cage, LaBarbara and Drummond works were composed for the group."
- Mode Records
Dean Drummond's Zoomoozophone:
Newband
- "Widely regarded as the world's preeminent microtonal music ensemble, NEWBAND was founded in 1977 by composer Dean Drummond and flutist Stefani Starin who continue as Artistic Directors. With Drummond's invention of the 31-tone zoomoozophone in 1978, NEWBAND began to explore music using microtonality and alternative tuning systems in an innovative and eclectic repertoire influenced by classical, jazz and world music. In 1990, NEWBAND received custodianship of the original Harry Partch Instrument Collection. The typical NEWBAND concert involves a stage filled with some of the world's most amazing musical instruments performed upon by an ensemble of virtuosos who move from instrument to instrument with incredible ease.
NEWBAND consists of a core of virtuosic multi-instrumentalists, equally at home in concert performances and in productions involving theater, dance and film. Newband productions have included: Harry Partch's Delusion of the Fury (Directed by John Jesurun, with choreography by Dawn Akemi Saito), Oedipus (directed by Bob McGrath with Ridge Theater), The Wayward (directed by Tom O'Horgan); Daphne of the Dunes (choreographed by Alice Farley); Henry Cowell's Trickster Coyote with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company; and a live soundtrack by Dean Drummond for F.W. Murnau's landmark silent film, Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh).
NEWBAND has performed throughout North America and Europe including at New Music America in Houston, The Library of Congress and the Kennedy Center in Washington, Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, World Music Days in Oslo, Festival de Lille in France, USARTS Festival in Berlin and The Icebreaker in Amsterdam. In its New York home base, NEWBAND has performed at the New York Philharmonic Horizons New Virtuosity Series at Avery Fisher Hall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Bang on a Can Festival, La Mama Experimental Theater, Merkin Concert Hall and Columbia University. NEWBAND has premiered works by Harry Partch, Dean Drummond, John Cage, John Zorn, Ezra Sims, Muhal Richard Abrams, James Pugliese, Elizabeth Brown, Anne Le Baron, Lois V Vierk and Julia Wolfe and recorded on Mode, Music and Arts, Point, Aurora and Wergo Records.
The Harry Partch Instrument Collection is the largest component of the Newband Instrumentarium, including all of the instruments built by the composer-inventor during the period 1930-1974, as well as several instruments replicated by the Harry Partch Foundation and Newband since 1974. Other instruments in the Newband Instrumentarium are the zoomoozophone and juststrokerods, both invented by Dean Drummond, a microtonally programmed synthesizer, and a large collection of exotic percussion instruments. NEWBAND performs on the Instrumentarium as well as standard Western instruments - flute, cello and percussion regularly - voices, clarinet, brass and strings as repertoire demands."
- http://www.newband.org
- The musical instruments of Harry Partch (1945/1967) @ YouTube
- "“Medea” by Calliope Tsoupaki is the first in a series of chamber music compositions focusing on drama; a “melodrama for 8 instruments”. The composition is written for Ensemble MAE, that distinguishes itself for its colourful, direct, physical and improvisatory character. Tsoupaki uses the ensemble's palette, composing solos, duets, trios, wrapped in larger sonic fields, with a strong associative and visual impact. Further there is no story-telling for the listener to be led into the piece; the music material itself is suggestive, and the melodies have a leading role, as characters in a theater play. Coming back as in different scenes in a film, each time changed and transformed, they are the vectors of tangible dramatic development.
Next to an exploration of the myth, “Medea” attempts to compose a self-portrait, the composer briefly shedding light onto a deep, unspoken part of herself. Pasolini's “Medea” was an inspiration for writing this piece, and most of all Maria Callas in the role of Medea, “so tragic that she did not sing a word.”
- Unsounds
Gunshae - The Lost Cascadian Suite
Kuma (Transmissions)
Lady Eve (Oboe)
Vanessa Stovall (Harp)
- "The Lost Cascadian Suite is Gunshaes celestial anthem for the Pacific Northwest, in four parts. This is a collection of sub-aquatic ambient for the tribes of the Cascadian revolution. Far more laden with sub-bass than anything Gunshae has done to date, The Lost Cascadian Suite is what happens when free improv collides with classical orchestral training and is topped off with a life long passion for sound system music. Drift that can also make you vibrate."
http://www.notype.com/drones/cat.e/pan_070/ - http://archive.org/details/pan070
Conductors: Bradley Lubman; Jeffrey Milarsky; Steven Sloane
Artists: Evan Ziporyn (Bass Clarinet); Fred Ho (Baritone Saxophone); Todd Reynolds (Violin); Seth Josel (Electric Guitar); Ned McGowan (Contrabass Flute)
- "An album that explores the extreme ends of whats possible when some uncommon solo instruments join the orchestra as soloist. This album contains five works by as many composers featuring music for unusual instruments that extend the range and sonic possibilities of an otherwise acoustic orchestra.
Three of the pieces are what we might call bottom-feeders, as they explore and gather their power from the extreme low register. Evan Ziporyn demonstrates the virtuosic possibilities of the bass clarinet, integrating his own ideas with influences ranging from Balinese Gamelan to jazz to Stravinsky, in his Big Grenadilla. Fred Ho makes real dragons fly in a tour-de-force and call-to-action for baritone saxophone and orchestra that combines Chinese folk song with an avant-jazz perspective. Perhaps the most unusual instrument on this album is the seldom-heard contrabass flute, an instrument that, in the hands of Ned McGowan, is capable of everything from near breathless calm to driving bass riffs that propel the orchestra forward.
The other two works on the album partner electric instruments with the orchestra. Keeril Makans Dream Lightly features the electric guitar of Seth Josel. But you wont find any amped-up power chords here, only the most delicate and ethereal of guitar harmonics, making the piece an almost anti-concerto. Finally, Neil Rolnick, a pioneer in electronic music, introduces us to the cyborg-fiddle he created with soloist Todd Reynolds, an instrument that seamlessly takes us from flashy Pagagini-esque pyrotechnics to cyberspace.
Each of the five pieces was commissioned and premiered by ACO for Orchestra Underground, its entrepreneurial ensemble and concert series at Carnegie Halls Zankel Hall that seeks to re-invent and re-imagine the orchestra with unusual instruments, eclectic influences, new collaborations and technologies, and important new compositional voices."
- From the linernotes @:
American Composers Orchestra homepage:
- "This new Pogus 2 CD compilation, curated by Luis Alvarado (writer, journalist, sound poet), presents some of the most important pieces of the Peruvian musical vanguard of the 1960s and 70s, offering a representative sample of works and composers from this important period in Peruvian music.
Thirteen works by thirteen different composers 5 tape pieces and 8 instrumental works give an excellent introduction to some fascinating composers who are known outside of Peru in varying degrees, if at all. These composers explored serial, electronic, electroacoustic, and aleatoric music during a time of tension between politics and the avant-garde in academic music in Latin America. The 1960s and 1970s were particularly difficult years for Latin American social movements, and a time when the concepts of vanguard, revolution and universalism enter into complex interactions. These works and their composers ask not how much experimentation occurred, but what the use of these techniques represent and to what extent did these musicians and their music engage critically with modernity?
Our hope is that the listener will find some or all of these composers and their works of interest, and will further explore the music made by these fine composers as it hopefully becomes more available over time."
- Pogus Productions.
Full streaming @ Soundcloud
- "Pierre-Yves Mace is a young French composer - he was born in 1980 - who has already released four albums on famous labels such as Tzadik and Sub Rosa. Miniatures - Song Recycle is his second album for the parisian imprint Brocoli, following the acclaimed Passagenweg. Miniatures - Song Recycle, as the title suggests, alternates musique concrete studies and songs in the form of lieder, where the voice is made of recycled, chopped and transformed a cappella vocals from YouTube, accompanied by the composer/pianist. Pierre-Yves Mace lives in Paris and has been working with musicians Sylvain Chauveau, ON, Rainier Lericolais, That Summer, Minizza, Louisville, Quatuor Pli, writers Mathieu Larnaudie, Philippe Vasset, Christophe Fiat, contemporary artists Hippolyte Hentgen, Gaëlle Boucand, Clotilde Viannay. He's also member of the collective L’Encyclopedie de la Parole, and a researcher in the field of musicology : His book Musique et document sonore (Music and recording), has just been released on Presses du Réel."
- Experimedia @ Soundcloud
- "Drones consists of the Nico Muhlys three EPs Drones & Piano, Drones & Viola and Drones & Violin, with a special bonus composition. Performing the pieces are Bruce Brubaker, Nadia Sirota and Pekka Kuusisto along with Muhly himself. Drones was recorded and produced by Valgeir Sigurðsson in the Greenhouse studios in Iceland."
- "I started writing the Drones pieces as a method of developing harmonic ideas over a static structure. The idea is something not unlike singing along with ones vacuum cleaner, or with the subtle but constant humming found in most dwelling-places. We surround ourselves with constant noise, and the Drones pieces are an attempt to honor these drones and stylize them."
-Nico Muhly @ Bedroom Community.
Cage, Unlocked
Released 05 September 2012
- "The Music of John Cage. Recorded live, February 11, 2012 at the Avant Music Festival at Wild Project, New York City."
"The 2012 Avant Music Festival celebrated John Cage's 100th birthday with a day of music entitle "Cage, Unlocked." This album features music recorded that day."
http://avantmedia.org/
Emusic
- "Canadian pianist Vicky Chow has performed extensively as a classical and contemporary soloist, chamber musician, and ensemble member, and has been described as “brilliant” (New York Times), “a monster pianist” (Time Out New York) “virtuosic” (New Jersey Star Ledger), “sparkling” with a “feisty technique” (MIT Tech) and “new star of new music” (Los Angeles Times) . She is the pianist for the New York based eclectic contemporary sextet, Bang on a Can All-Stars and has performed with other groups such as Wordless Music Orchestra, Opera Cabal, Wet Ink Ensemble, ai ensemble and AXIOM. She is also a member of two other groups: DUO X88, a piano duo with the Dutch pianist Saskia Lankhoorn, and piano trio called Typical Music with violinist Todd Reynolds and cellist Ashley Bathgate.
Her passion has propelled Vicky to work with an A-to-Z of leading composers and musicians such as John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Nik Bärtsch, Don Byron, Bryce Dessner (The Nationals) Michael Gordon, Glenn Kotche (Wilco), David Longstreth (Dirty Projectors), David Lang, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), Julia Wolfe, Evan Ziporyn". . . . . .
- Much more @ http://www.vickychow.com/Vicky_Chow/about.html
From member of Victoire and Now Ensemble:
Mazzoli’s first opera is inspired by the life and writings of fiercely independent explorer Isabelle Eberhardt. Born in Geneva in 1877 to an aristocratic mother and an anarchist father, Isabelle took to donning men’s clothing at an early age in order to enjoy greater freedom and mobility. In 1897, she and her mother travelled to North Africa where they were converted to Islam and started to create a new life. Before their new life took hold, Isabelle’s mother passed away. Shortly after her mother’s death, Isabelle’s father succumbed to throat cancer and one of her brothers committed suicide. Propelled by an overwhelming sense of loneliness and loss, Isabelle moved permanently to Algeria in 1899.
Dressing as a man and calling herself Si Mahmoud Essadi, Isabelle travelled easily in Arab society. While there was no mistaking her true gender, the Africans, by all accounts treated her as a man. She joined a secret Sufi brotherhood, roamed the desert on horseback and even fought in street battles against French colonists. During different periods in history, Isabelle has been lionized and demonized for her disinterest in the social mores of her era and for engaging in numerous love affairs throughout her life. Soon after moving to Africa, Isabelle fell in love with an Algerian soldier, Slimene Ehnni and married him in 1901. The two had an erratic and passionate relationship, but in 1904, after a long separation, they made plans to settle down in Ain Sefra, Algeria. Isabelle rented a house in the town and awaited her husband. On October 21, 1904, a flash flood tore through the town, destroying the house and drowning Isabelle.
Song from the Uproar explores the timeless themes of Isabelle's story: the desire to break with one's past and forge a new identity, and the confusion of falling in love and the conflict between eastern and western culture. Isabelle transcends her trying circumstances in each scene, transforming from a depressed Swiss woman to a fearless Moroccan man, from a patient wife to a restless adventurer and, in her final aria, from life to death. Song from the Uproar moves beyond a chronological description of Isabelle's life and immerses the audiences in the emotional, dream-like landscapes of her astonishing journals. Traditional opera conventions are turned on their heads: a five-piece amplified chamber ensemble replaces the pit orchestra, and ghostly electronics waft in and out of the musical textures, layering the voices in unexpected and seemingly impossible ways. Stephen Taylor's haunting films and Gia Forakis's repetitive, dance-like staging add to the timeless, immersive nature of the work. . . ."
- G. Schirmer inc.
Missy Mazzoli - Born: 1980
- "A fast-rising composer on the contemporary music scene, Missy Mazzoli’s talent draws audiences equally into concert halls and rock clubs.Her unique music reflects a trend among composers of her generation who combine styles, writing music for the omnivorous audiences of the 21st century. She inhabits a gorgeous and mysterious sound-world that melds indie-rock sensibilities with formal training from Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding, Richard Ayers and others. Practically speaking, she amasses music in layers not normally found together but in ways that create matchless vertical harmonies.
Recently deemed "one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York" by The New York Times, and "Brooklyn's post-millennial Mozart" by Time Out New York, her music has been performed all over the world by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, the American Composers Orchestra, New York City Opera, the Minnesota Orchestra, the South Carolina Philharmonic, NOW Ensemble, and many others.
Upcoming projects include a new orchestral work for the Detroit Symphony, another quartet for Kronos and a piece for Ensemble ACJW. She was recently appointed Composer-In-Residence for the Opera Company of Philadelphia. In this position she will have the opportunity to follow a personalized, three-year development track focused on the advancement of her career as an operatic composer.
In addition to the critically acclaimed premiere of her opera Song from the Uproar during the 2011-12 season, Mazzoli was a Composer-Educator Partner for the Albany Symphony. There she heard the premieres of an expanded version of her orchestral work Violent, Violent Sea as well as world premiere of Holy Roller which Albany Symphony commissioned
Her music has been featured on numerous festivals including the 2007 and 2009 Bang-on-a-Can New Music Marathon, the Cabrillo Festival (Santa Cruz), the Gaudeamus New Music Festival (Amsterdam), the Ecstatic Music Festival (New York) and the ZOOM Young Composers series at New York's Merkin Concert Hall.
She is the recipient of four ASCAP Young Composer Awards (2007 through 2010), a Fulbright Grant to the Netherlands (2002–2004), and grants from the Jerome Foundation, American Music Center, and the Barlow Endowment. In 2006 Mazzoli taught composition in the Music Department of Yale University, and from 2007–2010 was Executive Director of the MATA Festival in New York City, an organization dedicated to promoting the work of young composers
Mazzoli is an active pianist, and often performs with Victoire, an "all-star, all-female quintet" (Time Out New York) she founded in 2008 dedicated exclusively to her own compositions. Their debut EP was named one of 2009's 10 best classical albums by Time Out New York. Their debut full-length CD, "Cathedral City," featuring eight of Mazzoli's new works, was released on New Amsterdam Records in September 2010 and received positive reviews from the classical and indie rock communities alike. Mazzoli attended the Yale School of Music (M.M. 2006), the Royal Conservatory of the Hague (post-graduate studies 2002–2004) and Boston University (B.M. 2002). Her principal teachers were Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding, Richard Ayres, David Lang, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Charles Fussell, Richard Cornell, Martin Amlin, and John Harbison."
- G. Schirmer inc.
http://www.missymazzoli.com/ - Emusic
These two volumes are being released together and simultaneously, as a sign of continuation.
-"For Luc Ferrari, this is the first full-length CD to come out after the trilogy we developed with him Les anecdotiques /2002, a fifteen-part suite (CD SR207), Son Mémorisé /1976-2002 (CD SR252) and Didascalies /2007 (CD SR259).
What we have here is three substantial pieces: Programme commun pour clavecin et bande magnétique/1972
performed by Elisabeth Chonacka, Didascalies 2 /1993 performed by Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven, Claude Berset, and Vincent Royer (in 2009) and available only on vinyl SRV305 (note that Didascalies and Didascalies 2 are two different compositions), and another previously unreleased piece that he held dear: Les émois d'Aphrodite/1986-1998, performed by San Francisco's MC Band under his direction."
- "We are pleased to release for the first time, the solo works of Brunhild Ferrari: Derivatif/2008, Brumes du reveil/2009, Tranquilles Impatiences/2010 forming a trilogy on reconstruction from a memory that is still quite alive. To us, these works are new bricks in the erection of a liberating oeuvre."
- Sub Rosa
Biography from Other Minds:
- "On February 5th, 2002, Luc Ferrari celebrated his 73rd birthday in Paris. The work and aesthetics of Ferrari continue to have a singular impact on several generations of American avant-garde composers. Like Alvin Lucier, Ferrari first obtained a thorough, traditional technique in composition. He took piano lessons with Alfred Cortot, composition lessons with Arthur Honegger and musical analysis with Olivier Messiaen. But he proceeded to become interested in the recording process to such a degree that he began to make tape pieces using altered ambient sounds and later incorporated electronics into his work in an effective and original manner.
In 1954, his life altered radically when he boarded a ship and traveled to New York to meet Edgard Varèse, after having been impressed by live radio broadcast of his Déserts for tape and orchestra. From Varèse, Ferrari learned to treat sound as a thing in and of itself; also to place sound objects in the right time and space, from both an audio and psychological point of view. By 1963-4 he had begun Hétérozygote, an extended tape piece in which ambient sounds unfold in narrative form, suggesting a dazzling variety of incidents, all unexplained. The composer’s program notes for these scores, themselves works of a poetic imagination, only added to the fascination.
By 1970 he had completed Presque Rien No. 1, a kind of musical photography, in which unassuming ambient sounds of a small village in Yugoslavia, recorded throughout a long day, are telescoped by means of seamless dissolves into a 21-minute narrative in which no apparent “musical” sounds are included. When the work was issued on a Deutsche Grammophon LP worldwide the response was first one of shock and then revelation. Finally, John Cage’s exhortation that “music is all around us if only we had ears,” had been taken seriously by a fellow composer.
Shortly thereafter, Ferrari appeared on KPFA Radio in Berkeley, and his interviewers, Richard Friedman and Charles Amirkhanian, decided to follow his lead and solicit ambient sound recordings from individuals all over the globe. The World Ear Project of KPFA proceeded to broadcast hundreds of such tapes, made on then-new cassette machines in the field, and numerous composers on the West Coast began to incorporate such sounds into their electronic works.
Beyond the mere acceptance of ambient sounds as musical, Ferrari found that his forays with the professional tape recorder into public places added a level of social engagement to his work. This led him to compose pieces in which the audience becomes voyeuristically involved with a kind of audio home movie. In such a state, a great deal is suggested, which is why radio remains such a powerful medium, even in the face of the wide acceptance of television. The disembodied voice of a human being in Ferrari’s work lures in the listener into an intimacy which is palpable.
Beyond his work involving technology, Ferrari has composed a large body of instrumental music, ranging from very early piano solos to works for large orchestra, such as Histoire du plaisir et de la désolation (1979-81), a towering 35-minute work in three movements which won the International Koussevitsky Prize for recordings when it was released in 1990. And among his important credits are a series of invaluable television films which he made about the rehearsal processes of Varése, Messiaen, Stockhausen and others.
Luc Ferrari died of pneumonia in Arezzo, Italy, in August 2005."
- What a great way to start the new year !
Description: Music to awaken to.
Bill Ryan, composer • Ashley Bathgate, cello • Vicky Chow, piano • David Cossin, percussion
Michael Lowenstern, bass clarinet • Pablo Mahave-Veglia, cello • Jonathan Nichol, saxophone • Todd Reynolds, violin • Paul de Jong, ?.
- "A lot has happened since the 2004 release of Billband’s debut album on innova, Blurred. Where that album was called “gritty and funky” by Gramophone, the group’s new album, Towards Daybreak, turns more personal and showcases the broad palette of composer/leader Bill Ryan. Though still firmly rooted in the minimalism of Steve Reich and Terry Riley (Ryan is the founder and director of Michigan’s Grand Valley State University’s New Music Ensemble, the group behind innova's releases of In C Remixed by Riley and Music for 18 Musicians by Reich), Towards Daybreak is by turns contemplative, roiling, spacious, and aggressive, reflecting experiences in Ryan’s life from the birth of a child to the loss of his parents.
Opening with the elegiac “Simple Lines,” the ensemble of Ashley Bathgate (cello), Vicky Chow (piano), David Cossin (percussion), Michael Lowenstern (bass clarinet), Pablo Mahave-Veglia (Cello), Jonathan Nichol (saxophone), and Todd Reynolds (violin) leads the listener through the album’s open doors into a lush work for strings that sets a reflective tone. The record then builds slowly, piano entering alongside vibraphone on the title track before the sandy susurration of brushed drums opens up “Rapid Assembly.” As the rhythms settle into a percolating groove, this is where the album begins to open up its depths.
Grammy-winner Silas Brown engineered and co-produced the album with Ryan, their third collaboration, and the attention to the sound shines through. The strings are rich and woody, the percussion viscerally captured, the winds as present as if in your living room. As a whole, Towards Daybreak blends the precision and craft of the best minimalism with the distinct humanism and interplay of a small chamber group. This is a music that reveals itself gradually, working its way deeper into you with each listen."
- Innova Recordings - Track 7 @ Soundcloud
- "For the past twenty years Bill Ryan (b.1968) has been a tireless advocate of contemporary music. Through his work as a composer, conductor, producer and educator, he has engaged diverse audiences throughout the country with the music of our time. In recognition of these efforts, in 2008 he won the Michigan Governor’s Award in Arts Education, and in 2009 the American Composers Forum's Champion of New Music Award for his significant contributions to the work and livelihoods of contemporary composers throughout the country. In 2012 he was a finalist for the Michigan Distinguished Professor of the Year award.
Bill’s own music has roots in minimalism, jazz and popular music. It is energetic, evocative and deeply personal, and has been described as “…constantly threatening to burst at the seams, were those seams not so artfully structured...rarely has music this earthy been so elegant." [Gramophone Magazine]
Bill’s music has been performed in major cities and venues across the country including (le) Poisson Rouge, Galapagos, Symphony Space, and Lincoln Center (New York), Woodruff Arts Center (Atlanta), the Atlas (Washington D.C.), Initman Theater (Seattle), and the Hobby Center (Houston), and internationally in Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia. His music has received awards from Meet the Composer, ASCAP, and New Music USA.
In addition to the concert stage, Bill’s music is regularly used by choreographers and dance companies throughout the country. Most recently he composed the music for The Secondary Colors, an evening-length collaboration with Karen Stokes Dance which was called “The most adventurous, if not spectacular, work this year” by Culture Map Houston.
Also active as a concert producer, Bill has presented over 50 events in his Open Ears and Free Play concert series, gaining national recognition with three ASCAP/Chamber Music America Adventurous Programming Awards. Notable guests have included eighth blackbird, Prism, So Percussion, Ethel, Lisa Moore, Todd Reynolds, Julia Wolfe, Talujon, Michael Lowenstern, and the Michael Gordon Band.
As a conductor Bill has commissioned and premiered dozens of works by such notable composers as Phil Kline, Marc Mellits, Belinda Reynolds, Jad Abumrad, Zoe Keating, Evan Ziporyn, and David Lang. In 2006 he founded the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, who have been profiled in numerous publications including Newsweek, the New York Times, and Billboard Magazine, and featured on NPR's Weekend Edition, All Things Considered, and WNYC's Radiolab. Beyond their many campus events they have performed concerts in Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington D.C., at New York’s Bang On a Can Marathon, as members of the all-star ensemble assembled by the Kronos Quartet to perform on the In C 45th Anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall, and at the Make Music New York summer festival.
Bill has produced three critically acclaimed recordings by the ensemble, named to top year-end lists by the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Weekly, Time Out Chicago, and many others. A track from their second CD, In C Remixed, was recently heard on MTV's new hit series Teen Wolf. Music from their first CD, Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, was recently named one of the top five classical recordings of the decade by WNYC’s John Schaefer.
Bill resides in West Michigan with his wife and three children. When not working on music Bill can usually be found in the woods, washing his truck, or watching the Detroit Tigers.
- http://www.billryanmusic.com - 5 questions to Bill Ryan @ ICIYL
- "Cold Blue Two is an eclectic anthology of 14 new, previously unrecorded works—many of them written specifically for this CD—by a diverse collection of composers whose personal musical visions usually blend intuition with process. The composers include both the well-known and the not-so-well-known, most with longtime associations with Cold Blue, and two making their first appearance on the label: John Luther Adams, Gavin Bryars, Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, Jim Fox, Peter Garland, Daniel Lentz, Ingram Marshall, Read Miller, Larry Polansky, David Rosenboom, Phillip Schroeder, Chas Smith, and James Tenney.
Sometimes stark, sometimes lush, this is music in which subtle emotions lurk just below cool surfaces. Among the tracks are dramatic pieces, drifting pieces, and pieces that simply defy easy categorization. From a dozen cellos to a solo just-intonation National steel guitar, from a Harry Partch diamond marimba with strings to a solo accordion, from music featuring celesta or hammered dulcimer or densely layered tracks of steel guitar and Hammond organ or classical guitar with electronics to string quartets, solo piano, and a variety of small chamber ensembles, this collection contains something to surprise (and delight) just about everyone.
Like most of the music on this West Coast label, this album’s pieces tend to focus on the various aspects of music’s inherent sensuality, which some critics have suggested is a uniting aesthetic interest among the composers whose work appears on the label.
Among the featured performers are many renowned new-music champions, including Sarah Cahill, Guy Klucevsek, John Schneider, ETHEL, the Formalist Quartet, Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, and a host of other fine players, including a number of the composers themselves.
Cold Blue Two is also the long-awaited sequel to the label’s popular previous anthology simply entitled Cold Blue (CB0008), an album of thirteen short works that San Francisco’s Other Minds founder Charles Amirkhanian called "a classic anthology of American new music."
- http://www.coldbluemusic.com/
- "Time Loops, a collaboration with cello innovator Maya Beiser, is the second CD of Harrison's works for Bang on a Can's Cantaloupe Music label (October 2012 release), and includes the Young People's Chorus of New York City (YPC), and Payton MacDonald (founding member of Alarm Will Sound) on tabla & percussion. The featured work Just Ancient Loops builds up to 20 layers of pre-recorded cellos, and was premiered by Beiser at the Bang on a Can Marathon in June 2012 along with an art film that was created for the project by multimedia artist Bill Morrison. Also on the CD is Hijaz, which was commissioned by conductor Francisco J. Nunez and YPC, and featured on YPC's 10th Anniversary Transient Glory program at the 92nd St. Y in New York in May 2011, and subsequently broadcast nationwide on American Public Media."
Soundcloud
Michael Harrison,
- "Composer and pianist, has been called "an American Maverick" by Philip Glass. Through his expertise in "just intonation" tunings, Indian ragas and rhythmic cycles, Harrison has created "a new harmonic world of vibrant sound" (The New York Times). With a uniquely personal style that transcends the ages, his music is both forward-looking and deeply rooted in different forms of traditional music. This unique perspective, alongside a simple and elegant gift for melody, makes him a composer who can reach a wide range of audiences. . . ."
- Much more @ Cantaloupe Music
Robyn Schulkowsky, percussion
Fredy Studer, drums
Joey Baron, drums
- "Composer/percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky (b. 1953) has premiered and recorded some of the most important percussion works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, working with composers such as Stockhausen, Wolff, Cage, Feldman and Xenakis.
Armadillo (19902007) is one large-scale piece in four sections, the first of which, at around forty-two minutes, is about three times the duration of the other three combined (these are more or less the same duration, five-plus minutes each). One might think of the image of a Mayan temple, with a large broad base rising pyramid-like to smaller structures at the top. Almost all of the musics sound is from drums, in a full range from high to very low. The trios playing is virtuosic, precise and finely modulated in color and dynamics.
This is a music at once variously complex and unified or simplified by the prevailing sonority of the drums. What gives the music its complexity and richness, what makes it distinctively engaging, is not just the stretches of intricate, overlaid patterningthere are a number of moments when textures thin out and simplifybut the continuous structural shifts, the unpredictable but somehow right moves from one kind of texture and procedure to another. It is a mysterious music, at once highly disciplined and controlled and at the same time full of energy and movement. It is the result of an intense and controlled focus in its composition and performance, a focus that because of its very intensity somehow allows the release of a sense of freedom."
- New World Records
Robyn Schulkowsky
- "Born and raised in South Dakota, percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky has been an innovator and collaborator throughout her life. Already during her studies in Iowa and Germany and later on her international solo tours, Robyn Schulkowsky has dedicated herself to revealing the wonders of percussion to people all over the world. Her continuous exploration of new sound dimensions has led to the development of many new and unusual instruments.
An active musician on five continents, Robyn Schulkowsky moved to Germany during a heyday of experimental and adventurous classical composition. She has premiered and recorded some of the most important percussion works of the 20th and 21st centuries, working with composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kevin Volans, John Cage, Morton Feldman and Iannis Xenakis, presenting their works during tours that included the former Soviet Union, India, Africa, South America, Korea, Japan as well as at major European music festivals.
Robyn Schulkowskys adventurous nature connects her with exceptional project partners and alternative performance spaces. She has collaborated on multi-media projects with legendary African drummer Kofi Ghanaba, avant-garde visual artist Guenther Uecker, the actress Edith Clever and groundbreaking choreographer Sasha Waltz, and has founded - together with Stephan Andreae - the annual festival Drums Summit Bonn.
Robyn Schulkowsky is particularly passionate about education. Since 1998, as founder of Rhythm Lab, she has taken drumming workshops to countless cities, incorporating indigenous drumming styles and patterns from around the globe, and involving students, professionals and aficionados alike in workshops and concerts. Primarily directed at children and teenagers, the project focuses on the idea of music as the experience and not the product, aiming to make rhythm tangible by experimenting with music, sound and movement. To this end, Robyn Schulkowsky works closely with the sound artist Lukas Kuehne, with whom she developed new percussion instruments. In spring 2009 she worked with 100 young budding musicians on her new music-theater project based on the story of Antigone which was presented in July in a former cattle-market hall in Ingolstadt (Germany) with resounding success.
Schulkowskys virtuosity has been captured on over 20 recordings, including CDs with violist Kim Kashkashian and trumpet players Reinhold Friedrich and Nils Petter Molvaer, and seminal recordings of compositions by Christian Wolff and Morton Feldman. She is a composer herself, and in 2005, she performed improvisations and her own compositions twice daily for two weeks on a sound sculpture in New Yorks Grand Central Station. In 2008 her opera The Child of the Sea Otter was premiered in Oldenburg (Germany) and repeated in Mannheim and Berlin.
Last season in Sweden, together with the Gothenburg Symphony and fellow renowned solo percussionists Anders Loguin, Mika Takehara, Eirik Raude and Anders Haag, Robyn Schulkowsky performed the critically-acclaimed premiere of Glorious Percussion by Sofia Gubaidulina under the baton of celebrated young conductor Gustavo Dudamel. This new ensemble has since named itself after the piece and has been appearing with several important orchestras, most recently with the Berlin Philharmonic.
This season, Robyn Schulkowskys frenetic global pace continues with a month-long tour of South America with trumpet player Reinhold Friedrich featuring concerts and workshops, as well as a US tour of an Armenian project with violist Kim Kashkashian."
- Drummerworld.
- "In this trilogy, space is the fundamental element in which music is developed and sounds are deployed. The three works were constructed by using certain sounds fixed in the acoustic space in relation to other sounds that are continually displaced, orbiting like satellites around the fixed ones and thus creating great spatial complexity"
- Cezame Music Agency - With streaming.
- "Daniel Teruggi (11 March 1952, La Plata, Argentina) is a French composer.
While taking a degree in physics at the National University of La Plata, he also studied music at the La Plata Conservatory (197377). He moved to France in 1977 and entered the electro-acoustics class at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique (CNSM) in Paris, gaining his diploma in 1980.
In 1983 he joined the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM). As a specialist in computer-generated music, he is particularly concerned with teaching, and with the SYTER (système en temps réel) audionumeric system. In 1984 he took over artistic responsibility for the group, and became its director in 1997. He has pursued a parallel career teaching at the Sorbonne since 1986.
Managing director of GRM (in 2012)."
- Discogs
- More Daniel Teruggi on History of Electronic / Electroacoustic Music (1937-2001) - CD 37 (Ubuweb)
- "Gerald Resch, born in 1975 in Linz, Austria, developed his economical approach to composition during his studies with Beat Furrer in Graz. Expanding upon this, Resch states, Encounters, junctures, abstract patterns etc. are all able to inspire the beginning of a composition. I like superimpositions, unforeseen changes of perspective and hidden symmetry. I also like to invent logical but surprising developments of simple material. This release demonstrates his preoccupation with plastic forms in Cantus Firmus, the perception of nature in Ein Garten and the omnipresence of a burdensome, loaded tradition. (Wolfgang Fuhrmann)
At the center of this release is the work for viola and seven instruments, Ein Garten. Pfade, die sich verzweigen. The German word verzweigen translates to ramification and this process is more than apparent upon listening to the piece. However, despite its daringness, Reschs music is always centered and accessible: as Wolfgang Fuhrmann puts it, one has the impression that the musical movement circles again and again around certain tonal centers or constellations of intervals not necessarily in the sense of diatonic tonality, but rather, in the sense of a disposition in the pieces ambit of pitch and sound, which ensures orientation. (Wolfgang Fuhrmann)"
Kairos Music - http://www.geraldresch.at/
Gerald Resch - grounds @ Soundcloud
- "Out Of Darkness, Light is the second studio album from Gunshae (pronounced Gun-shai), the Panambient orchestra compromised of Canadian dubstep pioneer, Kuma; and internationally renowned oboist and DJ, Lady Eve. The album presents eight tracks developed from improvisations recorded over a four year span in Vancouver, Cancun, Seattle, Uculet, San Francisco, Tokyo, Melbourne and New Smyrna Beach. Live performances were recorded and taken back to the Den Studios in Vancouver were they were over-dubbed, invoked and expanded upon.
Gunshae is live ambience at its most beguiling, an exploration of the grey area between electronic and classical musics. Its molten woodwinds and Satie in dub. Its heavy drones and music played by a band sitting on a veranda with Wong Kar-Wai. While these works certainly drift in the same musical sky as Stars Of the Lid, Zoviet France and Murcof, they are as the album's penultimate suite suggests, both celestial and oceanic. Happily content to be carried gently between the chill out room, the concert hall and the art gallery, Out Of Darkness, Light has no qualms in reminding you that sometimes, it just is.
While Gunshae's backbone is built on Kuma's loops and Lady Eve's woodwinds, Gunshae has never has never turned away from playing with others on an international scale. Australian poet Graham Colin opens the album with an invocation for experience on Air Into Gold while Tokyo analogue synth legend, Hataken, brings added drift to Celestial, Yet Oceanic, a song based on a performance he followed at the Soundwave Music festival in 2008. 2046 and What Would Wong Kar Wai Do? feature Vancouver clarinet virtuoso Shawn Earle and the shoegazer bass and vocals of Hong Kong's Pari Kishi. Vanessa Stovall's harp underpins Oceanic, Yet Celestial, beats out rhythm and sends shards of light everywhere. The album concludes with a remix of I Left My Heart At Arena Mexico by Mexicali electronic music icon and Static Discos label founder, Fax."
Ohm Resistance / Darla
- "Gunshae (pronounced Gun-shai) is the Panambient project of Canadian dubstep pioneer, Kuma, and renowned Oboist and DJ, Lady Eve.
Bridging a gap between two very distinct contemporary practices, Gunshae is what happens when a classically trained musician and a veteran DJ and producer with a thing for improvising jam on the sound of stuff and things.
Gunshae is live ambience at its most beguiling, an exploration of the grey area between electronic and classical musics.
Its molten woodwinds and Satie in dub. Its heavy drones and show tunes played by a band sitting on a veranda with Wong Kar-Wai. Its discrete music for the wifi generation.
Tossing aside classical musics obsession with adherence to the written score and live electronic performances stereotype of one guy behind a laptop checking his email, both members of Gunshae have been known to start the show on stage and finish up in the audience. Gunshae are not your average sound art duo or ambient performance act.
Breaking down barriers between audience and performer, Gunshae is as happy in the chill out room as it is the art gallery or concert hall. Each performance is completely unique, site/audience specific and completely devoted to embracing the moment.
These are Cascadian lullaby makers, crafting soundtracks made for trans-continental smudged sunsets."
The Conspiracy Group
Birgitte Alsted, electronics, vocals
Rasmus Schjærff Kjøller, accordion
- "Through several decades, the composer Birgitte Alsted (b. 1942) has been a pioneer of electro-acoustic music, finding the main inspiration for her music in literature and poetry. This album presents four of Alsted's key works for the first time on CD with the dramatic sound collage Agnete's Laughter as the captivating title work."
- "The Danish composer Birgitte Alsted (b. 1942) is inspired and fascinated by the sound and noise of everyday life, the implicit music of the surroundings, and the terms of the nonverbal communication between humans and other living creatures. In 2002 she combined 'Whhoommm', 'Sssscchhh' etc. with the words of a letter written by the poet Rilke in her work "Zu Versuchen, Die Fragen".
Birgitte Alsted is an experimental artist. She plays the violin and graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Music with final examination/debut concert in 1971. In 2006 she got her Master's degree in electronic music composition from the Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus, - but she began her compositional work as soon as 1972.
Birgitte Alsted has received numerous awards and scholarships, including National Arts Foundation 3-year scholarship in 1980, Borresen Prize in 1992, the Ancker Award scholarship ('Det Anckerske legat', a travelling-scholarship for artists) in 2003, and the National Arts Foundation 3-year scholarship in 2006. In 2011 she received The National Arts Foundation's Composer Prize for female composers.
Birgitte Alsted still plays the violin. Her work as a musician also influence her compositions, which often have dramatic and expressive character, and she works with acoustic instruments, computer and tape. Alsteds activities are extensive: from alternative modes of collective improvisation and composition with children to theater music, from music for modern dance to visual installations, solo works, vocal music, chamber music and orchestral music. For several years, Birgitte Alsted has worked with multimedia performances. This has enabled her to start working with electroacoustic music, where she has been particularly attracted to computer music's ability to manipulate sound, and she has experimented with the creation of multi-faceted sensory experiences with the use of literature and poetry, dance and light installations."
- Dacapo Records
Musicians:
Andrea Pellegrini: mezzo-soprano
Tanja Zapolski: piano
Alexander Zapolski: 1st violin
Anja Zelianodjevo: 2nd violin
Grigoriy Khodos: viola
Mette Spang-Hanssen: cello
Ida Bach Jensen: double-bass and strings
Thea Vesti Pedersen: acoustic guitar
Eskild Skovbakke Winding: percussion, harmonium and percussive piano
Johnny Stage: electric guitar, mandolin, autoharp and sitar
Ketil Duckert: trumpet and flugelhorn
Hans Nybo: bassoon
Martin Hall : music box, tapes and details
- "If Power Asks Why features a line of new Martin Hall songs performed by the mezzo-soprano Andrea Pellegrini and the classical pianist Tanja Zapolski. The Danish avant-garde ensemble Lydenskab also appears on the recordings and so does the double-bass player Ida Bach Jensen. The album is produced by Martin Hall and the greater part of the songs is arranged by the internationally acclaimed violinist Alexander Zapolski (the latter also performs as such on the recordings).
The production is based on a series of piano-based hybrid lieder, a collection of songs all characterized by a high degree of sombre drama titles such as MILFs, Cum and Schopenhauer, Rather Quotable than Honest and Hope is a Lack of Information might serve to illustrate the lyrical nature of the project. The songs are probably best described as passionate objections against the cultural imperatives of our times and culture and in particular the standardised parameters of desire. All in all the album contains some of Martin Halls most exuberant lyrical work ever.
Andrea Pellegrini is one of Denmarks most praised and awarded younger mezzo-sopranos. Tanja Zapolski has likewise gained great positive attention as a concert pianist during the 10?s, performing with most Danish symphony orchestras. Hall and Pellegrini have earlier collaborated on albums such as Camille (2002), Das Mechanische Klavier (2004) and Hospital Cafeterias (2009), whereas it is the first time Hall works with Zapolski."
Martin Hall
- "Began his musical training at the age of ten at the Piano and Music Academy of Copenhagen. First record release at the age of 17 as singer and composer in the avantgarde ensemble Ballet Mécanique whose debut album The Icecold Waters of the Egocentric Calculation from 1981 is regarded as a cornerstone in contemporary Danish music history (figures on the list over the 50 most important releases in Danish rock ever in the esteemed Danish rock encyclopedia Politikens Rockleksikon).
In 1995 Martin Hall was awarded with the prestigious three-year grant as a composer from The National Fund for the Endowment of The Art. He used the price to break with his current record company and single-handedly finance the production of Random Hold (1996), an album generally regarded as his most significant record release during the 90?s (the album being his second title to figure on the already mentioned Politiken chart).
During the 00?s Hall has collaborated with younger Danish artists such as Efterklang, Marybell Katastrophy, Bjørn Svin and Tone. His album Hospital Cafeterias from 2009 is considered to be yet another milestone in a still evolving career.
Halls current album If Power Asks Why was nominated for the Danish National Radios P2 Award 2013 Lyt til Nyt.
http://www.martinhall.com/
Joseph Byrd
- "The imaginative and carefully crafted music of Joseph Byrd (b. 1937) assumes an astonishing variety of guises: he was an integral part of the experimental arts scene in New York and Los Angeles in the 1960s and he founded the psychedelic rock band The United States of America, and its successor Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies, to name just the most salient. Byrds career resists easy categorization because his collective activities encompass a broader sound world than is typically admitted within the confines of a single genre. In this sense, Byrd possesses the spirit of radical exploration that has long characterized composers of the American experimental tradition. He initially moved to New York in 1960 to study with John Cage, but among the most influential of his experiences during this period were his two lessons with Morton Feldman, whose delicately floating music enchanted the young composer. The works on this recording provide a rich musical document of Byrds activities in New York between 1960 and 1963, when he studied with Feldman, served as an apprentice to Cage, and participated in the Fluxus group. Crafted with technical precision, all of the works were designed to explore the singularity of sound that was central to Byrds lessons with Feldman.
When Byrds music was performed at Carnegie Recital Hall in the spring of 1962, Eric Salzman of The New York Times described the concert as a thimbleful of tiny sounds that were generally just this side of the threshold of inaudibility. Initially, the thimbleful of tiny sounds assembled on this recording may not appear to anticipate the extraordinary diversity of Byrds subsequent work, but they reveal the key to his early studies and the foundation of his artistic development. As with much of Feldmans music, the low dynamic levels and subtly shifting timbres and textures persuade the listener to attend to the sounds more carefully, thereby enriching the perceptual experience."
New World Records
- "Recordings of works by Joseph Byrd, student of Morton Feldman and John Cage and frontman for The United States Of America, are being released by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble via New World Records.
Byrd collaborated with a number of Fluxus artists in the 1960s, and also formed Joe Byrd And The Field Hippies, recording psych-rock album The American Metaphysical Circus in 1969.
This release, Joseph Byrd NYC 19601963, recorded by contemporary music ensemble ACME, includes new recordings of "Animals", "Loops And Sequences" (written for Charlotte Moorman), "Water Music" (written for Max Neuhaus), "Four Sound*Poems" (each of which is dedicated to a woman from the experimental art scene at the time), plus "String Trio, Densities I".
- The Wire
- We have been playing the music of Derek Bermel for several years, returning to it time and again because its eclectic influences are rich and varied. Canzonas Americanas, released on Cantaloupe Music, brings the stylistic variety of his work together in one album, capturing the many musical traditions of North and South America that are part of Derek'sand ourworld.
Derek Bermel synthesizes the diverse musical languages of his time into a unique, thoroughly individual American voice that is tuneful and rich, engaging and sophisticated, says Alan Pierson, our Artistic Director. Canzonas Americanas establishes Derek as a composer firmly in an American tradition like Copland, Ives, Gershwin, and Ellington before him.
We are joined by the remarkable Luciana Souza whose voice evokes a Latin dreamscape in the last movement of the title track. Timothy Jones performs the song collection Natural Selection with theatricality. And Kiera Duffy adds her soprano to the arresting At the End of the World."
http://www.alarmwillsound.com/ - Cantaloupe Music - Soundcloud
- Described by the Toronto Star as an "eclectic with wide open ears", Grammy-nominated composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel has been widely hailed for his creativity, theatricality, and virtuosity. Bermel's works draw from a rich variety of musical genres, including classical, jazz, pop, rock, blues, folk, and gospel. Hands-on experience with music of cultures around the world has become part of the fabric and force of his compositional language.
Bermel has worked with a diverse array of musicians including Wynton Marsalis, Midori, John Adams, Paquito D'Rivera, Philip Glass, James Galway, Gustavo Dudamel, Luciana Souza, Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), and Stephen Sondheim. . . . ."
- http://www.derekbermel.com/bios.cfm