- "Time to Burn Judith Shatins third solo CD for innova Recordings presents a rich cross-section of her acoustic and electronic music. Called highly inventive on every level; hugely enjoyable and deeply involving, with a constant sense of surprise by The Washington Post, Shatins music combines vivid timbral hues with perceptually clear forms. Glyph (solo viola, string quartet and piano) opens the CD with a soaring performance by violist James Dunham, the Cassatt String Quartet and pianist Margaret Kampmeier.
On the title track, masterful oboist Aaron Hill and percussionists I-Jen Fang and Mike Schutz capture the explosive world Shatin created in response to the turmoil around us. The remaining four pieces show her inventive exploration of electronics and her mastery of their combination with acoustic instruments. Hosech Al Pney HaTehom (Darkness Upon the Face of the Earth) is about a world being born out of the subterranean darkness, lightning; out of chaos, life. It is also about a new world of sound, a music constructed from the basic DNA of sound, modulated sine waves.
Next is Grito del Corazón (Cry of the Heart), inspired by Goyas powerful Black Paintings and commissioned by Ensemble Barcelona Nova Música. This version, for two clarinets and electronics, is performed with electrifying clarity by F. Gerard Errante and D. Gause. Sic Transit extends the electronic realm in a new direction, pairing I-Jen Fang with computer-controlled acoustic instruments. Scored for percussionist and CADI (Computer Assisted Drumming Instrument) with six computer-controlled robotic arms the piece finds Shatin playing with different levels of control, just as the events of our lives sometimes seem within our own control and sometimes beyond our control.
The CD closes with the Cassatt String Quartets affecting performance of Elijahs Chariot, scored for amplified quartet and electronics made from processed shofar calls. Again, the music is suggestive of fire, this time the fiery chariot of Elijah rising up to Heaven." Innova Recordings Soundcloud with 4 tracks
- "Judith Shatin is a composer and sound artist whose musical practice engages our social, cultural, and physical environments. She draws on expanded instrumental palettes and a cornucopia of the sounding world, from machines in a deep coal mine, to the calls of animals, the shuttle of a wooden loom, a lawnmower racing up a lawn. Timbral exploration and dynamic narrative design are fundamental to her compositional design, while collaboration with musicians, artists and communities are central to her musical life. . . . . "
New on Emusic and released by Timpani in 2009: - "These two cds from timpani, both recorded in Luxembourg, offer an excellent introduction to one of the most exciting composers of today, one whose interest is predominantly in sound as sound, that aspect seized upon in these vividly recorded discs."
Peter Grahame - Woolf-Musical Pointers
- "Ivo Malec was born in Zagreb, Croatia. In 1959, he settled in France and joined Pierre Schaeffer in what was to become the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) one year later. When he arrived in Paris, Malec was already a fully equipped composer with a number of works to his credit, including a piano sonata (1949), a cello sonata (1956) and a symphony (1951) as well as several vocal works. He however considers his works written after 1960 as his first mature compositions. His work at the GRM was to prove extremely fruitful for his later musical progress. On the one hand, it allowed him to expand his expressive palette considerably; and, on the other hand, it made him conscious of the expressive potential of sound, as an object, so to say. From 1960 onwards, he regularly composed either electro-acoustic pieces and works for live instruments and electronics, such as Lumina (1968) for strings and tape, Cantate pour elle (1966) for soprano, harp and tape and Attaca (1986) for percussion and tape, for which he is particularly well-known and highly regarded. However, he never ceased to compose for more traditional orchestral and instrumental forces. From Sigma (1963) onwards, his orchestral works benefited from his experience in electro-acoustic music. In fact, as a number of other composers at that time, he asked the question as to how electro-acoustic devices could satisfyingly transfer to orchestral music. His mature composing career was devoted to finding viable answers to that question. From Sigma onwards, a number of substantial orchestral pieces such as Oral (1967) for actor and orchestra, one of his greatest pieces, Lied (1969) for 18 voices and 39 strings as well as the works heard on this CD provide several possible answers."
- Last.fm Malec @ Ubuweb Goodies
- "Duane Pitre's new album, Bridges, features two pieces taken from a suite of analogous compositions by the same name, and was composed by Pitre in 2012. The two pieces that comprise the album are meant to work together in sequence as a composite work; or they can be isolated and listened to on their own. The title derives its name from the original concept for this work, which was to bring together aspects of traditional Eastern music (such as compositional form and tuning) with Western musical traditions (such as in the church music of the Middle Ages and modern classical music). The result is an album that merges the ancient with the new, while creating a sound that is wholly its own." Important Records - Soundcloud
- "Duane Pitre is an American avant-garde composer, performer, and sound artist. His work often focuses on the tensions between electronic sound and acoustic instrumentation, chaos and discipline, as well as site-specificity and performativity. The composer frequently utilizes alternate tuning schemes that focus on microtonality, enabling him to explore unaccustomed harmonic intervallic relationships. He has created works for various instrumentation configurations such as string orchestra, his own bowed harmonic-guitar ensemble, string/wind ensembles, and more. . . ."
- More @ http://www.duanepitre.com/news-events-bio.php More Duane Pitre @ Emusers
Performers: Common Sense Ensemble, New Millennium Ensemble
- "As composer Dan Beckers debut solo CD, Fade is a manifesto of sorts, exploring his fascination with process in all its forms. Not just musical ones, he says, but sociological, mathematical, and natural processes as well. I fancy I can almost see them unfolding and whirling around me; all whizzing by, colliding, merging, often intersecting. I find great delight in this.
Interspersed throughout the album is a set of five ReInventions, essentially cover tunes of five of JS Bachs Inventions (played with cyborg-like panache by a Disklavier player piano). Becker asks the question: What would happen if one injected some postminimal processes into the preexisting ones already embedded in the DNA of these Inventions? These ReInventions are the result of that chemical reaction (think Nancarrow meets Bach on Reichs stoop.)
Other more personal chamber works fill out the CD. The opener "Gridlock", Becker's most performed work and a predictable favorite with musicians and audiences alike, has been called by Kyle Gann a virtual manifesto for postminimalist formalism." Fade, the title track, is something of a lullaby written for his yet-to-be born daughter. Beckers preferred world of musical processes proves impressively capable of capturing the emotionally tentative, hesitant and fragile state that all adoptive parents-to-be understand.
Keeping Time and A Dream of Waking complete the disc, showing new angles and approaches to how process can be embodied in a musical composition. For in the end this concept of process, when explored deeply, expands to embrace notions of relationship and ultimately community. And for Becker this is a good place for any obsession to lead.
Becker is the founder and Artistic Director of the Common Sense Composers Collective, and is the current Chair of Composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music."
- Innova Recordings - Soundcloud
- "Born in 1960, Dan Becker is a San Francisco-based composer whose wide-ranging achievements both exemplify and reflect a life dedicated to new music in America. Beckers artistic work has been described as post-minimalist due to the strong influence of works by Terry Riley, with whom he studied, and other minimalists of the early 1960s including La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Becker is also the founder and Artistic Director of the Common Sense Composers Collective, a member of the Board of Directors of the American Music Center, and a professor of composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Becker received his DMA in Composition from Yale University, where he also earned his MM and MMA degrees. His teachers have included Terry Riley, Jacob Druckman, Martin Bresnick, Elinor Armer, Poul Ruders and Louis Andriessen. Awards and grants include those from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001), Meet the Composer (2002/2008), American Music Center (2006), Live Music for Dance (2006), the America Composers Forum (2004), and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust (2003). His music has been performed at universities and festivals large and small, across the United States, including the Norfolk Summer Festival, Chicago Arts Series, Park City String Quartet Festival, Bates College American Music Festival, and many others.
The Common Sense Composers Collective is an eight-member SF-NYC based composers group committed to experimenting with the processes in which music is conceived, developed, and presented. Each year the composers of Common Sense collaborate with a different performing ensemble; past partners have included the Meridian Arts Ensemble, the New Millennium Ensemble, Twisted Tutu, the Dogs of Desire Ensemble, the American Baroque period instrument ensemble, the Robin Cox Ensemble and New Yorks Essential Music. Common Sense has released three CDs documenting their projects, and has also produced five editions of their Bay Area New Music Marathon titled OPUS415 (Nos. 4 and 5 presented by Other Minds), a showcase of the diverse voices of Bay Area composers and performers alongside a selection of special guests." Other Minds
- http://www.commonsensecomposers.org More Common Sense @ Gems from the New World & NWCRI catalogue
The magnificent Prism Quartet strikes again, this time with a combination of contemporary classical and Jazz.
PRISM Quartet is:Timothy McAllister, Zachary Shemon, Matthew Levy, Taimur Sullivan
- With guests: Tim Ries, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Jason Moran, Ben Monder, Jay Anderson, Bill Stewart, Francois Zayas and Richard Belcastro
- "As a guiding force behind the omnivorous PRISM Quartet, Matthew Levy has been a musical midwife: helping to birth a large and eclectic repertoire of works built around the endlessly versatile sound of the saxophone quartet. But while championing so many of his colleagues, from the internationally renowned to the young and emergent, Levy has done a great disservice to a contemporary American composer with a distinctive voice: namely, Matthew Levy.
Peoples Emergency Center is a chance for PRISM to finally focus on Levys own music, which draws freelyand often surprisinglyfrom classical, jazz, world, and rock traditions. The album begins with a particularly instructive example. Under the Sun is a three-part suite scored for piano (the redoubtable Jason Moran), saxophone choir, percussion, and, in its third and final movement, the Indian sitar. In the opening movement, Awakening, a keyboard/percussion groove serves as the engine driving the rustle and hubbub of a what? Are those birds taking flight and singing? Or is it the sound of the urban jungle yawning and stretching to life? Either way, the winds are overdubbed to form choirs of Philip Glass-style intensity, streaked through with jagged flashes of piano. With its striking collision of American Minimalism, the rhythms of Latin and African music, and the improvisation of jazz, Awakening is a major statement of intent at the start of the album.
The album includes three works written just for PRISM, including Lyric. Levys voracious musical appetite apparently includes the French Spectralists, composers like Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail, who create deeply-hued textures by analyzing the component parts of each sound and making those parts explicit, either by splitting the sound so that one or more of its overtones are audible, or reinforcing those harmonic components with other instruments. Working with this so-called harmonic series quickly moves the music out of standard Western tuning, and there are moments in Lyric that are both beautiful and unsettlingtake, for example, the almost metallic ringing sound of the sax choir that ends the piece, a sign of mourning for the composers mother, in whose memory the work was composed.
The recording also features four works, including Serial Mood, in which PRISM is joined by an all-star line-up of jazz artists. Serial Mood is a punning title: here, Levy manages to combine the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg, whose early 20th century experiments set music free of the constraints of tonality, with the strongly tone-centered modes of classical Greek music. The first part, Reflection, features Rudresh Mahanthappa, whose alto solo is full of movement and quicksilver changes of tone color, over a backdrop of softly roiling saxes and some rather insistent bass and drums, courtesy of Jay Anderson and Bill Stewart. The second half, Refraction, rides on a fierce post-bop groove, but the texture clears out in the middle to allow notable solos by Ben Monder, Tim Ries, and Matthew Levy himself.
- Innova Recordings - Soundcloud
Matthew Levy - "has been hailed by the Saxophone Journal as a complete virtuoso of the tenor saxophone and by the New York Times for his energetic and enlivening performances. A recipient of composition fellowships from the Independence Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he has scored four motion pictures, including PBSs Diary of a City Priest, featured at the Sundance Film Festival. His music is highlighted on three PRISM recordings on Koch and innova; he has also recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, Tzadik, and Grammavision; collaborated with a host of choreographers/dance companies, among them Peter Sparling and Scrap; and appeared as a guest artist with the Detroit Symphony and counter)induction. He holds three degrees from the University of Michigan, where he was a recipient of the Lawrence Teal Award, and has served on the faculties of the Universities of Michigan, Redlands, and Toledo. From 2000-2011, he served as Director of the Philadelphia Music Project at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage."
- http://www.prismquartet.com/about/ensemble/ More Prism Quartet @ Emusers</div>
- "Philip Blackburns music has been called trippy, hallucinatory, intense, and riveting. Music of Shadows, his follow up to the 2012 Ghostly Psalms (innova 246), is all those things and more. Verging on transcendental, it contains three substantial works that are explorations of ways of listening as much as they are music in the usual sense. They offer sensually sonic worlds to inhabit and wallow in; ambient landscapes of the dreaming mind and what you might hear there.
Two of them began as underground soundscape installations, as part of Blackburns Sewer Pipe Organ to be played back inside St. Pauls storm drain system near the Mississippi. The sounds emerging from manholes across a wide area brought awareness to the acoustic spaces normally hidden from daily consciousness. One work, Dry Spell, started as a steampunk cityscape of lost children amidst invisible Victorian factories, and distant voices of heavenly choirs and innocents trapped in forgotten playgrounds. By contrast, Still Points, is a more geometrical fantasy on the overtones of the 60-cycle electrical hum; a dance of pure rhythmic proportions (made on a recreation of Cowell and Theremins Rhythmicon instrument).
The final work, The Long Day Closes, is a modest statement on mortality originally created as the soundtrack to part of Blackburns film, The Sun Palace an experimental multimedia work paying tribute to the TB era and one particular Colorado sanatorium where some of his ancestors chased the cure. With a 40-voice chorus from UC-Colorado Springs, instrumental ensemble, tape, and a solo clarinet recording by Bob Paredes added long after his death, the music is a sustained, soaring homage to those who live at the cusp of life and death every day. The sensation is not too far from classics such as Bryars The Singing of the Titanic or Ives The Unanswered Question.
The world of vision has shades of light and dark, densities, movement, and space, with transparent layers and areas of focus. Blackburns sound world likewise maps the inner ear to the outer world in stunningly imaginative, time-defying ways; leaving impressions and shadows in its wake."
- "Philip Blackburn is an environmental sound artist, composer, author (on Harry Partch), film-maker, designer, and sculptor. His musical pantheon includes Kenneth Gaburo, Harry Partch, Henry Brant, Pauline Oliveros, Harley Gaber, and many others he has encountered through his work at the innova label.
Music of Shadows was supported by New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust."
- Innova Recordings - Soundcloud</div>
- "A Special Light collects various works by composer David Macbride over the span of the last decade. But as much as this makes Macbrides document, a journal of a certain distinct period, it also remains a canvas onto which listeners can paint their own experiences. We each bring our own story to whatever music we experience, writes Macbride in the liner notes. So a single piece communicates a myriad of personal stories.
Throughout, Macbride explores his relationship with his Chinese heritage (his mother was from China, his father from Scotland), a part of himself that he had never directly addressed in his work before. In Kelet, it comes through in the vocal inflections of the violin, reminiscent of the Chinese erhu. Other Asian elements arise in the temple bowls of Swinging and the Indian-based melodic modes of the cello pieces 1 x 4 and 1 x 8. All of these pieces, Macbride writes, reflect in one way or another Chinese musical and cultural traditions as I become more comfortable being direct in personalizing recognizable Eastern styles and aesthetics.
But beyond cultural signals or specificities, Macbrides music has what he calls a basic sense of serenity and focus. Underlying the diverse instrumentation and approaches of each piece is that reflective and meditative state, whether the piece is in memory of a dear friend gone too soon (A Special Light) or part of a physical sound installation as with the excerpts from Percussion Park.
- Innova Recordings
-"David Macbride has written numerous works, ranging from solo and chamber to orchestral music, with particular emphasis on music for percussion. His works have been performed extensively in the United States and abroad: notable performance include the Hartford Symphony, the Arditti String Quartet, League ISCM, Percussive Arts Society International Convention, World Saxophone Congress, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. A recent work, Percussion Park, is a musical landscape where the audience is invited to freely roam the performance site in search of the music.
Commissions include The Roberts Foundation New Works Initiative, Chamber Music America, and the Concert Artists Guild. Solo CDs entitled Conundrum: The Percussion Music of David Macbride featuring Benjamin Toth and In Common: Duets by David Macbride are on the Innova Recordings label. David Macbride: A Composers Journey with the Poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca is available on Albany Records, as is In Passing: Solo Piano Music, composed and performed by the composer.
Macbride has been extremely active in bringing diverse musics to the Greater Hartford community, having produced numerous events in Elizabeth Park and other venues over the past fifteen years. He regularly performs in schools and senior citizen homes, and received a 2001 University of Hartford Community Service Award in recognition of his contributions.
As a pianist, Macbride was invited to give a recital tour of Peru by the Instituto Cultural Peruano NorteAmericano, and has performed recitals in Spain and Mexico as well. Macbride is Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the Hartt School, University of Hartford."
- "The music of Franz Martin Olbrisch is not intended to mean anything it wants to be what it naturally is: an acoustical experience which becomes an artwork through the act of listening. He places the focus on one particular inherent aspect of the music, which he then exploits to the limit: the endless variety of sound.
He frequently requires from interpreters complex or unusual ways of playing which produce unforeseeable combinations of sounds. The situation of the listener is also important, because it is impossible to follow simultaneously the often complex and many-faceted musical processes. Listeners must focus on particular aspects in order to register, perceive, and understand, in their own way, the piece as an artwork. Olbrisch does not consider the impossibility of controlling each detail of the interpretation and the listeners perception a deficit, but rather a necessary artistic characteristic an approach which he developed further in his orchestral work craquelé.
Furthermore many of Olbrischs works are therefore characterized by an engagement with the acoustical qualities of instruments and their specific sound-producing mechanisms. This approach is noticeable for example in his work flöte, sounds & live-electronics in which he derives the basic compositional principles entirely from the fingering techniques of a standard transverse flute.
For his orchestral work Grain, Olbrisch uses computer-assisted procedures to analyse the significant features of the noise sequence produced by a drinks machine, from the insertion of the coin to the rattling delivery of the can. The material obtained therefrom is used for the orchestral parts.
In coupures de temps..., all instruments play in the same tempo, but nonetheless each part follows a different rhythmic subdivision of the basic pulse, so that different groupings take place simultaneously. Through this independent temporal organization of the individual instruments, there is a continuous divergence and convergence in the parts."
- Wergo
David Rosenboom, composition and electronics William Winant, percussion
-"David Rosenboom (b.1947) is considered a pioneer in American experimental music. This release of his Zones of Influence (1984-85) documents for the first time the complete version of a major composition for percussion and computer/electronics that introduced new virtuoso performance techniques along with significant developments in real-time algorithmic composition and advanced interactive linking of percussion instruments with software. Few solo percussion works exist with the scope of this composition. Though the work has been performed extensively, it has never been fully recorded for public release until now.
Zones of Influence is a five-part cycle of works for in which the percussionist's performance is processed and transformed in a special way. This way involves not just transforming the percussion instruments' sounds on an acoustic level, but processing based on information contained in complex patternings manifested in the percussionist's performance. This constitutes real-time algorithmic processing or algorithmic composition driven by the musical structure of what the percussionist plays. For its time, Zones of Influence introduced historically innovative approaches to how real-time compositional algorithms may be considered as key components of a score. It also introduced a technique for making sequences of continuously evolving variations on musical materials, called morphological transformations . These transformations, in turn, outlined musical trajectories in what qualities; and from a system of multi-part counterpoint made with these trajectories , the musical materials of Zones of Influence emerged. Indeed, all the musical materials for Zones of Influence were generated with these tools, starting with the musical features contained in two long, 60-note, melodies, which were freely composed in advance.
Each of the five works in this set involves entirely different percussion setups, written scores and computer algorithms. Since the piece was composed before the proliferation of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), special interface electronics were constructed to connect the percussion instruments to a computer assisted digital instrument known as the Touché . This innovative, computer instrument was collaboratively designed by Donald Buchla and David Rosenboom in Berkeley, Ca, in 1979-1980. Zones of Influence was written for percussionist, William Winant and the Touché." Pogus Procuctions - Avant Music review - More Rosenboom @ Emusers
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
- "William Winant (b. 1953) is a multi-faceted percussion artist with over 200 recordings, has collaborated with such renowned artists as John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Anthony Braxton, James Tenney, Cecil Taylor, George Lewis, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, Joan LaBarbara, Oingo Boingo, Kronos Quartet, Sonic Youth, Mr. Bungle, Yo-Yo Ma, Mark Morris, Merce Cunningham, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio. Composers who have written for him include John Cage, Lou Harrison, John Zorn, Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, David Rosenboom, Larry Polansky, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, Terry Riley, Fred Frith, and Wadada Leo Smith. He teaches at Mills College and the University of California at Santa Cruz."
- "Composer Lee Weisert, faculty member at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes acoustic and electro-acoustic music that seeks to find, through experimentation, tinkering, and unconventional approaches, a ritualistic and expressively deep world of sound. From Triangle Umbrella Octopus, a collage of sounds made from rewired childrens toys, to Hohle Fels, recorded with Weisert playing only key click sounds on flutes and clarinets, his music manages to both excavate fresh timbral territory while still retaining a sense of narrative and architecture, something often lost when composers dig deep to unearth new textures. Pianist Clara Yangs poignant performance on the Messiaen-esque Erard stands out on this disc as a monologue amidst the otherwise electronics dominated program, but also reveals another rich side of Weiserts writing, and one that provides context for the lush verticalities we hear in the electro-acoustic work Shirt of Noise. Also notable is saxophonist Matthew McClures performance on the dystopic track, Any thing that is Strang, intentionally mixed as if the performer found himself underwater or behind a thick curtain. Each work on this engaging recording comes from a finely considered starting point, making these pieces not just fascinating end products, but also documentations of a composer interested in rigging up unlikely processes as the genesis for new work." New Focus Recordings - Soundcloud
- "Lee Weisert (b. 1978) is a composer of instrumental and electronic music. His recent work draws inspiration from a wide variety of scientific disciplines and reinterprets their respective principles into an artistic context.
His instrumental music has been played by nationally recognized performers and ensembles, including Steve Schick and the red fish blue fish percussion ensemble, the Callithumpian Consort, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and the JACK string quartet. His pieces have been performed at several music festivals including the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP 2009, 2011), June in Buffalo (2008), and New Interfaces In Musical Expression (NIME 2009, 2012).
His electronic music, composed primarily in cSound and MAX/MSP, deals with algorithmic and chaotic structures in 4- and 8-channel spatialization. Along with composer Jonathon Kirk, he is a member of the Portable Acoustic Modification Laboratory (PAML), a collaborative sound installation team. PAML's most recent project, Cryoacoustic Orb, uses hydrophones frozen inside several large spheres of ice to create a dense and naturally-evolving soundscape.
Lee has degrees in music composition from the University of Colorado (BM), California Institute of the Arts (MM), and Northwestern University (DM). His primary composition instructors have been James Tenney, Michael Pisaro, Jay Alan Yim, and Chris Mercer. He is currently an assistant professor at UNC Chapel Hill."
- "Robert Erickson (1917-1997), one of the important American composers of the late twentieth century, is fondly remembered as an influential teacher who counted such figures as Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick and Paul Dresher among his students. The quartets chart his evolution as a composer over the arc of his career. The first was written in 1950 while he was still in the process of finding his compositional voice and is the most "classical" of the four, looking back to the Second Viennese School. The Second Quartet (1956) is acknowledged as the watershed moment in his career, the work where the compositional tropes that would characterize his music henceforth first manifest themselves in full. The final two come from the last stage of his career just before he was struck down with the debilitating disease that would, for all intents and purposes, end his creative life in 1987. Solstice was written in 1985, almost thirty years after the second, and Corfu followed shortly after in 1986. The quartets are fundamental to any understanding of his work and receive their world-premiere recordings here."
- New World Records More Robert Erickson @ Emusers
Two albums fit for both N&N threads, thus the double posts:
Fantastic news from Denovali Records by Mathew Collings - "Must check outs" for Ben Frost fans ! Composed, Performed and Recorded by Matthew Collings
Except Strings on Everything you love and Toms performed by McFalls Chamber Ensemble, taken from 'News from Nowhere', composed by Matthew Collings, recorded by Alex Fiennes
French Horn by Matt Giannotti
Clarinet and Bass Clarinet on Stills by Pete Furniss
Violins by on Stills and Cicero by Paul Evans
Additional Drum Recording on Silence is a Rhythm Too by Daniel Rejmer
Toms features recordings from 'The Acoustic Amplifier', designed by Matthew Collings, Gareth Griffiths and Giorgios Aposkotis
- "Silence seems to be harder and harder to achieve in this technologically saturated age. Collings admits that it reveals the habits of his own hearing, from being obsessed with its opposite: noise. Silence Is A Rhythm Too is about trying to find grace, space and expanse as much as tension and menace, and reconciling the two.
Still being intrigued by the idea of materials on the edge of collapse, he catches them up in their dying breath: The record is full of these processes, including prepared amplifiers and electronics pushed to the extreme to coax new sounds, close-micing and high volume. Despite the fact that most of his work is mediated by technology, hes far more excited by the sound of acoustic. Featuring brass ensembles and a string quartet the instruments and sounds are full of cracks, breath, embedding rough materials informed by luscious intentions. Silence Is A Rhythm Too keeps an eye on the small textural details as it is about harmony and physicality in the moment where silence and noise meet."
Mathew Collings - Splintered Instruments
Composed and Performed by Matthew Collings
Except 'Vasilia', Composed by Collings/Frost
Produced by Ben Frost
Drums and Additional Percussion on 'Vasilia' and 'They Meet on the Subway' by Brady Swan
Clarinet and Bass Clarinet by Pete Furniss
Contrabass by Caitlin Callahan
Cimbalom and Theremin by Frank Aarnick
Violin on 'Pneumonia loves the Moon' by Paul Evans
Violin on 'Routine' by Lorcan Doherty
Trombone by Helgi Hrafn Jonsson
Trumpet by Ari Bragi
Additional Synth, Piano and Prepared Piano on 'Vasilia' by Ben Frost
- "Splintered Instruments is not an empty claim. It is the sound of acoustic components on the verge of collapse, as if spitting out something articulate with their dying breath. It is real-world, analog, dusty and broken, but still forward-looking.
Matthew Collings the Edinburg-based composer and producer makes his solo debut with this Fluid Audio release. He says, Emotionally this record comes out of reckoning with the destructive forces in my life. Ive felt my whole life as if there is an immense, violent force ready to come out of me. I wanted to finally reach it and reckon with it. Here it rears its head, filtered through melody.
Of the albums spilling percussion, exquisite spans of silence and its almost petroleum viscidity, Collings writes, Very few thing in nature are truly repetitive. There is always subtle variation and imprecision. Its a revolt against machines: precision doesnt express anything and is pretty unnatural. Everything I play is messy, but on the border of being out of place. I use the computer for convenience, not as a principle. It is electronic only because I dont have the hands or people to do it all at once. If I could, then I would. Nearly all of Splintered Instruments is organic, played on acoustic instruments or sourced from physical objects and then manipulated, often considerably.
- "Collings's work contrasts the crushed guitars and textures of My Bloody Valentine or Sonic Youth with structures more akin to contemporary classical composers like Steve Reich or David Lang. In his powerful live performances, he uses the amplifier as an instrument and the guitar as a control device for innovative digital processes. Using numbers of 'prepared amplifiers', he coaxes unique sounds by placing bells, rice and wood directly onto the speaker cone and manipulating the physical vibrations with his fingers, producing a highly visual and physical performance.
These approaches a viscerally demonstrated on his debut full-length release 'Splintered Instruments' (2013). This music is textural, melodic and often sonically overwhelming.
He received an ALT-W award from New Media Scotland in 2012 for 'The Third Mind', an algorithmic cinema performance and installation with Erik Parr, premiered at sell-out shows at Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA). He was recently invited to participate at the 50th Design Biennial in Ljubliana, Slovenia (2014).
His work for films includes a specially commissioned live score for Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent classic, 'The Man with the Movie Camera' for the Reykjavik Design Festival (2010) and an invitation to work on 'The Invisibles' (2010), a commission from Amnesty International with Ben Frost, featuring Gael Garcia Bernal. His score for Ha?kon Palsson ?s film 'Guilt' was recently performed at the opening of the Glasgow Short Film Festival.
His work has also featured in Installations at Glasgow City Halls (2011), Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Dundee Neon Digital Arts Festival (2010, UK), Burning Man Festival (2010, USA), Chattanooga Gallery of Contemporary Art (2010, USA), Icelandic Academy of Arts (Iceland, 2009) and Manipulate Festival (UK, 2011).
He has performed alongside many respected artists in his field, including Tim Hecker, Ben Frost, Chris Corsano, Nico Muhly and Jasper TX.
He is currently developing an audio-visual 'opera' for strings, clarinet, electronics and real-time visuals, entitled 'A Requiem for Edward Snowden' (2014)"
- George Antheil was quite a character in the music of the first half of the last century. He authored a book, Bad Boy of Music, which is still in print. He was at the noisy premiere riot of The Rite of Spring in Paris and reported that he wasn’t a bit concerned for himself because he had a loaded pistol in his pocket. After moving to Hollywood to escape the Nazi, like so many other composers in Europe, he continued his career writing scores for the movies.
His Ballet Mecanique of 1924 was originally written to accompany a Dadaist film in which Fernand Léger participated. In its public performance he intended to shake things up by creating a work which was more to look at than to hear, which parodied the trend for “industrialized music” and broke many of the rules of what classical music should really be. It is scored for 16 pianolas (a sort of low-budget version of the Welte-Mignon Vorsetzer), two standard pianos, three xylophones, seven electric bells, three propellers, a siren, four bass drums and one tam-tam. That’s why some called it more of a work to be seen than to be heard. It is relentlessly loud and cacophonous, with over 600 time signature changes in it. At the New York premiere the person operating the siren goofed and it wasn’t heard until everyone was leaving and the concert was over, and the work was considered a colossal failure. Antheil was the most famous American musician in Europe at the time.
Due to new technology that now makes Antheil’s original vision possible, a new performance first took place in Germany in 1996, and had 13 more performances. That has been further refined by G. Schirmer, which has published MIDI sequences and samples on a CD-ROM along with the score and parts. Two grand pianos were custom-modified using a MIDI sequence file which was created by running copies of the original rolls made for the Pleyel pianola thru an optical scanner. The many errors in the rolls for the single pianola were reconstructed from Antheil’s written score by Paul Lehrman and Dr. Jürgen Hocker and have been used for most performances since the 1990s. The “bell-box” is also MIDI-controlled and there is a custom click track the conductor hears over headphones to keep everything together.
So what’s it like? Much more accurate than earlier recordings of the work but still a noisy rout. Being in hi-res surround makes it more of a spatial experience; otherwise I probably wouldn’t have wanted to hear it again, frankly. The note booklet is a kick.
A Jazz Symphony is quite a contrast to the ballet. Paul Whiteman had commissioned it in 1925 for his second Experiment in Modern Music concert in Carnegie Hall—the first of which premiered Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. It didn’t make it for that concert, but was later performed in Carnegie Hall by the “all-Negro” W.C. Handy Orchestra (Handy got a more experienced conductor to lead it) with Antheil as the piano soloist. It borrows from Rhapsody in Blue—Antheil was known for blatant quoting other well-known music in his works. Stravinsky and Scott Joplin get some notes in this one, and the 13-minute work ends most oddly with a Viennese waltz.
- "George Antheil (1900-1959) was an American composer—born in Trenton, New Jersey—who began his professional career in Europe, where he was friends with, among many others, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway, Eric Satie, and Igor Stravinsky. In the early '20s, he lived at the literal center of English-language culture in Europe: above Sylvia Beach's legendary Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on the Rue de l'Odéon, in Paris's Latin Quarter. (Beach was the original publisher of Joyce's controversial and groundbreaking Ulysses.)
Antheil wrote over 300 musical works in all major genres, including symphonies, chamber works, film music, and operas. He was extremely outspoken and articulate, and wrote numerous articles, as well as an autobiography, Bad Boy of Music, which is still in print.
As a young composer, he considered himself to be quite the revolutionary, and his music, especially in his early career, employed many unusual sound sources and combinations of instruments. In many ways, both musical and technical, he was far ahead of his time. His concerts routinely caused riots all over Europe, which at the time was considered a sign of genius.
Besides composing, Antheil was an excellent writer, an inventor, and a student of many disciplines, including endocrinology, criminal justice, and military history. He was co-holder of a remarkable patent (with actress Hedy Lamarr) for a "secret communications system" which is today in wide use and known as "spread-spectrum technology" — although neither he nor Lamarr ever received a dime for it.
Antheil left Paris in the late '20s and went to Berlin, and then as German society began to fall under the influence of the Nazis, returned permanently to America. He settled in Hollywood, where he enjoyed a reasonably successful career as a composer for film and television. He died in 1959."
- "NOT I is performed by Klangforum Wien, under the direction of Clement Power, with Agata Zubel herself performing the vocals. The record encompasses pieces based on the poetry of Wis?awa Szymborska (Labirynt), Czes?aw Mi?osz (Aforyzmy na Mi?osza), Samuel Beckett (NOT I) and one instrumental piece (Shades on Ice)."
- “Aforyzmy na Mi?osza” (for solo soprano, string quintet, percussion, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, trumpet and accordion) was produced for the Sacrum Profanum festival on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Czes?aw Mi?osz. The lyrics for the song were taken from a range of Mi?osz’s work, one can hear fragments of both his poems and prose in the song. It was first performed on the 15th of September 2011 at the Sacrum Profanum festival , at a concert in the Museum of Urban Engineering. Agata Zubel herself performed the vocal solo and Clement Power led the Klangforum Wien orchestra."
- “Shades of Ice” (for clarinet, cello, and electronics) is the only piece on the KAIROS CD without vocals. The piece was made for the London Sinfonietta chamber orchestra, as part of the “Sonic Exploration” series. It was first performed on the 20th of October 2011 in London by Mark van de Wiel and Tim Gill. It is a musical representation of the composer’s fascination with the Icelandic landscape, in particular the Vatnajökull glacier, the biggest in Europe. “It’s the most ‘picturesque’ piece I have ever written” says Agata Zubel."
- "The album ends with the titular “NOT I” for vocals, instrumental group and electronics, written by Zubel in 2010. The composition has been distinguished many times, among others, at the UNESCO Rostrum of Composers in Prague, and with the first ever Polonica Nova award. “I think that these rewards neither hinder nor help me. Although it is very nice, because it is a confirmation that what we are doing has an impact” – comments the composer on her successes." http://culture.pl/en/work/not-i-agata-zubel
- "Agata Zubel was born in Wroc?aw and graduated with a distinction from the local Karol Lipinski Academy of Music after studying composition and voice. To deepen her artistical understanding she obtained a doctorate in musical arts in 2004 and furthermore received scholarships from the Ministry of Culture, the Rockefeller Foundation, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung and the Executive Board of the City of Wroclaw and studied abroad in the Netherlands. She is currently a lecturer on the faculty of the Academy of Music in Wroc?aw. Modern music occupies a special place in her repertoire and as a vocalist she has participated in many prestigious performances. Together with the composer and pianist Cezary Duchnowski she established the ElettroVoce Duo in 2001 and consequently premiered and recorded numerous works by contemporary composers. In the past years she performed Chantefleurs et Chantefables by Witold Lutoslawski (Musica Polonica Nova), DW9 by Bernhard Lang (The Warsaw Autumn) and Luci mie traditrici by Salvatore Sciarrino (Nostalgia Festival) and many more. She received the annual “Orpheus” Award of Polish music critics for the title role in C. Duchnowski’s opera Martha’s Garden. Agata Zubel also participated in an experimental improvisation project during the International Courses of Composition in Darmstadt. She has given many concerts abroad: in Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland, Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Greece, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Korea, Canada and the United States. She worked together with famous modern music ensembles - Klangforum Wien, musikFabrik, London Sinfonietta, Eighth Blackbird Ensemble, Seattle Chamber Players. She has won several competitions in the fields of both voice and composition. In 2005 she received the prestigious “Passport” Award of the “Polityka” weekly for classical music, was awarded the Wroc?aw Music Award for her work with ElettroVoce and was the winner of the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in 2013 to just name a few. In 2010 her opera-ballet Between was premiered in the Grand Theatre of the National Opera in Warsaw and in 2011 she was commissioned to write another opera for this theatre which should become Oresteia." Kairos Music
Content: Sonata per sei for two pianos, three percussionists and sampler keyboard (2006) Psalm 151 in memoriam Frank Zappa, for percussion solo or four percussionists (1993), version for four percussionists Kosmos pour un ou deux pianos (1961, rev. 1999), version for two pianos
- "Béla Bartók plays a major role in many works by Peter Eötvös. The love of Bartók’s music first appears in the piano piece “Kosmos”. The title refers to Bartók’s famous piano cycle “Mikrokosmos”. However, the work also bears the title “Kosmos” because Yuri Gagarin’s famous space flight was about to take place when it was written in March 1961. Eötvös was then 17 years old, and Gagarin excited the young composer’s imagination.
On the occasion of the 125th anniversary of Bartók’s birth in 2006, Eötvös wrote a piano concerto in which he further developed Bartók’s ideas and thought processes. The concerto is entitled “CAP-KO”, an acronym for “Concerto for Acoustic Piano, Keyboard, and Orchestra”. The piano resources are extended by use of a computer, which adds further sounds to those being played – a revolutionary technology that Eötvös wants to be understood as a symbol of Bartók’s pioneering spirit. The concerto centres on the famous Bartók cascades of octaves and sixths. Eötvös has twice re-arranged “CAP-KO” for other instrumentations, e.g. as “Sonata per sei” for two pianos, three percussionists, and sampler keyboard.
Among the musicians Eötvös has always admired is Frank Zappa. When Zappa died in 1993 at the young age of 42, Eötvös responded with grief and anger. He said, “In connection with Zappa’s premature and meaningless death, one really cannot praise God, but must protest.” He composed a piece that gives expression to this protest. Since the 150 psalms in the Bible do not deal with protest, the piece became Psalm 151: “This is the one that is not in the Bible.” Wergo
- "The Schlagquartett Köln [Percussion Quartet Cologne] made their debut at the Witten Days for New Chamber Music in 1989. Their multi-faceted and adventurous repertory ranges widely through percussion music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Numerous concerts, radio productions, and premieres of works by Carola Bauckholt, Edison Denissow, Beat Furrer, Nicolaus A. Huber, Wolfgang Rihm, Dieter Schnebel, Salvatore Sciarrino, Gerhard Stäbler, Volker Staub, Casper Johannes Walter, and many others document the now more than 20 years of continuous work undertaken by this unusual instrumental combination.
In close collaboration with the younger generation of composers, the musicians of the ensemble have created considerable opportunity for the solution of compositional problems through the development of innovative playing techniques and the construction of special instruments.
In addition to their work with the ensemble, the individual members concertize as soloists and have been engaged by well-known orchestras and chamber music ensembles: among them Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble musikFabrik, Ascolta Ensemble, and Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin. The Schlagquartett Köln appears often in international festivals and is active in the realization of music theater projects, including cooperation with the Düsseldorf theater and opera house and the State Theater in Wiesbaden.
In 2003, the ensemble was awarded the support prize of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.
- "Peter Eötvös was born on 2 January 1944 in Székelyudvarhely (Transylvania). At the age of 14, Zoltán Kodály admitted him to his composition class at the Music Academy in Budapest. In 1966, a scholarship permitted him to relocate to the Federal Republic of Germany where he sought contact with the musical avant-garde in Cologne. He subsequently performed in concerts with the Stockhausen Ensemble (1968-1976) and was employed as sound engineer in the West German Radio electronic studio in Cologne. At the invitation of Pierre Boulez, Eötvös conducted the opening concert of the IRCAM in Paris 1978 and was subsequently appointed as musical director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain. He gave his debut at the London PROMS in 1980 and conducted the first performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera “Donnerstag aus Licht” the following year at the Scala in Milan. Eötvös was appointed as principal guest conductor of a number of international orchestras: the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart and, since 2009, also the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Vienna. With the foundation of the International Peter Eötvös Institute for Young Conductors and Composers, Eötvös created a platform for the transfer of acquired knowledge and experience to the next generation. He taught at the Musikhochschule in Karlsruhe from 1992, took up an appointment as professor at the Musikhochschule in Cologne and subsequently returned to Karlsruhe in 2002 for a further five years.
Eötvös views music as an intensive form of communication between composer, performer and the audience. His ability of creating unusual tonal worlds is particularly displayed in his orchestral works, for example in zeroPoints, composed in 1999 in homage to Pierre Boulez. The title of the work is a reference to the historical “zero hour” in electronic music, although the integrated sound effects are in fact produced exclusively on orchestral instruments. The works Jet Stream for trumpet and orchestra (2002) and Seven for solo violin and orchestra (2006/2007) both feature a solo instrument as the focus of action. The composition CAP-KO (2005) which is dedicated to Béla Bartók develops a totally new form of piano concerto. The work exists in three different versions: a concerto with orchestra for one solo pianist who alternates between an acoustic grand piano and electronic keyboard, as a double concerto for two acoustic solo pianos with orchestral accompaniment and as an ensemble work for two pianos, sampler and percussion (Sonata per sei).
Eötvös can be counted among the most successful operatic composers of our time. The libretto of the chamber opera Radames (1975/1997) originated from a textual concept by the composer, whereas later opera projects are based on master works of world literature. In 2002, Le Balcon, based on the play by Jean Genet was premiered at the Festival in Aix-en-Provence. Angels in America (2004) is based on the cult play by Tony Kushner which has been regarded as a key text in American literature since the 1990s. The opera Love and Other Demons, originating from a novel by the Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, transports us into the world of Columbia in the 18th century with its superstition, desire and religious obsession and was premiered to great acclaim at the 2008 Glyndebourne Festival. In 2010, Die Tragödie des Teufels was premiered at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich.
Eötvös has received numerous international honours and awards including the Hungarian Bartók Prize (1997), the Christoph und Stephan Kaske Prize (2000), the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award (2002) and the prize SACD Palmarès in the category "Prix Musique" (2002). Eötvös has been a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, the Hungarian Academy of Letters and Arts (Széchenyi Iroldami és M?vészeti Akadémia), the Saxon Academy of the Arts in Dresden and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music since 2000. He was also awarded the title of Commandeur de l`Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2003) and 2004 the Cannes Classical Award in the category "Best Living Composer" at the MIDEM. He received the Frankfurt Music Prize in 2007 and the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale in 2011."
- "Cirque (Circus) was not intentionally composed for dance, but was from the very beginning connected to the dancer and choreographer Bernardo Montet: in 1989, the RTVE (Spanish television) commissioned a video-dance from director Robert Cahen who asked Michèle Bokanowski to write the music; the result, Solo, was filmed in Paris in the Arènes de Lutèce, and was choreographed and danced by Bernardo Montet on the first musical sequences sketched on the theme of the circus. In October 1995, Bernardo Montet premiered a choreography for eight dancers on Cirque.
Cirque was produced in the studios of Kira BM Films and of Les Musiques de la Boulangère, both in Paris (France). The concert premiere was on May 23, 1994 in the Socar factory in Crest (France) during the first Futura festival. The recordings used in this music were produced between March 1988 and October 1993. The accordion was played by Jean-Louis Matinier." Electrocd
- "Coming from a family of musicians (professionals on her mother’s side, amateurs on her father’s side), she read, at the age of 22, À la recherche d’une musique concrète (In Search of a Concrete Music) by Pierre Schaeffer and decided to study composition. After a classical education in harmony, she met Michel Puig, a student of René Leibowitz, who taught her composition and analysis according to Schönbergian Principles. In September 1970, she began a two-year course at the Research Department of the ORTF under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer. At the same time, she participated in a sound synthesis research group, studied computer music at the Faculté de Vincennes as well as electronic music with Éliane Radigue. Between 1972 and ’84, she composed essentially for the concert — Pour un pianiste, Trois chambres d’inquiétude, Tabou — and for film — music for the short films by Patrick Bokanowski as well as for his feature film L’Ange. Since 1985, she has composed for television, for theatre — with Catherine Dasté — and for dance, with choreographers Hideyuki Yano, Marceline Lartigue, Bernardo Montet, and Isabelle Kürzi."
New double album from composer,Performer on Didjeridu & Keyboards, Naturalist & Recorder of Birdsong and Master of Just Intonation, Ron Nagorcka:<div><a href="http://www.emusic.com/album/ron-nagorcka/atom-bomb-becomes-folk-art/15252342/"><img src="http://cf-images.emusic.com/music/images/album/152/523/15252342/600x600.jpg" alt="Atom Bomb Becomes Folk Art album cover"> </a><br></div><div>- "Atom Bomb (1977) (Golden Fur: Samuel Dunscombe, Judith Hamann & James Rushford, with cassette tape recorders, toy instruments and various other devices) In a music critique for The Australian newspaper in 1977 entitled Atom Bomb becomes Folk Art, Paul Utiger described one of Atom Bomb's performances from the late 1970s: The most important instruments were the cassette recorders for which Nagorcka provided very detailed operating instructions. During the course of the piece they built up an elaborate collage of acoustically superimposed material which in turn was played at the end. This performance by Golden Fur is the first in thirty years. This group of young Melbourne musicians with their creative use of amplification and choice of toy instruments, take the notion of creative analog distortion to new levels. Finite Differences (1973) (Graham Cox & Ron Nagorcka, pipe organ duet) This is one of Nagorcka's first pieces. Extensive use is made of the instruments mechanical stop action to control the amount of air passing through the pipes, producing many intriguing effects. In:
- Modulations (1974/83/2012), a group of instrumentalists interpreted one note (in various octaves) according to a graphic score while reel-to-reel tape loops and a VCS3 synthesiser were set-up to add effects.
Requiem (in memoriam Ian Bonighton) (1976) (Ron Nagorcka, pianoforte) Ian Bonighton was a young Melbourne composer who was an especially valued and loved teacher. This Requiem was written after his tragic early death, and is based on the theme ABGH derived from his name.
- Dawn in the Wombat Forest (1985) (Liza Lim, violin; Ron Nagorcka, clavichord, didjeridu, electronics) One morning in 1985, when Ron Nagorcka was living on the edge of the Wombat State Forest in Victoria, he recorded himself playing the didjeridu while slowly approaching a cassette tape recorder. The recording became the backing track for this largely improvisational piece with violin and (unamplified) clavichord which.
- Artamidae (2002) (Monte Mumford, conductor; Larry Polansky, fretless electric guitar & mandolin; Joe Cook, trombone; Jennie MacDonald, flute & piccolo; Karlin Love, clarinet & bass clarinet; Ron Nagorcka, MIDI keyboard & didjeridu) With the exception of the second piece (Australian Magpie), they are all written in just intonation. This is a tuning system based on the harmonic series that Nagorcka began to explore seriously once electronic instruments made the task relatively easy in the late 1980s.
Just Bluffing for Quamby (2006) is 2 electro-acoustic pieces in just intonation based on the sounds of Quamby Bluff.
- With myriad degrees of light-dark infusion (2006) (Conductor, Simon Reade; Joe Cook, trombone; Karlin Love, clarinet; Melissa Chominsky, violoncello; Ron Nagorcka, MIDI keyboard) The title of this work is taken from a quotation below by American composer Harry Partch, who devised the scale of 43 tones per octave used in this piece.
- Little Penguins (1995) (Ole Jørgen Melhus, trombone; Ron Nagorcka, didjeridu & electronic keyboard) A raucous chorus of Little Penguins on a Tasmanian beach inspired this virtuosic and rhythmically complex interplay between trombone, didjeridu and keyboard, written in just intonation.
- Colluricincla harmonica (1998) (Larry Polansky, fretless electric guitar; Hans Meijer & Ron Nagorcka, electronic keyboards) Written for Larry Polansky in what seems to have been a successful attempt to help convince him keep an electric guitar fretless so that it can play alternative tunings.
- To be a pilgrim (2006)(Ole Jørgen Melhus, trombone; David Scott Hamnes, pipe organ; Ron Nagorcka, didjeridu) In the theme can be heard echoes of the English traditional melody adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams for John Bunyan's wonderful hymn Who would true valour see...
- "Composer, performer, and naturalist Ron Nagorcka (born 1948) spent much of his childhood exploring music and the natural world on a sheep farm in Western Victoria (Australia). He went on to study history, pipe organ with Sergio de Pieri, harpsichord with Max Cooke, and composition with Keith Humble, Ian Bonighton and Jean-Charles Francois at Melbourne University and then composition and electronic music at the University of California San Diego, where his teachers included Kenneth Gaburo, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Erickson, and John Silber. During the 1970s he was active as a composer in Melbourne where he founded the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre - providing a venue of considerable importance to many emerging composers and musicians of the time - and taught composition at the Melbourne State College. In 1986 he visited Tasmania as a tutor at the National Young Composers School in Hobart, and decided to move to the island. Since 1988 he has been living and working in a remote forest in northern Tasmania, where he has built his own house and solar-powered studio. As an active field naturalist, he takes a keen interest in the science, as well as the aesthetics of the Australian bush. His recordings of nature also become the basis for many of his compositions. The melodies, rhythms, even the instrumental quality of the music are generated by painstaking listening and analysis of natural Australian soundscapes. Digital technology also enables him to explore a long held interest in the ancient tuning known as "just intonation". An analysis of birdsong provides the basis for the scales he designs. He also writes for conventional instruments using equal temperament. It was the influence of Australian indigenous culture - in particular the didjeridu players with whom he occasionally worked - who encouraged him to develop more of an understanding of the Land, and to reflect this in his music. He makes and plays his own didjeridus, and has incorporated this instrument into his music since 1974. The influence of traditional Aboriginal music is otherwise most evident in his rhythmical techniques."
- Pogus Productions</div>
- "Vladimir Ivanovich Martynov (Moscow, 20 February 1946) is a Russian composer, known for his music in the concerto, orchestral music, chamber music and choral music genres.
- He studied piano as a child. Gaining an interest in composition, he enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory where he studied piano under Mikhail Mezhlumov and composition under Nikolai Sidelnikov, graduating in 1971.
In his early works, such as the String Quartet (1966), the Concerto for oboe and flute (1968), Hexagramme for piano (1971), and Violin sonata (1973), Vladimir Martynov used serial music (or twelve-tone) technique. In 1973 he got a job at the studio for electronic music of the Alexander Scriabin Museum. For Soviet composers of this era, this studio had much the same meaning as the RAI Electronic Music Studio in Milan, the West German Radio studio, and the ORTF Studio in Paris, providing a meeting ground for the avant-garde musicians. Sofia Gubaidulina, Sergei Nemtin, Alfred Schnittke, and Edison Denisov were among the composers regularly working and meeting there.
Martynov helped to form a rock group called Boomerang at the Scriabin Studio. For them he wrote a rock opera Seraphic Visions from St. Francis of Assisi (1978).
Vladimir Martynov is also known as a serious ethnomusicologist, specializing in the music of the Caucasian peoples, Tajikistan, and other ethnic groups in Russia. He also studied medieval Russian and European music, as well as religious musical history and musicology. While even in Soviet times this field of study was considered generally acceptable, it also allowed him to study theology, religious philosophy and history. Vladimir Martynov began studying early Russian religious chant in the late 1970s; he also studied Renaissance music of such composers as Machaut, Gabrieli, Isaac, Dufay, and Dunstable, publishing editions of their music. He became interested in the brand of minimalism developing in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s: a static, spiritually-inspired style without the shimmering pulse of American minimalism. The timeless quality of chants and the lack of a sense of bar lines in Renaissance polyphony entered into his version of minimalism.
At about this time, he began teaching at the Academy of Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius in Sergiyev Posad. There was a period of consolidation in the early 1980s where he wrote music specifically tailored for use in church services, then resuming writing original music in his minimalist style. Among his works from this period is Come in! for violin and ensemble of 1988 which was performed by Gidon Kremer and by the composer's partner, Tatiana Grindenko.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, he has written works that take on large Christian themes, such as Apocalypse (1991), Lamentations of Jeremiah (1992), Magnificat (1993), Stabat Mater (1994), and Requiem (1998). One of his major compositions is a nearly hour-long piece called Opus Posthumum (1993), devoted to the idea that "a man touches the truth twice. The first time is the first cry from a new born baby's lips and the last is the death rattle. Everything between is untruth to a greater or lesser extent." He also composed a much shorter Opus Prenatum and a work called Twelve Victories of King Arthur for Seven Pianos (1990).
He has recordings on Le Chant du Monde's imprint "Les Saisons Russes" and on the Moscow based independent label LongArms Records. In 2009 London Philharmonic gave the world premiere of his opera Vita Nuova. The opera premiered in the U.S. at the new Alice Tully Hall on February 28, 2009. Martynov's composition "The Beatitudes", as performed by Kronos Quartet, featured in La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), the winner of the 2014 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Vladimir Martynov has authored several books and seminal articles on musical theory, history and philosophy of music.
- "The music of Huck Hodge (b. 1977) draws extensively, if obliquely, on experiences from his northwestern American heritage. Uniquely Northwestern light patterns act as an inspiration in much of his music - the way that a piercing slant of light, breaking through a dreary Seattle cloudscape, casts an intense, otherworldly chiaroscuro on the landscape - the ethereal yellowness of the light in bas-relief against the yawning darkness of the sky. These stark contrasts in light and dark find their way into his striking combination of pure and dissonant harmonies, widely spaced orchestrations and vast, diffuse timbres. The works on this CD, written over a period of half a dozen years, display a breadth of conception that is refreshing to encounter in such a young composer while also indicating the process of rapid development that has characterized his trajectory so far.
Certainly, the music is engaging on a very immediate level: many of the sounds are strikingly new, not only in themselves but in the originality of their combinations. You may never before have heard the melodica, for example, as a concert instrument; you have definitely never before heard it subjected to live processing in ensemble with an amplified string quartet. Many of the novel performance techniques incorporated into his scores are designed to negotiate pathways between definite pitch, indefinite pitch, and noise. Even more important to Hodge than the immediacy of sonic impression, however, is the idea that gives rise to a piece in the first place, which he speaks of as the "extra-musical": not for the sake of constructing some kind of program, but rather as a matter of "uncovering some essential formal or expressive quality that can be reconstituted in music." The sources of such ideas are as various as his compositions: literature, philosophy, visual art, even the natural world have all served in this capacity at one time or another" New World Records Ale?theia - Huck Hodge @ Youtube
- "Adriana Hölszkys own comments concerning her music reveal her fascinating use of parameters such as space and time. She prefers to describe her works as individually structured sound spaces. There are expanding and shrinking spaces, and there are shifts from one sound area to another, which she compares to film editing with its sharp cuts or gentle fades. There are sudden intrusions of one sound area into another, and sometimes two or more sound areas are superimposed. Also, the concept of time does not exist for her as a single entity: Temporal processes appear in multiple strands in her music: cosmic time, terrestrial time, and an endless variety of experiential times that permeate one another and are superimposed.
The title of Hölszkys apocalyptic work for organ ... und ich sah wie ein gläsernes Meer, mit Feuer gemischt [And I saw what looked like a sea of glass mixed with fire] describes extremely contrasting realities: "sea of glass" and "fire". They interact in clear-cut succession; sounds and expressive characters alternate constantly: From one instant to the next, vivid pictures of light and color alternate with calm and mysterious moments that seem like narrow openings into other dimensions, explains the composer.
Her work Efeu und Lichtfeld [Ivy and Field of Light] also contains a stark contrast within itself. The worlds of the violin and organ appear to exist independently of one another. The violin figures move like pin pricks in a disconnected and restless fashion, primarily in the extreme upper register of the instrument. The organ sounds are like pulsating sources of light. The multiple meanings of the contrasting sounds arise finally as a consequence of the interaction between gradual transformations of color and discontinuous changes in pulse. (Hölszky)
In the large four-movement composition ... und wieder Dunkel I [ And Again Darkness 1] each movement is associated with a fragment from Gottfried Benns poem Ein Wort [A Word]: The wording of the second verse has been subdivided by Hölszky, and the fragments have each been placed in front of part of her composition."
- "Adriana Hölszky, born 1953 in Bucharest, is an Romanian-born German composer and pianist. In 1976 she moved with her family to Germany. Between 1997 and 2000, Hölszky was professor of composition at the Rostock University of Music and Theatre, and since 2000 she has been professor of composition at the Mozarteum University of Salzburg."
- "Dominik Susteck (born in Bochum, Germany in 1977) studied from 1998 to 2005 at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, the Hochschule for Music and Dance in Cologne, and the music Hochschule in Saarbrücken with an emphasis on sacred music, music theory, and composition; he completed his concert examination in organ. At the Study Seminar in Wuppertal, he completed the second State Examination in Music. During his church music studies, he held a lecturers position for music theory and organ at the Bishops Sacred Music School in Essen, which he used for the dissemination and inclusion of contemporary music in church activities. He has also served as a lecturer at the Folkwang University in Essen, the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf, and at the Franz Liszt Hochschule in Weimar; he has been a guest lecturer at the Hochschule for Music and Dance in Cologne, the Hochschule for Sacred Music in Dresden, as well with the Archdiocese of Cologne, the Diocese of Essen, and the Diocese of Mainz. Of particular importance to him is work with young people, with whom he has worked on projects dedicated to compositions by György Ligeti, Kurt Schwitters, John Cage, and Terry Riley, among others.
Since 2007, he has been the successor to Peter Bares as composer and organist at St. Peters Art Station in Cologne, where his improvisation concerts have attracted particular notice. Susteck has played numerous premiere performances of works by composers including Peter Bares, Erik Janson, Johannes S. Sistermanns, Stefan Froleyks, and Peter Köszeghy. His concerts have been broadcast by various German radio networks (among them Deutschlandfunk, WDR [West German Radio], and Saarland Radio). Dominik Susteck is the director of the international festival orgel-mixturen and has been a guest at festivals for contemporary organ music in Berlin and Frankfurt. As a composer and organist, he has been awarded a number of prizes (among them the first prize in the Aeolian Trio Composition Competition in 2004, the Klaus Martin Ziegler Prize in 2008 in Kassel, and the first prize in composition in the organ plus competition at the music Hochschule in Mainz in 2010)." Wergo
Fantastic stuff . . . out on New Amsterdam Records today, - Here's what RonanM writes about it:
- "What strikes you rapidly is the contrast between the electronics and the sheer humanity of the pianist. The tone, the nuance and phrasing of Vicky Chow's astounding performance contrast with the mechanical exactitude of the electronics. And listening to her tumble endlessly through complex high-speed patterns, there is a sense of ballet, of muscular energy, of willpower. With the electronics, it's just mechanical repetition. Chow emerges as human - daring, singing, dancing in a way that circuits will never, never emulate."
Surface Image is a stunning marriage of Perich's inspired electronic aesthetic and Chow's nuanced yet fiercely virtuosic playing. It's a landmark release for Perich, being his first major release focusing solely on his work, as well as his first large-scale piano composition. Chow's dynamic performance is swept up in a sublime flurry of dazzling 1-bit sounds, simultaneously entangling and unraveling over the hour long journey. The line between electric and organic is artistically blurred, as the simple hand-wired electronics fuse with the individual notes of the piano on the same, expansive plane.
Through a string of groundbreaking works pairing acoustic instruments with hand-made 1-bit electronics, Tristan Perich has transformed the way in which traditional forms of composition can be enhanced and reinvigorated by the aesthetic simplicity of math, physics, and code. Perich's name splashed onto the scene with 2004's 1-Bit Music (the first album ever released as a self-contained microchip embedded in a jewel case) and since then his 1-bit compositions (like 2010's 1-Bit Symphony) have flourished: growing steadily in size, scope, and ambition.
Canadian pianist Vicky Chow has been described as "brilliant" (New York Times) and "one of the new stars of new music" (Los Angeles Times). She has premiered works by a slew of iconic composers - from Steve Reich to Bryce Dessner - and is a member of New York's preeminent Bang on a Can All-Stars. Chow also recently created an arrangement of The Rite of Spring for solo piano, of which she gave multiple performances during the centennial celebration, including a live streamed performance from WNYC's The Greene Space on May 29th, 2013 - the exact day the work was premiered in Paris 100 years earlier.
Surface Image premiered on February 19, 2013 at Roulette in Brooklyn, NY. During live performances, Chow's piano can be seen nested in a sea of cables and circuit boards, each powering one of the 40 loudspeakers hand-wired by Perich to serve as his electric orchestra. The immense work was later later recorded at EMPAC's sound studio, helmed by producer Argeo Ascani, mix engineer Jeffrey Svatek, and recording engineers Stephen McLaughlin and Svatek. The enormous scope and power of Surface Image's live aesthetic is captured in vivid detail by this recording, which places the listener at the center of Perich and Chow's sublime cacophony." Emusic
This album (with album of the year potential) could be posted on the N&N thread and here, so why not here: Bobby Previte - Terminals
- Featuring: Zeena Parkins, Greg Osby, Nels Cline and John Medeski
- "Drummer, composer, bandleader and improviser Bobby Previte is known for his voluminous contributions to New Yorks legendary downtown experimental music scene an immensely fertile period in the 1980s that saw the likes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass breaking new ground with Ornette Colemans Prime Time, Bang on a Can and many more.
Now with nearly four decades under his belt as a creative force behind the drumkit, Previte has assembled a dream team of musicians from the jazz, indie rock and classical worlds to create TERMINALS, a luminous project consisting of five concertos for percussion ensemble and soloists, each inspired by the schematic-like terminal maps that Previte has noticed in airports around the world. The eternally adventurous So Percussion accompanies throughout, as Nels Cline (Wilco), Zeena Parkins, Greg Osby and John Medeski (Medeski Martin & Wood) take turns in the forefront to deliver an electrifying part-composed, part-improvised workout spanning two vinyl pieces.
In the liner notes to the LP, pressed in a deluxe double-gatefold package, Previte breaks down the influences that inspired the project. Terminals is a collision between, and a celebration of, two worlds. In cliche?d terms: the precise, unflappable, classical percussion ensemble meets the wild, uncontrollable, jazz master improviser in the forum best suited to such a meeting, the concerto a schizophrenic word whose etymology is much debated but in Italian means to join together, while in Latin means to contend. These two worlds happily co-exist in my mind. This is the country in which I live. Cantaloupe Music - http://bobbyprevite.com/projects/terminals/ music
</a><br><span style="color: darkblue;"><strong>Tracklist<br><br>1. Hitchcock Études (20:48)<br>Megumi Masaki, piano and background vocals<br><br>2. Bookburners (14:34)<br>Stéphane Tétreault, cello<br>Paolo Kapunan (a.k.a. DJ P-Love), turntables <br><br>3. White Label Experiment (13:56)<br>So Percussion<br>Nicole Lizée, turntables and omnichord <br><br>4. Ouijist (13:41)<br>Mark Takeshi McGregor, alto flute<br>Ben Reimer, percussion<br>Rebecca Whitling, violin and omnichord<br>Mark Haney, double bass<br>Nicole Lizée, spectres <br><br>5. Son of the Man with the Golden Arms (18:20)<br>Architek Percussion<br>Ben Reimer, drum kit<br>Steve Raegele and Jonathan Barriault, guitars <br><br><em>- "Bookburners comprises a collection of Nicole Lizée’s works from the past five years picking up where 2008’s This Will Not Be Televised left off. Bookburners presents a number of Lizée’s fixations and obsessions that have infiltrated the five pieces on the album: a reinterpretation of rave culture, John Cage, Hitchcock, witchhouse meets classical, turntablism, iconography, meticulously notated glitch, auteur theory, voyeurism, malfunction, psychopaths, phantoms, backmasking, crate digging, grave digging and a sonic depiction of the imagination of graphic designer Saul Bass - and their melding with classical, concert, notated music. The record features an all-star cast of stellar musicians from across Canada and the U.S., among which include New York City’s So Percussion, turntablist DJ P-Love, drummer Ben Reimer, and cellist Stéphane Tétreault."<br><br><a href="http://www.nicolelizee.com/"><img src="http://www.mbam.qc.ca/infolettre/images/2014/2014-05-6_musique.jpg"></a><br>- "Montreal based composer Nicole Lizée creates new music from an eclectic mix of influences including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, glitch, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and 1960s psychedelia. She is fascinated by the errors made by outmoded and well-worn technology and captures these glitches, notates them and integrates them into live performance.<br><br>In 2001 Lizée received a Master of Music degree from McGill University. After a decade and a half of composition, her commission list of over 40 works is varied and distinguished, and includes the Kronos Quartet, BBC Proms, l’Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, CBC, New York City’s Kaufman Center, San Francisco Symphony, So Percussion, Eve Egoyan, Australian Art Orchestra, Fondation Arte Musica, Gryphon Trio and the SMCQ. Her music has been performed worldwide in renowned venues including Carnegie Hall (NYC), Royal Albert Hall (London), Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam) and Cité de la Musique (Paris) - and in major festivals including the BBC Proms (UK), Huddersfield (UK), Bang On a Can (USA), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (UK).<br><br>Lizée was awarded the prestigious 2013 Canada Council for the Arts Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music. She is a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow (2010). Her work for piano and notated glitch, Hitchcock Études, was chosen by the International Society for Contemporary Music to be featured at the 2014 World Music Days in Poland. Additional awards and nominations include a Prix Opus (2013), two Prix collégien de musique contemporaine (2012, 2013), the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers’ Top 10 List (2008) and the 2002 Canada Council for the Arts Robert Fleming Prize for achievements in composition."</em><br><a href="http://www.musiccentre.ca/node/124286">Centrediscs</a> - <a href="
Out on Naxos Sweden / Alice Musik Produktion: Peter Söderberg - lute, guitarr, oud
Erik Peters - live electronics
Alvin Lucier - On the Carpet of Leaves Illuminated by the Moon
Version for oud and pure wave oscillator
James Tenney - Chromatic Canon
Version for lute and live electronics
John Cage - One 7
Version for guitar and live electronics
Steve Reich - Violin Phase
Version for lute and live electronics
- "The lute and guitar player Peter Söderberg and composer, musician Erik Peters devote their new CD to four American composers: Alvin Lucier, James Tenney, John Cage and Steve Reich. Already on ALCD004 ( Contemporary Lute, 1991) Söderberg presented lute transcriptions of music by Reich and Cage with a much appreciated result. In this new recording the interpretations take on a dimension of transformation as the compositions are actualized through a virtual electronic environment; the acoustic sound of the string instruments are in different ways in dialogue with and processed by live electronics, creating a lucid contemptualisation of these influential compositions." Alice Musik Produktion
-"Erik Peters is a Swedish composer and performer working in the field of contemporary music and sound-art. Recent activities includes a project around interpretation and improvisation with POING, FEED and John Butcher, a collaboration with UK-based artist Mark Fell, and a CD-recording of American experimental music (Lucier, Tenney, Cage and Reich) for lute, prepared guitar, oud and live-electronics, with Swedish lute player Peter Söderberg. As a composer Erik Peters has created chamber music (with and without electronics), orchestral music, text/sound-compositions, radiophonic works and sound-installations, often exploring open and emergent forms. At the Gotland School of Music Composition he teaches studio technique, acoustics, soundscape composition, graphic notation and auditive analysis. He is also the Vice Chairman of the Society of Swedish Composers. Currently Erik Peters is studying at the Royal Institute of Art and Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts and aims at expanding his practice towards the borderland between performance, staging and audio-visual installation art."
- "This record highlights Leo Kupper's earliest unique compositions produced during the 1960's when he was ardently seeking out structures distinctly applicable to purely electronic sounds."
- "Leo Kupper was born in Nidrum, Hautes Fagnes (Eastern Belgium) on the 16th of April 1935. He studied musicology at the Liège Conservatory, then became the assistant of Henri Pousseur who, in 1958, had just founded the Apelac Studio in Brussels. Kupper started to work on his first pieces there, but he would finalize them only upon putting together his own studio in 1967: the Studio de Recherches et de Structurations Electroniques Auditives (which means 'studio of audio electronic research & structuring'). That is where he would compose, to this day, over forty works, most of them on instruments of his own design. In the '70s and '80s, he built a series of Sound Domes (briefly established in Rome, Linz, Venice, and Avignon), places where every sound, every phonem uttered by the listening audience was transformed by hundreds of loudspeakers of various sizes organized in a dome shape. This device transformed sounds through space AND time: something said could be morphed into another sound hours, days, perhaps years later. Leo had envisioned that a device like his, a place for contemplation, would be much-needed in cities where Nature had been evacuated. In the late '70s, after discovering Iranian music master Hussein Malek, Kupper became one of the very few Western virtuosos of the santur. His first pieces were released by Deutsche Grammophon and, later, Igloo. His latest works have been released by the New York-based label Pogus.
In 1961, having terminated his musicology studies, Leo Kupper left Liège for Brussels. By that time, centres for music research such as those in Cologne, Paris and Milan had already produced works of experimental music, where pioneers were forging new and diverse routes in electronic music, 'musique concrète' and electro-vocal music. The GAME machine - Générateur Automatique de Musique Electronique (Automatic Generator of Electronic Music) was constructed during such period and spirit of renewal and technical exploration. The GAME consisted of a collection of variable 'sonic cells' sensitive to modulations of positive and negative voltages and programmable manually through the aid of colour-coded cables. Complex electronic loops and sound from loudspeakers and from microphone pick-ups were then either recorded by tape-machines or performed and interpreted by musicians who opened automatic channels, thus triggering automatic sound to exit the speakers. This in turn penetrated the machines by means of microphones and was replayed. Here then was an entirely new way of playing a musical instrument and how the works here were composed and performed." Sub Rosa - Soundcloud
Jay ! finally the new Urban Sax album has showed up on music: INTRODUCTION TO THE BAND - URBAN SAX is the fruit of a long acoustic and architectural research that began in 1973 when Gilbert Artman, the bands Creator, Composer and Choreographer made the town of Menton, in the south of France, reverberate with strategically-placed 16 saxophonists. Over the years, from projects to projects, the band increased to its present form : 30 saxophonists, 10 chorus singers, 3 percussionists, 1 bass player and 2 dancers.
URBAN SAX can be augmented by local participants from Dance and Music Schools. This has no limit ; the band has sometimes numbered 200 !
Whenever its possible, Gilbert Artman likes the band to be joined by some musicians issued from different musical horizons. To give you a few examples, the band was joined in Jakarta by Balinese dancers and Gamelan musicians, in Vancouver by some Native American drummers and Scottish pipers, in Turkey by some sufis, in Tokyo by some traditional Japanese drummers...
URBAN SAX has been invited all over the world to perform in great events such as the inauguration of plazas, theatres, monuments..., opened and closed countless festivals, played in prestigious places (castles, caves, churches...), redefined truly urban environments like subways, factories, electric power stations..., and has been asked to participate in numerous Conventions.
PREPARATION OF A CONCERT - Each site is carefully checked out beforehand so that its full spatial and acoustic potential can be realized. Thats what Gilbert Artman calls Acoustical Town Planning: to take over a space of environment and fill it with sound and movement. This concept he created is unique. Its during Gilbert Artmans visit that are decided the human and technical needs, the necessary authorizations and the running of the show.
Each performance of URBAN SAX is different ; Gilbert Artman works each time on a choreography specially adapted to the event and its location.
ABOUT THE BANDS PERFORMANCES - Each performance is spectacular because the band literally invades the location. Some saxophonists are climbing down buildings, others are on the rooftops, behind the windows, some are arriving in helicopters... Everyone wears earphones and thanks to the transmitter, Gilbert Artman can be very precise his being, say, 200 meters from the musicians, who in turn might be 100 meters from each other.
The spectator is always surrounded by images and sounds and very often, there are some dancers and musicians suspended above him. URBAN SAX recreates the urban landscape and forever changes the relation between the people and their town. More Urban Sax @ Emusers http://www.musicprom.com/e_urban.html
- "This CD collects four chamber works in Newmans idiosyncratic, quirky style, performed by one of Berlins leading new music ensembles.
Newman appears a vocal soloist in the work Cologne. The texts are derived from a travel brochure about the city of Cologne which was filled with translation mistakes to a hilarious extent.
For Ghost Symphony, Newman writes: the majority of the piece consists of my own five chords to which I applied the rhythmic values of the first movement of Beethovens 5th Symphony, with the notable exceptions of the interpolations of Beethovens most structurally important chords which shine through. Mode Records
- "Chris Newman is a contemporary composer, painter, author and performance artist living in Berlin. From 1976-79 he studied music at King's College London, taking a Bachelor of Music. During this time he met the Russian poet Eugene Dubnov and started to translate Russian poets (Mandelstam, Khlebnikov), an experience that proved important for his later work (e.g. from one medium to another, from life to art). He started writing his own poems in 1979. Moved to Cologne, Germany, in 1980 to study with Mauricio Kagel (New Music, Theatre/Video) at the Hochschule für Musik Köln. First public performance was singing his own songs in 1982. Founded chamber-punk rock band Janet Smith in 1983; met Morton Feldman in 1984. First concerts and video showings: Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Theater am Turm, Frankfurt; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Cooper Union, New York. Started to paint in 1989, which led (from 1994) to the two medium installations; in recent years presented paintings in a more sculptural and installed manner, cutting the canvas and rearranging the parts to form a new relationship within the painting. Since the beginning of the '80s Newman's compositions, have been performed at concerts and festivals and recorded for radio productions (including orchestral commissions). He has published books of poetry and prose and issued a number of CDs. From 2001 to 2002 he was professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart."
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review: - "Every new modern composer you encounter forces you to start from the beginning, to blank the mind of expectations and let yourself open to what will come. Canadian composer Gordon Fitzell and his five-work album Magister Ludi (Centrediscs 20414) filled in the blank slate with some excellent high-modernist chamber music. The Ensemble contemporain de Montreal (ECM+) under Veronique Lacroix handle the performances with exceptional verve and creativity and the recording has first-rate presence.
Fitzell has come up with a notation system that structures the music yet allows the players improvisational latitude. From all aural appearances this is a fortuitous circumstance as the ECM+ rise to the occasion with music of considerable interest.
The five works performed on the CD cover a fair amount of time (from 2000 to 2014) yet go together quite seamlessly. "Pangea Ultima" has passages that show an affinity with avant jazz improv. (And the presence of Francis Houle, as well-respected avant improvisor, has some effect on that.) The bulk of the music has a distinctive spatial sprawl and fully high modernist abstraction. It does not suggest Darmstadtian serialism as much as it fits in with the more open-formed sounds that came after.
And so the hour-long program that includes the title work "Magister Ludi" (named after Hesse's provoking "Glass Bead Game" novel, for flute octet plus cello), "violence," "Flux" and "evanescence," the latter of which combines the ensemble with an electronics score, give us much to appreciate and contemplate.
This is serious, abstract, well-crafted modern chamber music in the grand avant tradition. The sound colors are vivid and the music excellently paced. Based on the recording Gordon Fitzell establishes his sound. He is a contender among the new, advanced style composers for the pantheon of most worthy Millennialists, I would say. Time will tell. In the meantime hear this album by all means. ECM+ sounds brilliant and the music no less so."
- "Canadian composer, performer and multimedia artist Gordon Fitzell has worked with many outstanding ensemblesNorwegian group BIT20 Ensemble, Brazils PianOrquestra, the pan-Canadian Ensemble 1534, and American sextet eighth blackbird, whose multiple Grammy-winning album strange imaginary animals features two of his works. In 2000 he began what would become a dynamic and longstanding collaboration with conductor Véronique Lacroix and ECM+; three of the works presented on this recording were commissioned and premiered by the group. In addition to concert music, Fitzell has presented multimedia installations in North America and Europe, most recently for World Music Days in Bruges, Belgium and Montreals Productions Totem Contemporain. Fitzell leads the eXperimental Improv Ensemble (XIE) and serves as Artistic Co-Director of the Winnipeg new music organization GroundSwell." Canadian Music Centre
This album is maybe the most significant Musique Concrete / Electronica release from Denmark, ever ! - An album that belongs in the history books.
[url=https://www.emusic.com/album/74544129/Else-Marie-Pade/Svaevninger?album_ref=Artist Albums][img]https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0972/4654/products/382_padekirk_web_large.jpeg?v=1446135994[/img][/url] - " . . . . Despite an age difference of 51 years, Else Marie Pade and Jacob Kirkegaard speak a similar musical language and are prominent listeners and communicators of sounds that we tend to overhear. For the first time these two pioneers are collaborating on a new work: SVÆVNINGER investigates the variations that one can hear when sound waves collide. Both artists have previously worked on this phenomenon; Jacob Kirkegaard in his work Labyrinthitis (2007) and Else Marie Pade in her work "Faust Suite" (1962). For their new joint piece SVÆVINGER, they remixed some of Pade's early (and hitherto unreleased) sound experiments with some of Kirkegaard's recordings from his own ear, thus leading the audience straight into the undiscovered labyrinths of their own hearing." Important Records
- "Else Marie Pade (b. 1924) is one of the pioneers of electronic music in Denmark. From the beginning of the 1950s, she, in close co-operation with technicians and assistants on Radio Denmark, produced a substantial amount of concrete and electronic music, partly in the shape of independent works for radio broadcasts, partly in the shape of accompaniments to various radio dramas. She started taking private lessons in composition from both Vagn Holmboe, Jan Maegaard and Leif Kayser. It was in 1952 that Pade discovered the means by which she could bring into being her universe of sound. The impulse came from a broadcast on Radio Denmark about Pierre Schaeffer, the originator of the new movement within the French field of electronic music: musique concrète. After visiting Schaeffer in 1952, Pade began to study the concrete aesthetics of music and the technique behind it. In the latter half of the 1950s, Pade, together with Lauridsen, organised an interimistic electronic sound studio at Radio Denmark, where one could work with both concrete and synthetically produced sound material - a synthesis which was also a prominent issue in the new Italian sound studio, Studio de Fonologia Musicale, where people like Luciano Berio, Henri Posseur and John Cage were working. From 1957 until the middle of 1960s, Pade experienced a productive period in which she created a long series of electronic works and thereby made a name for herself, both in Denmark and to a certain extent in international electronic circles." Dacapo Records
Comments
- "Time to Burn Judith Shatins third solo CD for innova Recordings presents a rich cross-section of her acoustic and electronic music. Called highly inventive on every level; hugely enjoyable and deeply involving, with a constant sense of surprise by The Washington Post, Shatins music combines vivid timbral hues with perceptually clear forms. Glyph (solo viola, string quartet and piano) opens the CD with a soaring performance by violist James Dunham, the Cassatt String Quartet and pianist Margaret Kampmeier.
On the title track, masterful oboist Aaron Hill and percussionists I-Jen Fang and Mike Schutz capture the explosive world Shatin created in response to the turmoil around us. The remaining four pieces show her inventive exploration of electronics and her mastery of their combination with acoustic instruments. Hosech Al Pney HaTehom (Darkness Upon the Face of the Earth) is about a world being born out of the subterranean darkness, lightning; out of chaos, life. It is also about a new world of sound, a music constructed from the basic DNA of sound, modulated sine waves.
Next is Grito del Corazón (Cry of the Heart), inspired by Goyas powerful Black Paintings and commissioned by Ensemble Barcelona Nova Música. This version, for two clarinets and electronics, is performed with electrifying clarity by F. Gerard Errante and D. Gause. Sic Transit extends the electronic realm in a new direction, pairing I-Jen Fang with computer-controlled acoustic instruments. Scored for percussionist and CADI (Computer Assisted Drumming Instrument) with six computer-controlled robotic arms the piece finds Shatin playing with different levels of control, just as the events of our lives sometimes seem within our own control and sometimes beyond our control.
The CD closes with the Cassatt String Quartets affecting performance of Elijahs Chariot, scored for amplified quartet and electronics made from processed shofar calls. Again, the music is suggestive of fire, this time the fiery chariot of Elijah rising up to Heaven."
Innova Recordings
Soundcloud with 4 tracks
- "Judith Shatin is a composer and sound artist whose musical practice engages our social, cultural, and physical environments. She draws on expanded instrumental palettes and a cornucopia of the sounding world, from machines in a deep coal mine, to the calls of animals, the shuttle of a wooden loom, a lawnmower racing up a lawn. Timbral exploration and dynamic narrative design are fundamental to her compositional design, while collaboration with musicians, artists and communities are central to her musical life. . . . . "
- "These two cds from timpani, both recorded in Luxembourg, offer an excellent introduction to one of the most exciting composers of today, one whose interest is predominantly in sound as sound, that aspect seized upon in these vividly recorded discs."
Peter Grahame - Woolf-Musical Pointers
- "Ivo Malec was born in Zagreb, Croatia. In 1959, he settled in France and joined Pierre Schaeffer in what was to become the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) one year later. When he arrived in Paris, Malec was already a fully equipped composer with a number of works to his credit, including a piano sonata (1949), a cello sonata (1956) and a symphony (1951) as well as several vocal works. He however considers his works written after 1960 as his first mature compositions. His work at the GRM was to prove extremely fruitful for his later musical progress. On the one hand, it allowed him to expand his expressive palette considerably; and, on the other hand, it made him conscious of the expressive potential of sound, as an object, so to say. From 1960 onwards, he regularly composed either electro-acoustic pieces and works for live instruments and electronics, such as Lumina (1968) for strings and tape, Cantate pour elle (1966) for soprano, harp and tape and Attaca (1986) for percussion and tape, for which he is particularly well-known and highly regarded. However, he never ceased to compose for more traditional orchestral and instrumental forces. From Sigma (1963) onwards, his orchestral works benefited from his experience in electro-acoustic music. In fact, as a number of other composers at that time, he asked the question as to how electro-acoustic devices could satisfyingly transfer to orchestral music. His mature composing career was devoted to finding viable answers to that question. From Sigma onwards, a number of substantial orchestral pieces such as Oral (1967) for actor and orchestra, one of his greatest pieces, Lied (1969) for 18 voices and 39 strings as well as the works heard on this CD provide several possible answers."
- Last.fm
Malec @ Ubuweb Goodies
Duane Pitre - Bridges
Duane Pitre - compositions, cumbus, ukelin, mandolin, computer, & electronics
Oliver Barrett (aka. Petrels) - cello
Bhob Rainey - soprano saxophone
- "Duane Pitre's new album, Bridges, features two pieces taken from a suite of analogous compositions by the same name, and was composed by Pitre in 2012. The two pieces that comprise the album are meant to work together in sequence as a composite work; or they can be isolated and listened to on their own. The title derives its name from the original concept for this work, which was to bring together aspects of traditional Eastern music (such as compositional form and tuning) with Western musical traditions (such as in the church music of the Middle Ages and modern classical music). The result is an album that merges the ancient with the new, while creating a sound that is wholly its own."
Important Records - Soundcloud
- "Duane Pitre is an American avant-garde composer, performer, and sound artist. His work often focuses on the tensions between electronic sound and acoustic instrumentation, chaos and discipline, as well as site-specificity and performativity. The composer frequently utilizes alternate tuning schemes that focus on microtonality, enabling him to explore unaccustomed harmonic intervallic relationships. He has created works for various instrumentation configurations such as string orchestra, his own bowed harmonic-guitar ensemble, string/wind ensembles, and more. . . ."
- More @ http://www.duanepitre.com/news-events-bio.php
More Duane Pitre @ Emusers
Performers: Common Sense Ensemble, New Millennium Ensemble
- "As composer Dan Beckers debut solo CD, Fade is a manifesto of sorts, exploring his fascination with process in all its forms. Not just musical ones, he says, but sociological, mathematical, and natural processes as well. I fancy I can almost see them unfolding and whirling around me; all whizzing by, colliding, merging, often intersecting. I find great delight in this.
Interspersed throughout the album is a set of five ReInventions, essentially cover tunes of five of JS Bachs Inventions (played with cyborg-like panache by a Disklavier player piano). Becker asks the question: What would happen if one injected some postminimal processes into the preexisting ones already embedded in the DNA of these Inventions? These ReInventions are the result of that chemical reaction (think Nancarrow meets Bach on Reichs stoop.)
Other more personal chamber works fill out the CD. The opener "Gridlock", Becker's most performed work and a predictable favorite with musicians and audiences alike, has been called by Kyle Gann a virtual manifesto for postminimalist formalism." Fade, the title track, is something of a lullaby written for his yet-to-be born daughter. Beckers preferred world of musical processes proves impressively capable of capturing the emotionally tentative, hesitant and fragile state that all adoptive parents-to-be understand.
Keeping Time and A Dream of Waking complete the disc, showing new angles and approaches to how process can be embodied in a musical composition. For in the end this concept of process, when explored deeply, expands to embrace notions of relationship and ultimately community. And for Becker this is a good place for any obsession to lead.
Becker is the founder and Artistic Director of the Common Sense Composers Collective, and is the current Chair of Composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music."
- Innova Recordings - Soundcloud
- "Born in 1960, Dan Becker is a San Francisco-based composer whose wide-ranging achievements both exemplify and reflect a life dedicated to new music in America. Beckers artistic work has been described as post-minimalist due to the strong influence of works by Terry Riley, with whom he studied, and other minimalists of the early 1960s including La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Becker is also the founder and Artistic Director of the Common Sense Composers Collective, a member of the Board of Directors of the American Music Center, and a professor of composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Becker received his DMA in Composition from Yale University, where he also earned his MM and MMA degrees. His teachers have included Terry Riley, Jacob Druckman, Martin Bresnick, Elinor Armer, Poul Ruders and Louis Andriessen. Awards and grants include those from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001), Meet the Composer (2002/2008), American Music Center (2006), Live Music for Dance (2006), the America Composers Forum (2004), and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust (2003). His music has been performed at universities and festivals large and small, across the United States, including the Norfolk Summer Festival, Chicago Arts Series, Park City String Quartet Festival, Bates College American Music Festival, and many others.
The Common Sense Composers Collective is an eight-member SF-NYC based composers group committed to experimenting with the processes in which music is conceived, developed, and presented. Each year the composers of Common Sense collaborate with a different performing ensemble; past partners have included the Meridian Arts Ensemble, the New Millennium Ensemble, Twisted Tutu, the Dogs of Desire Ensemble, the American Baroque period instrument ensemble, the Robin Cox Ensemble and New Yorks Essential Music. Common Sense has released three CDs documenting their projects, and has also produced five editions of their Bay Area New Music Marathon titled OPUS415 (Nos. 4 and 5 presented by Other Minds), a showcase of the diverse voices of Bay Area composers and performers alongside a selection of special guests."
Other Minds
- http://www.commonsensecomposers.org
More Common Sense @ Gems from the New World & NWCRI catalogue
PRISM Quartet is:Timothy McAllister, Zachary Shemon, Matthew Levy, Taimur Sullivan
- With guests: Tim Ries, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Jason Moran, Ben Monder, Jay Anderson, Bill Stewart, Francois Zayas and Richard Belcastro
- "As a guiding force behind the omnivorous PRISM Quartet, Matthew Levy has been a musical midwife: helping to birth a large and eclectic repertoire of works built around the endlessly versatile sound of the saxophone quartet. But while championing so many of his colleagues, from the internationally renowned to the young and emergent, Levy has done a great disservice to a contemporary American composer with a distinctive voice: namely, Matthew Levy.
Peoples Emergency Center is a chance for PRISM to finally focus on Levys own music, which draws freelyand often surprisinglyfrom classical, jazz, world, and rock traditions. The album begins with a particularly instructive example. Under the Sun is a three-part suite scored for piano (the redoubtable Jason Moran), saxophone choir, percussion, and, in its third and final movement, the Indian sitar. In the opening movement, Awakening, a keyboard/percussion groove serves as the engine driving the rustle and hubbub of a what? Are those birds taking flight and singing? Or is it the sound of the urban jungle yawning and stretching to life? Either way, the winds are overdubbed to form choirs of Philip Glass-style intensity, streaked through with jagged flashes of piano. With its striking collision of American Minimalism, the rhythms of Latin and African music, and the improvisation of jazz, Awakening is a major statement of intent at the start of the album.
The album includes three works written just for PRISM, including Lyric. Levys voracious musical appetite apparently includes the French Spectralists, composers like Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail, who create deeply-hued textures by analyzing the component parts of each sound and making those parts explicit, either by splitting the sound so that one or more of its overtones are audible, or reinforcing those harmonic components with other instruments. Working with this so-called harmonic series quickly moves the music out of standard Western tuning, and there are moments in Lyric that are both beautiful and unsettlingtake, for example, the almost metallic ringing sound of the sax choir that ends the piece, a sign of mourning for the composers mother, in whose memory the work was composed.
The recording also features four works, including Serial Mood, in which PRISM is joined by an all-star line-up of jazz artists. Serial Mood is a punning title: here, Levy manages to combine the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg, whose early 20th century experiments set music free of the constraints of tonality, with the strongly tone-centered modes of classical Greek music. The first part, Reflection, features Rudresh Mahanthappa, whose alto solo is full of movement and quicksilver changes of tone color, over a backdrop of softly roiling saxes and some rather insistent bass and drums, courtesy of Jay Anderson and Bill Stewart. The second half, Refraction, rides on a fierce post-bop groove, but the texture clears out in the middle to allow notable solos by Ben Monder, Tim Ries, and Matthew Levy himself.
- Innova Recordings - Soundcloud
Matthew Levy
- "has been hailed by the Saxophone Journal as a complete virtuoso of the tenor saxophone and by the New York Times for his energetic and enlivening performances. A recipient of composition fellowships from the Independence Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he has scored four motion pictures, including PBSs Diary of a City Priest, featured at the Sundance Film Festival. His music is highlighted on three PRISM recordings on Koch and innova; he has also recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, Tzadik, and Grammavision; collaborated with a host of choreographers/dance companies, among them Peter Sparling and Scrap; and appeared as a guest artist with the Detroit Symphony and counter)induction. He holds three degrees from the University of Michigan, where he was a recipient of the Lawrence Teal Award, and has served on the faculties of the Universities of Michigan, Redlands, and Toledo. From 2000-2011, he served as Director of the Philadelphia Music Project at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage."
- http://www.prismquartet.com/about/ensemble/
More Prism Quartet @ Emusers</div>
- "Philip Blackburns music has been called trippy, hallucinatory, intense, and riveting. Music of Shadows, his follow up to the 2012 Ghostly Psalms (innova 246), is all those things and more. Verging on transcendental, it contains three substantial works that are explorations of ways of listening as much as they are music in the usual sense. They offer sensually sonic worlds to inhabit and wallow in; ambient landscapes of the dreaming mind and what you might hear there.
Two of them began as underground soundscape installations, as part of Blackburns Sewer Pipe Organ to be played back inside St. Pauls storm drain system near the Mississippi. The sounds emerging from manholes across a wide area brought awareness to the acoustic spaces normally hidden from daily consciousness. One work, Dry Spell, started as a steampunk cityscape of lost children amidst invisible Victorian factories, and distant voices of heavenly choirs and innocents trapped in forgotten playgrounds. By contrast, Still Points, is a more geometrical fantasy on the overtones of the 60-cycle electrical hum; a dance of pure rhythmic proportions (made on a recreation of Cowell and Theremins Rhythmicon instrument).
The final work, The Long Day Closes, is a modest statement on mortality originally created as the soundtrack to part of Blackburns film, The Sun Palace an experimental multimedia work paying tribute to the TB era and one particular Colorado sanatorium where some of his ancestors chased the cure. With a 40-voice chorus from UC-Colorado Springs, instrumental ensemble, tape, and a solo clarinet recording by Bob Paredes added long after his death, the music is a sustained, soaring homage to those who live at the cusp of life and death every day. The sensation is not too far from classics such as Bryars The Singing of the Titanic or Ives The Unanswered Question.
The world of vision has shades of light and dark, densities, movement, and space, with transparent layers and areas of focus. Blackburns sound world likewise maps the inner ear to the outer world in stunningly imaginative, time-defying ways; leaving impressions and shadows in its wake."
- "Philip Blackburn is an environmental sound artist, composer, author (on Harry Partch), film-maker, designer, and sculptor. His musical pantheon includes Kenneth Gaburo, Harry Partch, Henry Brant, Pauline Oliveros, Harley Gaber, and many others he has encountered through his work at the innova label.
Music of Shadows was supported by New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust."
- Innova Recordings - Soundcloud</div>
- "A Special Light collects various works by composer David Macbride over the span of the last decade. But as much as this makes Macbrides document, a journal of a certain distinct period, it also remains a canvas onto which listeners can paint their own experiences. We each bring our own story to whatever music we experience, writes Macbride in the liner notes. So a single piece communicates a myriad of personal stories.
Throughout, Macbride explores his relationship with his Chinese heritage (his mother was from China, his father from Scotland), a part of himself that he had never directly addressed in his work before. In Kelet, it comes through in the vocal inflections of the violin, reminiscent of the Chinese erhu. Other Asian elements arise in the temple bowls of Swinging and the Indian-based melodic modes of the cello pieces 1 x 4 and 1 x 8. All of these pieces, Macbride writes, reflect in one way or another Chinese musical and cultural traditions as I become more comfortable being direct in personalizing recognizable Eastern styles and aesthetics.
But beyond cultural signals or specificities, Macbrides music has what he calls a basic sense of serenity and focus. Underlying the diverse instrumentation and approaches of each piece is that reflective and meditative state, whether the piece is in memory of a dear friend gone too soon (A Special Light) or part of a physical sound installation as with the excerpts from Percussion Park.
- Innova Recordings
-"David Macbride has written numerous works, ranging from solo and chamber to orchestral music, with particular emphasis on music for percussion. His works have been performed extensively in the United States and abroad: notable performance include the Hartford Symphony, the Arditti String Quartet, League ISCM, Percussive Arts Society International Convention, World Saxophone Congress, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. A recent work, Percussion Park, is a musical landscape where the audience is invited to freely roam the performance site in search of the music.
Commissions include The Roberts Foundation New Works Initiative, Chamber Music America, and the Concert Artists Guild. Solo CDs entitled Conundrum: The Percussion Music of David Macbride featuring Benjamin Toth and In Common: Duets by David Macbride are on the Innova Recordings label. David Macbride: A Composers Journey with the Poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca is available on Albany Records, as is In Passing: Solo Piano Music, composed and performed by the composer.
Macbride has been extremely active in bringing diverse musics to the Greater Hartford community, having produced numerous events in Elizabeth Park and other venues over the past fifteen years. He regularly performs in schools and senior citizen homes, and received a 2001 University of Hartford Community Service Award in recognition of his contributions.
As a pianist, Macbride was invited to give a recital tour of Peru by the Instituto Cultural Peruano NorteAmericano, and has performed recitals in Spain and Mexico as well. Macbride is Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the Hartt School, University of Hartford."
Grain for large orchestra (2005)
flöte, sounds & live-electronics for flute and live-electronics (1995/2011 version 2011)
craquelé for large orchestra (2010)
coupures de temps for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, violoncello, percussions and live-electronics (2009/10)
- "The music of Franz Martin Olbrisch is not intended to mean anything it wants to be what it naturally is: an acoustical experience which becomes an artwork through the act of listening. He places the focus on one particular inherent aspect of the music, which he then exploits to the limit: the endless variety of sound.
He frequently requires from interpreters complex or unusual ways of playing which produce unforeseeable combinations of sounds. The situation of the listener is also important, because it is impossible to follow simultaneously the often complex and many-faceted musical processes. Listeners must focus on particular aspects in order to register, perceive, and understand, in their own way, the piece as an artwork. Olbrisch does not consider the impossibility of controlling each detail of the interpretation and the listeners perception a deficit, but rather a necessary artistic characteristic an approach which he developed further in his orchestral work craquelé.
Furthermore many of Olbrischs works are therefore characterized by an engagement with the acoustical qualities of instruments and their specific sound-producing mechanisms. This approach is noticeable for example in his work flöte, sounds & live-electronics in which he derives the basic compositional principles entirely from the fingering techniques of a standard transverse flute.
For his orchestral work Grain, Olbrisch uses computer-assisted procedures to analyse the significant features of the noise sequence produced by a drinks machine, from the insertion of the coin to the rattling delivery of the can. The material obtained therefrom is used for the orchestral parts.
In coupures de temps..., all instruments play in the same tempo, but nonetheless each part follows a different rhythmic subdivision of the basic pulse, so that different groupings take place simultaneously. Through this independent temporal organization of the individual instruments, there is a continuous divergence and convergence in the parts."
- Wergo
David Rosenboom, composition and electronics
William Winant, percussion
-"David Rosenboom (b.1947) is considered a pioneer in American experimental music. This release of his Zones of Influence (1984-85) documents for the first time the complete version of a major composition for percussion and computer/electronics that introduced new virtuoso performance techniques along with significant developments in real-time algorithmic composition and advanced interactive linking of percussion instruments with software. Few solo percussion works exist with the scope of this composition. Though the work has been performed extensively, it has never been fully recorded for public release until now.
Zones of Influence is a five-part cycle of works for in which the percussionist's performance is processed and transformed in a special way. This way involves not just transforming the percussion instruments' sounds on an acoustic level, but processing based on information contained in complex patternings manifested in the percussionist's performance. This constitutes real-time algorithmic processing or algorithmic composition driven by the musical structure of what the percussionist plays. For its time, Zones of Influence introduced historically innovative approaches to how real-time compositional algorithms may be considered as key components of a score. It also introduced a technique for making sequences of continuously evolving variations on musical materials, called
morphological transformations . These transformations, in turn, outlined musical trajectories in what qualities; and from a system of multi-part counterpoint made with these trajectories , the musical materials of Zones of Influence emerged. Indeed, all the musical materials for Zones of Influence were generated with these tools, starting with the musical features contained in two long, 60-note, melodies, which were freely composed in advance.
Each of the five works in this set involves entirely different percussion setups, written scores and computer algorithms. Since the piece was composed before the proliferation of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), special interface electronics were constructed to connect the percussion instruments to a computer assisted digital instrument known as the Touché . This innovative, computer instrument was collaboratively designed by Donald Buchla and David Rosenboom in Berkeley, Ca, in 1979-1980. Zones of Influence was written for percussionist, William Winant and the Touché."
Pogus Procuctions - Avant Music review - More Rosenboom @ Emusers
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
- "William Winant (b. 1953) is a multi-faceted percussion artist with over 200 recordings, has collaborated with such renowned artists as John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Anthony Braxton, James Tenney, Cecil Taylor, George Lewis, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, Joan LaBarbara, Oingo Boingo, Kronos Quartet, Sonic Youth, Mr. Bungle, Yo-Yo Ma, Mark Morris, Merce Cunningham, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio. Composers who have written for him include John Cage, Lou Harrison, John Zorn, Alvin Curran, Chris Brown, David Rosenboom, Larry Polansky, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, Terry Riley, Fred Frith, and Wadada Leo Smith. He teaches at Mills College and the University of California at Santa Cruz."
- "Composer Lee Weisert, faculty member at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes acoustic and electro-acoustic music that seeks to find, through experimentation, tinkering, and unconventional approaches, a ritualistic and expressively deep world of sound. From Triangle Umbrella Octopus, a collage of sounds made from rewired childrens toys, to Hohle Fels, recorded with Weisert playing only key click sounds on flutes and clarinets, his music manages to both excavate fresh timbral territory while still retaining a sense of narrative and architecture, something often lost when composers dig deep to unearth new textures. Pianist Clara Yangs poignant performance on the Messiaen-esque Erard stands out on this disc as a monologue amidst the otherwise electronics dominated program, but also reveals another rich side of Weiserts writing, and one that provides context for the lush verticalities we hear in the electro-acoustic work Shirt of Noise. Also notable is saxophonist Matthew McClures performance on the dystopic track, Any thing that is Strang, intentionally mixed as if the performer found himself underwater or behind a thick curtain. Each work on this engaging recording comes from a finely considered starting point, making these pieces not just fascinating end products, but also documentations of a composer interested in rigging up unlikely processes as the genesis for new work."
New Focus Recordings - Soundcloud
- "Lee Weisert (b. 1978) is a composer of instrumental and electronic music. His recent work draws inspiration from a wide variety of scientific disciplines and reinterprets their respective principles into an artistic context.
His instrumental music has been played by nationally recognized performers and ensembles, including Steve Schick and the red fish blue fish percussion ensemble, the Callithumpian Consort, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and the JACK string quartet. His pieces have been performed at several music festivals including the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP 2009, 2011), June in Buffalo (2008), and New Interfaces In Musical Expression (NIME 2009, 2012).
His electronic music, composed primarily in cSound and MAX/MSP, deals with algorithmic and chaotic structures in 4- and 8-channel spatialization. Along with composer Jonathon Kirk, he is a member of the Portable Acoustic Modification Laboratory (PAML), a collaborative sound installation team. PAML's most recent project, Cryoacoustic Orb, uses hydrophones frozen inside several large spheres of ice to create a dense and naturally-evolving soundscape.
Lee has degrees in music composition from the University of Colorado (BM), California Institute of the Arts (MM), and Northwestern University (DM). His primary composition instructors have been James Tenney, Michael Pisaro, Jay Alan Yim, and Chris Mercer. He is currently an assistant professor at UNC Chapel Hill."
- "Robert Erickson (1917-1997), one of the important American composers of the late twentieth century, is fondly remembered as an influential teacher who counted such figures as Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick and Paul Dresher among his students. The quartets chart his evolution as a composer over the arc of his career. The first was written in 1950 while he was still in the process of finding his compositional voice and is the most "classical" of the four, looking back to the Second Viennese School. The Second Quartet (1956) is acknowledged as the watershed moment in his career, the work where the compositional tropes that would characterize his music henceforth first manifest themselves in full. The final two come from the last stage of his career just before he was struck down with the debilitating disease that would, for all intents and purposes, end his creative life in 1987. Solstice was written in 1985, almost thirty years after the second, and Corfu followed shortly after in 1986. The quartets are fundamental to any understanding of his work and receive their world-premiere recordings here."
- New World Records
More Robert Erickson @ Emusers
Fantastic news from Denovali Records by Mathew Collings - "Must check outs" for Ben Frost fans !
Composed, Performed and Recorded by Matthew Collings
Except Strings on Everything you love and Toms performed by McFalls Chamber Ensemble, taken from 'News from Nowhere', composed by Matthew Collings, recorded by Alex Fiennes
French Horn by Matt Giannotti
Clarinet and Bass Clarinet on Stills by Pete Furniss
Violins by on Stills and Cicero by Paul Evans
Additional Drum Recording on Silence is a Rhythm Too by Daniel Rejmer
Toms features recordings from 'The Acoustic Amplifier', designed by Matthew Collings, Gareth Griffiths and Giorgios Aposkotis
- "Silence seems to be harder and harder to achieve in this technologically saturated age. Collings admits that it reveals the habits of his own hearing, from being obsessed with its opposite: noise. Silence Is A Rhythm Too is about trying to find grace, space and expanse as much as tension and menace, and reconciling the two.
Still being intrigued by the idea of materials on the edge of collapse, he catches them up in their dying breath: The record is full of these processes, including prepared amplifiers and electronics pushed to the extreme to coax new sounds, close-micing and high volume. Despite the fact that most of his work is mediated by technology, hes far more excited by the sound of acoustic. Featuring brass ensembles and a string quartet the instruments and sounds are full of cracks, breath, embedding rough materials informed by luscious intentions. Silence Is A Rhythm Too keeps an eye on the small textural details as it is about harmony and physicality in the moment where silence and noise meet."
Mathew Collings - Splintered Instruments
Composed and Performed by Matthew Collings
Except 'Vasilia', Composed by Collings/Frost
Produced by Ben Frost
Drums and Additional Percussion on 'Vasilia' and 'They Meet on the Subway' by Brady Swan
Clarinet and Bass Clarinet by Pete Furniss
Contrabass by Caitlin Callahan
Cimbalom and Theremin by Frank Aarnick
Violin on 'Pneumonia loves the Moon' by Paul Evans
Violin on 'Routine' by Lorcan Doherty
Trombone by Helgi Hrafn Jonsson
Trumpet by Ari Bragi
Additional Synth, Piano and Prepared Piano on 'Vasilia' by Ben Frost
- "Splintered Instruments is not an empty claim. It is the sound of acoustic components on the verge of collapse, as if spitting out something articulate with their dying breath. It is real-world, analog, dusty and broken, but still forward-looking.
Matthew Collings the Edinburg-based composer and producer makes his solo debut with this Fluid Audio release. He says, Emotionally this record comes out of reckoning with the destructive forces in my life. Ive felt my whole life as if there is an immense, violent force ready to come out of me. I wanted to finally reach it and reckon with it. Here it rears its head, filtered through melody.
Of the albums spilling percussion, exquisite spans of silence and its almost petroleum viscidity, Collings writes, Very few thing in nature are truly repetitive. There is always subtle variation and imprecision. Its a revolt against machines: precision doesnt express anything and is pretty unnatural. Everything I play is messy, but on the border of being out of place. I use the computer for convenience, not as a principle. It is electronic only because I dont have the hands or people to do it all at once. If I could, then I would. Nearly all of Splintered Instruments is organic, played on acoustic instruments or sourced from physical objects and then manipulated, often considerably.
I wanted to reach into the deepest part of me and pull out the true nature of things, or at least a faithful side to them: admitting you are violent, you are a beast of nature as much as a romantic, civilised human being.
http://denovali.com/matthewcollings/ - https://soundcloud.com/mattcollbadger - music
- "Collings's work contrasts the crushed guitars and textures of My Bloody Valentine or Sonic Youth with structures more akin to contemporary classical composers like Steve Reich or David Lang. In his powerful live performances, he uses the amplifier as an instrument and the guitar as a control device for innovative digital processes. Using numbers of 'prepared amplifiers', he coaxes unique sounds by placing bells, rice and wood directly onto the speaker cone and manipulating the physical vibrations with his fingers, producing a highly visual and physical performance.
These approaches a viscerally demonstrated on his debut full-length release 'Splintered Instruments' (2013). This music is textural, melodic and often sonically overwhelming.
He received an ALT-W award from New Media Scotland in 2012 for 'The Third Mind', an algorithmic cinema performance and installation with Erik Parr, premiered at sell-out shows at Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA). He was recently invited to participate at the 50th Design Biennial in Ljubliana, Slovenia (2014).
His work for films includes a specially commissioned live score for Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent classic, 'The Man with the Movie Camera' for the Reykjavik Design Festival (2010) and an invitation to work on 'The Invisibles' (2010), a commission from Amnesty International with Ben Frost, featuring Gael Garcia Bernal. His score for Ha?kon Palsson ?s film 'Guilt' was recently performed at the opening of the Glasgow Short Film Festival.
His work has also featured in Installations at Glasgow City Halls (2011), Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Dundee Neon Digital Arts Festival (2010, UK), Burning Man Festival (2010, USA), Chattanooga Gallery of Contemporary Art (2010, USA), Icelandic Academy of Arts (Iceland, 2009) and Manipulate Festival (UK, 2011).
He has performed alongside many respected artists in his field, including Tim Hecker, Ben Frost, Chris Corsano, Nico Muhly and Jasper TX.
He is currently developing an audio-visual 'opera' for strings, clarinet, electronics and real-time visuals, entitled 'A Requiem for Edward Snowden' (2014)"
His Ballet Mecanique of 1924 was originally written to accompany a Dadaist film in which Fernand Léger participated. In its public performance he intended to shake things up by creating a work which was more to look at than to hear, which parodied the trend for “industrialized music” and broke many of the rules of what classical music should really be. It is scored for 16 pianolas (a sort of low-budget version of the Welte-Mignon Vorsetzer), two standard pianos, three xylophones, seven electric bells, three propellers, a siren, four bass drums and one tam-tam. That’s why some called it more of a work to be seen than to be heard. It is relentlessly loud and cacophonous, with over 600 time signature changes in it. At the New York premiere the person operating the siren goofed and it wasn’t heard until everyone was leaving and the concert was over, and the work was considered a colossal failure. Antheil was the most famous American musician in Europe at the time.
Due to new technology that now makes Antheil’s original vision possible, a new performance first took place in Germany in 1996, and had 13 more performances. That has been further refined by G. Schirmer, which has published MIDI sequences and samples on a CD-ROM along with the score and parts. Two grand pianos were custom-modified using a MIDI sequence file which was created by running copies of the original rolls made for the Pleyel pianola thru an optical scanner. The many errors in the rolls for the single pianola were reconstructed from Antheil’s written score by Paul Lehrman and Dr. Jürgen Hocker and have been used for most performances since the 1990s. The “bell-box” is also MIDI-controlled and there is a custom click track the conductor hears over headphones to keep everything together.
So what’s it like? Much more accurate than earlier recordings of the work but still a noisy rout. Being in hi-res surround makes it more of a spatial experience; otherwise I probably wouldn’t have wanted to hear it again, frankly. The note booklet is a kick.
A Jazz Symphony is quite a contrast to the ballet. Paul Whiteman had commissioned it in 1925 for his second Experiment in Modern Music concert in Carnegie Hall—the first of which premiered Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. It didn’t make it for that concert, but was later performed in Carnegie Hall by the “all-Negro” W.C. Handy Orchestra (Handy got a more experienced conductor to lead it) with Antheil as the piano soloist. It borrows from Rhapsody in Blue—Antheil was known for blatant quoting other well-known music in his works. Stravinsky and Scott Joplin get some notes in this one, and the 13-minute work ends most oddly with a Viennese waltz.
Gil Rose and his Boston Modern Orchestra Project are doing some wild and wonderful things in new and previously un-heard music and this is one of them."
http://www.bmop.org/news-press/lot-noise-plus-sort-rip-rhapsody-blue-fun-nevertheless - Booklet @ BMOP
- "George Antheil (1900-1959) was an American composer—born in Trenton, New Jersey—who began his professional career in Europe, where he was friends with, among many others, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway, Eric Satie, and Igor Stravinsky. In the early '20s, he lived at the literal center of English-language culture in Europe: above Sylvia Beach's legendary Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on the Rue de l'Odéon, in Paris's Latin Quarter. (Beach was the original publisher of Joyce's controversial and groundbreaking Ulysses.)
Antheil wrote over 300 musical works in all major genres, including symphonies, chamber works, film music, and operas. He was extremely outspoken and articulate, and wrote numerous articles, as well as an autobiography, Bad Boy of Music, which is still in print.
As a young composer, he considered himself to be quite the revolutionary, and his music, especially in his early career, employed many unusual sound sources and combinations of instruments. In many ways, both musical and technical, he was far ahead of his time. His concerts routinely caused riots all over Europe, which at the time was considered a sign of genius.
Besides composing, Antheil was an excellent writer, an inventor, and a student of many disciplines, including endocrinology, criminal justice, and military history. He was co-holder of a remarkable patent (with actress Hedy Lamarr) for a "secret communications system" which is today in wide use and known as "spread-spectrum technology" — although neither he nor Lamarr ever received a dime for it.
Antheil left Paris in the late '20s and went to Berlin, and then as German society began to fall under the influence of the Nazis, returned permanently to America. He settled in Hollywood, where he enjoyed a reasonably successful career as a composer for film and television. He died in 1959."
- "NOT I is performed by Klangforum Wien, under the direction of Clement Power, with Agata Zubel herself performing the vocals. The record encompasses pieces based on the poetry of Wis?awa Szymborska (Labirynt), Czes?aw Mi?osz (Aforyzmy na Mi?osza), Samuel Beckett (NOT I) and one instrumental piece (Shades on Ice)."
- “Aforyzmy na Mi?osza” (for solo soprano, string quintet, percussion, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, trumpet and accordion) was produced for the Sacrum Profanum festival on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Czes?aw Mi?osz. The lyrics for the song were taken from a range of Mi?osz’s work, one can hear fragments of both his poems and prose in the song. It was first performed on the 15th of September 2011 at the Sacrum Profanum festival , at a concert in the Museum of Urban Engineering. Agata Zubel herself performed the vocal solo and Clement Power led the Klangforum Wien orchestra."
- “Shades of Ice” (for clarinet, cello, and electronics) is the only piece on the KAIROS CD without vocals. The piece was made for the London Sinfonietta chamber orchestra, as part of the “Sonic Exploration” series. It was first performed on the 20th of October 2011 in London by Mark van de Wiel and Tim Gill. It is a musical representation of the composer’s fascination with the Icelandic landscape, in particular the Vatnajökull glacier, the biggest in Europe. “It’s the most ‘picturesque’ piece I have ever written” says Agata Zubel."
- "The album ends with the titular “NOT I” for vocals, instrumental group and electronics, written by Zubel in 2010. The composition has been distinguished many times, among others, at the UNESCO Rostrum of Composers in Prague, and with the first ever Polonica Nova award. “I think that these rewards neither hinder nor help me. Although it is very nice, because it is a confirmation that what we are doing has an impact” – comments the composer on her successes."
http://culture.pl/en/work/not-i-agata-zubel
- "Agata Zubel was born in Wroc?aw and graduated with a distinction from the local Karol Lipinski Academy of Music after studying composition and voice. To deepen her artistical understanding she obtained a doctorate in musical arts in 2004 and furthermore received scholarships from the Ministry of Culture, the Rockefeller Foundation, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung and the Executive Board of the City of Wroclaw and studied abroad in the Netherlands. She is currently a lecturer on the faculty of the Academy of Music in Wroc?aw. Modern music occupies a special place in her repertoire and as a vocalist she has participated in many prestigious performances. Together with the composer and pianist Cezary Duchnowski she established the ElettroVoce Duo in 2001 and consequently premiered and recorded numerous works by contemporary composers. In the past years she performed Chantefleurs et Chantefables by Witold Lutoslawski (Musica Polonica Nova), DW9 by Bernhard Lang (The Warsaw Autumn) and Luci mie traditrici by Salvatore Sciarrino (Nostalgia Festival) and many more. She received the annual “Orpheus” Award of Polish music critics for the title role in C. Duchnowski’s opera Martha’s Garden. Agata Zubel also participated in an experimental improvisation project during the International Courses of Composition in Darmstadt. She has given many concerts abroad: in Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland, Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Greece, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Korea, Canada and the United States. She worked together with famous modern music ensembles - Klangforum Wien, musikFabrik, London Sinfonietta, Eighth Blackbird Ensemble, Seattle Chamber Players. She has won several competitions in the fields of both voice and composition. In 2005 she received the prestigious “Passport” Award of the “Polityka” weekly for classical music, was awarded the Wroc?aw Music Award for her work with ElettroVoce and was the winner of the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in 2013 to just name a few. In 2010 her opera-ballet Between was premiered in the Grand Theatre of the National Opera in Warsaw and in 2011 she was commissioned to write another opera for this theatre which should become Oresteia."
Kairos Music
Sonata per sei for two pianos, three percussionists and sampler keyboard (2006)
Psalm 151 in memoriam Frank Zappa, for percussion solo or four percussionists (1993), version for four percussionists
Kosmos pour un ou deux pianos (1961, rev. 1999), version for two pianos
- "Béla Bartók plays a major role in many works by Peter Eötvös. The love of Bartók’s music first appears in the piano piece “Kosmos”. The title refers to Bartók’s famous piano cycle “Mikrokosmos”. However, the work also bears the title “Kosmos” because Yuri Gagarin’s famous space flight was about to take place when it was written in March 1961. Eötvös was then 17 years old, and Gagarin excited the young composer’s imagination.
On the occasion of the 125th anniversary of Bartók’s birth in 2006, Eötvös wrote a piano concerto in which he further developed Bartók’s ideas and thought processes. The concerto is entitled “CAP-KO”, an acronym for “Concerto for Acoustic Piano, Keyboard, and Orchestra”. The piano resources are extended by use of a computer, which adds further sounds to those being played – a revolutionary technology that Eötvös wants to be understood as a symbol of Bartók’s pioneering spirit. The concerto centres on the famous Bartók cascades of octaves and sixths. Eötvös has twice re-arranged “CAP-KO” for other instrumentations, e.g. as “Sonata per sei” for two pianos, three percussionists, and sampler keyboard.
Among the musicians Eötvös has always admired is Frank Zappa. When Zappa died in 1993 at the young age of 42, Eötvös responded with grief and anger. He said, “In connection with Zappa’s premature and meaningless death, one really cannot praise God, but must protest.” He composed a piece that gives expression to this protest. Since the 150 psalms in the Bible do not deal with protest, the piece became Psalm 151: “This is the one that is not in the Bible.”
Wergo
- "The Schlagquartett Köln [Percussion Quartet Cologne] made their debut at the Witten Days for New Chamber Music in 1989. Their multi-faceted and adventurous repertory ranges widely through percussion music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Numerous concerts, radio productions, and premieres of works by Carola Bauckholt, Edison Denissow, Beat Furrer, Nicolaus A. Huber, Wolfgang Rihm, Dieter Schnebel, Salvatore Sciarrino, Gerhard Stäbler, Volker Staub, Casper Johannes Walter, and many others document the now more than 20 years of continuous work undertaken by this unusual instrumental combination.
In close collaboration with the younger generation of composers, the musicians of the ensemble have created considerable opportunity for the solution of compositional problems through the development of innovative playing techniques and the construction of special instruments.
In addition to their work with the ensemble, the individual members concertize as soloists and have been engaged by well-known orchestras and chamber music ensembles: among them Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble musikFabrik, Ascolta Ensemble, and Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin. The Schlagquartett Köln appears often in international festivals and is active in the realization of music theater projects, including cooperation with the Düsseldorf theater and opera house and the State Theater in Wiesbaden.
In 2003, the ensemble was awarded the support prize of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.
- "Peter Eötvös was born on 2 January 1944 in Székelyudvarhely (Transylvania). At the age of 14, Zoltán Kodály admitted him to his composition class at the Music Academy in Budapest. In 1966, a scholarship permitted him to relocate to the Federal Republic of Germany where he sought contact with the musical avant-garde in Cologne. He subsequently performed in concerts with the Stockhausen Ensemble (1968-1976) and was employed as sound engineer in the West German Radio electronic studio in Cologne. At the invitation of Pierre Boulez, Eötvös conducted the opening concert of the IRCAM in Paris 1978 and was subsequently appointed as musical director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain. He gave his debut at the London PROMS in 1980 and conducted the first performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera “Donnerstag aus Licht” the following year at the Scala in Milan. Eötvös was appointed as principal guest conductor of a number of international orchestras: the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart and, since 2009, also the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Vienna. With the foundation of the International Peter Eötvös Institute for Young Conductors and Composers, Eötvös created a platform for the transfer of acquired knowledge and experience to the next generation. He taught at the Musikhochschule in Karlsruhe from 1992, took up an appointment as professor at the Musikhochschule in Cologne and subsequently returned to Karlsruhe in 2002 for a further five years.
Eötvös views music as an intensive form of communication between composer, performer and the audience. His ability of creating unusual tonal worlds is particularly displayed in his orchestral works, for example in zeroPoints, composed in 1999 in homage to Pierre Boulez. The title of the work is a reference to the historical “zero hour” in electronic music, although the integrated sound effects are in fact produced exclusively on orchestral instruments. The works Jet Stream for trumpet and orchestra (2002) and Seven for solo violin and orchestra (2006/2007) both feature a solo instrument as the focus of action. The composition CAP-KO (2005) which is dedicated to Béla Bartók develops a totally new form of piano concerto. The work exists in three different versions: a concerto with orchestra for one solo pianist who alternates between an acoustic grand piano and electronic keyboard, as a double concerto for two acoustic solo pianos with orchestral accompaniment and as an ensemble work for two pianos, sampler and percussion (Sonata per sei).
Eötvös can be counted among the most successful operatic composers of our time. The libretto of the chamber opera Radames (1975/1997) originated from a textual concept by the composer, whereas later opera projects are based on master works of world literature. In 2002, Le Balcon, based on the play by Jean Genet was premiered at the Festival in Aix-en-Provence. Angels in America (2004) is based on the cult play by Tony Kushner which has been regarded as a key text in American literature since the 1990s. The opera Love and Other Demons, originating from a novel by the Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, transports us into the world of Columbia in the 18th century with its superstition, desire and religious obsession and was premiered to great acclaim at the 2008 Glyndebourne Festival. In 2010, Die Tragödie des Teufels was premiered at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich.
Eötvös has received numerous international honours and awards including the Hungarian Bartók Prize (1997), the Christoph und Stephan Kaske Prize (2000), the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award (2002) and the prize SACD Palmarès in the category "Prix Musique" (2002). Eötvös has been a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, the Hungarian Academy of Letters and Arts (Széchenyi Iroldami és M?vészeti Akadémia), the Saxon Academy of the Arts in Dresden and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music since 2000. He was also awarded the title of Commandeur de l`Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2003) and 2004 the Cannes Classical Award in the category "Best Living Composer" at the MIDEM. He received the Frankfurt Music Prize in 2007 and the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale in 2011."
- "Cirque (Circus) was not intentionally composed for dance, but was from the very beginning connected to the dancer and choreographer Bernardo Montet: in 1989, the RTVE (Spanish television) commissioned a video-dance from director Robert Cahen who asked Michèle Bokanowski to write the music; the result, Solo, was filmed in Paris in the Arènes de Lutèce, and was choreographed and danced by Bernardo Montet on the first musical sequences sketched on the theme of the circus. In October 1995, Bernardo Montet premiered a choreography for eight dancers on Cirque.
Cirque was produced in the studios of Kira BM Films and of Les Musiques de la Boulangère, both in Paris (France). The concert premiere was on May 23, 1994 in the Socar factory in Crest (France) during the first Futura festival. The recordings used in this music were produced between March 1988 and October 1993. The accordion was played by Jean-Louis Matinier."
Electrocd
- "Coming from a family of musicians (professionals on her mother’s side, amateurs on her father’s side), she read, at the age of 22, À la recherche d’une musique concrète (In Search of a Concrete Music) by Pierre Schaeffer and decided to study composition. After a classical education in harmony, she met Michel Puig, a student of René Leibowitz, who taught her composition and analysis according to Schönbergian Principles. In September 1970, she began a two-year course at the Research Department of the ORTF under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer. At the same time, she participated in a sound synthesis research group, studied computer music at the Faculté de Vincennes as well as electronic music with Éliane Radigue. Between 1972 and ’84, she composed essentially for the concert — Pour un pianiste, Trois chambres d’inquiétude, Tabou — and for film — music for the short films by Patrick Bokanowski as well as for his feature film L’Ange. Since 1985, she has composed for television, for theatre — with Catherine Dasté — and for dance, with choreographers Hideyuki Yano, Marceline Lartigue, Bernardo Montet, and Isabelle Kürzi."
- Modulations (1974/83/2012), a group of instrumentalists interpreted one note (in various octaves) according to a graphic score while reel-to-reel tape loops and a VCS3 synthesiser were set-up to add effects.
Requiem (in memoriam Ian Bonighton) (1976) (Ron Nagorcka, pianoforte) Ian Bonighton was a young Melbourne composer who was an especially valued and loved teacher. This Requiem was written after his tragic early death, and is based on the theme ABGH derived from his name.
- Dawn in the Wombat Forest (1985) (Liza Lim, violin; Ron Nagorcka, clavichord, didjeridu, electronics) One morning in 1985, when Ron Nagorcka was living on the edge of the Wombat State Forest in Victoria, he recorded himself playing the didjeridu while slowly approaching a cassette tape recorder. The recording became the backing track for this largely improvisational piece with violin and (unamplified) clavichord which.
- Artamidae (2002) (Monte Mumford, conductor; Larry Polansky, fretless electric guitar & mandolin; Joe Cook, trombone; Jennie MacDonald, flute & piccolo; Karlin Love, clarinet & bass clarinet; Ron Nagorcka, MIDI keyboard & didjeridu) With the exception of the second piece (Australian Magpie), they are all written in just intonation. This is a tuning system based on the harmonic series that Nagorcka began to explore seriously once electronic instruments made the task relatively easy in the late 1980s.
Just Bluffing for Quamby (2006) is 2 electro-acoustic pieces in just intonation based on the sounds of Quamby Bluff.
- With myriad degrees of light-dark infusion (2006) (Conductor, Simon Reade; Joe Cook, trombone; Karlin Love, clarinet; Melissa Chominsky, violoncello; Ron Nagorcka, MIDI keyboard) The title of this work is taken from a quotation below by American composer Harry Partch, who devised the scale of 43 tones per octave used in this piece.
- Little Penguins (1995) (Ole Jørgen Melhus, trombone; Ron Nagorcka, didjeridu & electronic keyboard) A raucous chorus of Little Penguins on a Tasmanian beach inspired this virtuosic and rhythmically complex interplay between trombone, didjeridu and keyboard, written in just intonation.
- Colluricincla harmonica (1998) (Larry Polansky, fretless electric guitar; Hans Meijer & Ron Nagorcka, electronic keyboards) Written for Larry Polansky in what seems to have been a successful attempt to help convince him keep an electric guitar fretless so that it can play alternative tunings.
- To be a pilgrim (2006)(Ole Jørgen Melhus, trombone; David Scott Hamnes, pipe organ; Ron Nagorcka, didjeridu) In the theme can be heard echoes of the English traditional melody adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams for John Bunyan's wonderful hymn Who would true valour see...
- "Composer, performer, and naturalist Ron Nagorcka (born 1948) spent much of his childhood exploring music and the natural world on a sheep farm in Western Victoria (Australia). He went on to study history, pipe organ with Sergio de Pieri, harpsichord with Max Cooke, and composition with Keith Humble, Ian Bonighton and Jean-Charles Francois at Melbourne University and then composition and electronic music at the University of California San Diego, where his teachers included Kenneth Gaburo, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Erickson, and John Silber. During the 1970s he was active as a composer in Melbourne where he founded the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre - providing a venue of considerable importance to many emerging composers and musicians of the time - and taught composition at the Melbourne State College. In 1986 he visited Tasmania as a tutor at the National Young Composers School in Hobart, and decided to move to the island. Since 1988 he has been living and working in a remote forest in northern Tasmania, where he has built his own house and solar-powered studio. As an active field naturalist, he takes a keen interest in the science, as well as the aesthetics of the Australian bush. His recordings of nature also become the basis for many of his compositions. The melodies, rhythms, even the instrumental quality of the music are generated by painstaking listening and analysis of natural Australian soundscapes. Digital technology also enables him to explore a long held interest in the ancient tuning known as "just intonation". An analysis of birdsong provides the basis for the scales he designs. He also writes for conventional instruments using equal temperament. It was the influence of Australian indigenous culture - in particular the didjeridu players with whom he occasionally worked - who encouraged him to develop more of an understanding of the Land, and to reflect this in his music. He makes and plays his own didjeridus, and has incorporated this instrument into his music since 1974. The influence of traditional Aboriginal music is otherwise most evident in his rhythmical techniques."
- Pogus Productions</div>
Fancymusic.ru - music
- "Vladimir Ivanovich Martynov (Moscow, 20 February 1946) is a Russian composer, known for his music in the concerto, orchestral music, chamber music and choral music genres.
- He studied piano as a child. Gaining an interest in composition, he enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory where he studied piano under Mikhail Mezhlumov and composition under Nikolai Sidelnikov, graduating in 1971.
In his early works, such as the String Quartet (1966), the Concerto for oboe and flute (1968), Hexagramme for piano (1971), and Violin sonata (1973), Vladimir Martynov used serial music (or twelve-tone) technique. In 1973 he got a job at the studio for electronic music of the Alexander Scriabin Museum. For Soviet composers of this era, this studio had much the same meaning as the RAI Electronic Music Studio in Milan, the West German Radio studio, and the ORTF Studio in Paris, providing a meeting ground for the avant-garde musicians. Sofia Gubaidulina, Sergei Nemtin, Alfred Schnittke, and Edison Denisov were among the composers regularly working and meeting there.
Martynov helped to form a rock group called Boomerang at the Scriabin Studio. For them he wrote a rock opera Seraphic Visions from St. Francis of Assisi (1978).
Vladimir Martynov is also known as a serious ethnomusicologist, specializing in the music of the Caucasian peoples, Tajikistan, and other ethnic groups in Russia. He also studied medieval Russian and European music, as well as religious musical history and musicology. While even in Soviet times this field of study was considered generally acceptable, it also allowed him to study theology, religious philosophy and history. Vladimir Martynov began studying early Russian religious chant in the late 1970s; he also studied Renaissance music of such composers as Machaut, Gabrieli, Isaac, Dufay, and Dunstable, publishing editions of their music. He became interested in the brand of minimalism developing in the Soviet Union in the late 1970s: a static, spiritually-inspired style without the shimmering pulse of American minimalism. The timeless quality of chants and the lack of a sense of bar lines in Renaissance polyphony entered into his version of minimalism.
At about this time, he began teaching at the Academy of Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius in Sergiyev Posad. There was a period of consolidation in the early 1980s where he wrote music specifically tailored for use in church services, then resuming writing original music in his minimalist style. Among his works from this period is Come in! for violin and ensemble of 1988 which was performed by Gidon Kremer and by the composer's partner, Tatiana Grindenko.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, he has written works that take on large Christian themes, such as Apocalypse (1991), Lamentations of Jeremiah (1992), Magnificat (1993), Stabat Mater (1994), and Requiem (1998). One of his major compositions is a nearly hour-long piece called Opus Posthumum (1993), devoted to the idea that "a man touches the truth twice. The first time is the first cry from a new born baby's lips and the last is the death rattle. Everything between is untruth to a greater or lesser extent." He also composed a much shorter Opus Prenatum and a work called Twelve Victories of King Arthur for Seven Pianos (1990).
He has recordings on Le Chant du Monde's imprint "Les Saisons Russes" and on the Moscow based independent label LongArms Records. In 2009 London Philharmonic gave the world premiere of his opera Vita Nuova. The opera premiered in the U.S. at the new Alice Tully Hall on February 28, 2009. Martynov's composition "The Beatitudes", as performed by Kronos Quartet, featured in La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), the winner of the 2014 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Vladimir Martynov has authored several books and seminal articles on musical theory, history and philosophy of music.
Huck Hodge, piano, melodica & computer
- "The music of Huck Hodge (b. 1977) draws extensively, if obliquely, on experiences from his northwestern American heritage. Uniquely Northwestern light patterns act as an inspiration in much of his music - the way that a piercing slant of light, breaking through a dreary Seattle cloudscape, casts an intense, otherworldly chiaroscuro on the landscape - the ethereal yellowness of the light in bas-relief against the yawning darkness of the sky. These stark contrasts in light and dark find their way into his striking combination of pure and dissonant harmonies, widely spaced orchestrations and vast, diffuse timbres. The works on this CD, written over a period of half a dozen years, display a breadth of conception that is refreshing to encounter in such a young composer while also indicating the process of rapid development that has characterized his trajectory so far.
Certainly, the music is engaging on a very immediate level: many of the sounds are strikingly new, not only in themselves but in the originality of their combinations. You may never before have heard the melodica, for example, as a concert instrument; you have definitely never before heard it subjected to live processing in ensemble with an amplified string quartet. Many of the novel performance techniques incorporated into his scores are designed to negotiate pathways between definite pitch, indefinite pitch, and noise. Even more important to Hodge than the immediacy of sonic impression, however, is the idea that gives rise to a piece in the first place, which he speaks of as the "extra-musical": not for the sake of constructing some kind of program, but rather as a matter of "uncovering some essential formal or expressive quality that can be reconstituted in music." The sources of such ideas are as various as his compositions: literature, philosophy, visual art, even the natural world have all served in this capacity at one time or another"
New World Records
Ale?theia - Huck Hodge @ Youtube
[Dominik Susteck: organ / Sabine Akiko Ahrendt: violin / Jens Brülls: percussion
- "Adriana Hölszkys own comments concerning her music reveal her fascinating use of parameters such as space and time. She prefers to describe her works as individually structured sound spaces. There are expanding and shrinking spaces, and there are shifts from one sound area to another, which she compares to film editing with its sharp cuts or gentle fades. There are sudden intrusions of one sound area into another, and sometimes two or more sound areas are superimposed. Also, the concept of time does not exist for her as a single entity: Temporal processes appear in multiple strands in her music: cosmic time, terrestrial time, and an endless variety of experiential times that permeate one another and are superimposed.
The title of Hölszkys apocalyptic work for organ ... und ich sah wie ein gläsernes Meer, mit Feuer gemischt [And I saw what looked like a sea of glass mixed with fire] describes extremely contrasting realities: "sea of glass" and "fire". They interact in clear-cut succession; sounds and expressive characters alternate constantly: From one instant to the next, vivid pictures of light and color alternate with calm and mysterious moments that seem like narrow openings into other dimensions, explains the composer.
Her work Efeu und Lichtfeld [Ivy and Field of Light] also contains a stark contrast within itself. The worlds of the violin and organ appear to exist independently of one another. The violin figures move like pin pricks in a disconnected and restless fashion, primarily in the extreme upper register of the instrument. The organ sounds are like pulsating sources of light. The multiple meanings of the contrasting sounds arise finally as a consequence of the interaction between gradual transformations of color and discontinuous changes in pulse. (Hölszky)
In the large four-movement composition ... und wieder Dunkel I [ And Again Darkness 1] each movement is associated with a fragment from Gottfried Benns poem Ein Wort [A Word]: The wording of the second verse has been subdivided by Hölszky, and the fragments have each been placed in front of part of her composition."
- "Adriana Hölszky, born 1953 in Bucharest, is an Romanian-born German composer and pianist. In 1976 she moved with her family to Germany. Between 1997 and 2000, Hölszky was professor of composition at the Rostock University of Music and Theatre, and since 2000 she has been professor of composition at the Mozarteum University of Salzburg."
- "Dominik Susteck (born in Bochum, Germany in 1977) studied from 1998 to 2005 at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, the Hochschule for Music and Dance in Cologne, and the music Hochschule in Saarbrücken with an emphasis on sacred music, music theory, and composition; he completed his concert examination in organ. At the Study Seminar in Wuppertal, he completed the second State Examination in Music. During his church music studies, he held a lecturers position for music theory and organ at the Bishops Sacred Music School in Essen, which he used for the dissemination and inclusion of contemporary music in church activities. He has also served as a lecturer at the Folkwang University in Essen, the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf, and at the Franz Liszt Hochschule in Weimar; he has been a guest lecturer at the Hochschule for Music and Dance in Cologne, the Hochschule for Sacred Music in Dresden, as well with the Archdiocese of Cologne, the Diocese of Essen, and the Diocese of Mainz. Of particular importance to him is work with young people, with whom he has worked on projects dedicated to compositions by György Ligeti, Kurt Schwitters, John Cage, and Terry Riley, among others.
Since 2007, he has been the successor to Peter Bares as composer and organist at St. Peters Art Station in Cologne, where his improvisation concerts have attracted particular notice. Susteck has played numerous premiere performances of works by composers including Peter Bares, Erik Janson, Johannes S. Sistermanns, Stefan Froleyks, and Peter Köszeghy. His concerts have been broadcast by various German radio networks (among them Deutschlandfunk, WDR [West German Radio], and Saarland Radio). Dominik Susteck is the director of the international festival orgel-mixturen and has been a guest at festivals for contemporary organ music in Berlin and Frankfurt. As a composer and organist, he has been awarded a number of prizes (among them the first prize in the Aeolian Trio Composition Competition in 2004, the Klaus Martin Ziegler Prize in 2008 in Kassel, and the first prize in composition in the organ plus competition at the music Hochschule in Mainz in 2010)."
Wergo
Surface Image is a stunning marriage of Perich's inspired electronic aesthetic and Chow's nuanced yet fiercely virtuosic playing. It's a landmark release for Perich, being his first major release focusing solely on his work, as well as his first large-scale piano composition. Chow's dynamic performance is swept up in a sublime flurry of dazzling 1-bit sounds, simultaneously entangling and unraveling over the hour long journey. The line between electric and organic is artistically blurred, as the simple hand-wired electronics fuse with the individual notes of the piano on the same, expansive plane.
Through a string of groundbreaking works pairing acoustic instruments with hand-made 1-bit electronics, Tristan Perich has transformed the way in which traditional forms of composition can be enhanced and reinvigorated by the aesthetic simplicity of math, physics, and code. Perich's name splashed onto the scene with 2004's 1-Bit Music (the first album ever released as a self-contained microchip embedded in a jewel case) and since then his 1-bit compositions (like 2010's 1-Bit Symphony) have flourished: growing steadily in size, scope, and ambition.
Canadian pianist Vicky Chow has been described as "brilliant" (New York Times) and "one of the new stars of new music" (Los Angeles Times). She has premiered works by a slew of iconic composers - from Steve Reich to Bryce Dessner - and is a member of New York's preeminent Bang on a Can All-Stars. Chow also recently created an arrangement of The Rite of Spring for solo piano, of which she gave multiple performances during the centennial celebration, including a live streamed performance from WNYC's The Greene Space on May 29th, 2013 - the exact day the work was premiered in Paris 100 years earlier.
Surface Image premiered on February 19, 2013 at Roulette in Brooklyn, NY. During live performances, Chow's piano can be seen nested in a sea of cables and circuit boards, each powering one of the 40 loudspeakers hand-wired by Perich to serve as his electric orchestra. The immense work was later later recorded at EMPAC's sound studio, helmed by producer Argeo Ascani, mix engineer Jeffrey Svatek, and recording engineers Stephen McLaughlin and Svatek. The enormous scope and power of Surface Image's live aesthetic is captured in vivid detail by this recording, which places the listener at the center of Perich and Chow's sublime cacophony."
Emusic
You may be interested in seeing this.
Bobby Previte - Terminals
- Featuring: Zeena Parkins, Greg Osby, Nels Cline and John Medeski
- "Drummer, composer, bandleader and improviser Bobby Previte is known for his voluminous contributions to New Yorks legendary downtown experimental music scene an immensely fertile period in the 1980s that saw the likes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass breaking new ground with Ornette Colemans Prime Time, Bang on a Can and many more.
Now with nearly four decades under his belt as a creative force behind the drumkit, Previte has assembled a dream team of musicians from the jazz, indie rock and classical worlds to create TERMINALS, a luminous project consisting of five concertos for percussion ensemble and soloists, each inspired by the schematic-like terminal maps that Previte has noticed in airports around the world. The eternally adventurous So Percussion accompanies throughout, as Nels Cline (Wilco), Zeena Parkins, Greg Osby and John Medeski (Medeski Martin & Wood) take turns in the forefront to deliver an electrifying part-composed, part-improvised workout spanning two vinyl pieces.
In the liner notes to the LP, pressed in a deluxe double-gatefold package, Previte breaks down the influences that inspired the project. Terminals is a collision between, and a celebration of, two worlds. In cliche?d terms: the precise, unflappable, classical percussion ensemble meets the wild, uncontrollable, jazz master improviser in the forum best suited to such a meeting, the concerto a schizophrenic word whose etymology is much debated but in Italian means to join together, while in Latin means to contend. These two worlds happily co-exist in my mind. This is the country in which I live.
Cantaloupe Music - http://bobbyprevite.com/projects/terminals/
music
</a><br><span style="color: darkblue;"><strong>Tracklist<br><br>1. Hitchcock Études (20:48)<br>Megumi Masaki, piano and background vocals<br><br>2. Bookburners (14:34)<br>Stéphane Tétreault, cello<br>Paolo Kapunan (a.k.a. DJ P-Love), turntables <br><br>3. White Label Experiment (13:56)<br>So Percussion<br>Nicole Lizée, turntables and omnichord <br><br>4. Ouijist (13:41)<br>Mark Takeshi McGregor, alto flute<br>Ben Reimer, percussion<br>Rebecca Whitling, violin and omnichord<br>Mark Haney, double bass<br>Nicole Lizée, spectres <br><br>5. Son of the Man with the Golden Arms (18:20)<br>Architek Percussion<br>Ben Reimer, drum kit<br>Steve Raegele and Jonathan Barriault, guitars <br><br><em>- "Bookburners comprises a collection of Nicole Lizée’s works from the past five years picking up where 2008’s This Will Not Be Televised left off. Bookburners presents a number of Lizée’s fixations and obsessions that have infiltrated the five pieces on the album: a reinterpretation of rave culture, John Cage, Hitchcock, witchhouse meets classical, turntablism, iconography, meticulously notated glitch, auteur theory, voyeurism, malfunction, psychopaths, phantoms, backmasking, crate digging, grave digging and a sonic depiction of the imagination of graphic designer Saul Bass - and their melding with classical, concert, notated music. The record features an all-star cast of stellar musicians from across Canada and the U.S., among which include New York City’s So Percussion, turntablist DJ P-Love, drummer Ben Reimer, and cellist Stéphane Tétreault."<br><br><a href="http://www.nicolelizee.com/"><img src="http://www.mbam.qc.ca/infolettre/images/2014/2014-05-6_musique.jpg"></a><br>- "Montreal based composer Nicole Lizée creates new music from an eclectic mix of influences including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, glitch, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and 1960s psychedelia. She is fascinated by the errors made by outmoded and well-worn technology and captures these glitches, notates them and integrates them into live performance.<br><br>In 2001 Lizée received a Master of Music degree from McGill University. After a decade and a half of composition, her commission list of over 40 works is varied and distinguished, and includes the Kronos Quartet, BBC Proms, l’Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, CBC, New York City’s Kaufman Center, San Francisco Symphony, So Percussion, Eve Egoyan, Australian Art Orchestra, Fondation Arte Musica, Gryphon Trio and the SMCQ. Her music has been performed worldwide in renowned venues including Carnegie Hall (NYC), Royal Albert Hall (London), Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam) and Cité de la Musique (Paris) - and in major festivals including the BBC Proms (UK), Huddersfield (UK), Bang On a Can (USA), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (UK).<br><br>Lizée was awarded the prestigious 2013 Canada Council for the Arts Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music. She is a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow (2010). Her work for piano and notated glitch, Hitchcock Études, was chosen by the International Society for Contemporary Music to be featured at the 2014 World Music Days in Poland. Additional awards and nominations include a Prix Opus (2013), two Prix collégien de musique contemporaine (2012, 2013), the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers’ Top 10 List (2008) and the 2002 Canada Council for the Arts Robert Fleming Prize for achievements in composition."</em><br><a href="http://www.musiccentre.ca/node/124286">Centrediscs</a> - <a href="
Peter Söderberg - lute, guitarr, oud
Erik Peters - live electronics
Alvin Lucier - On the Carpet of Leaves Illuminated by the Moon
Version for oud and pure wave oscillator
James Tenney - Chromatic Canon
Version for lute and live electronics
John Cage - One 7
Version for guitar and live electronics
Steve Reich - Violin Phase
Version for lute and live electronics
- "The lute and guitar player Peter Söderberg and composer, musician Erik Peters devote their new CD to four American composers: Alvin Lucier, James Tenney, John Cage and Steve Reich. Already on ALCD004 ( Contemporary Lute, 1991) Söderberg presented lute transcriptions of music by Reich and Cage with a much appreciated result. In this new recording the interpretations take on a dimension of transformation as the compositions are actualized through a virtual electronic environment; the acoustic sound of the string instruments are in different ways in dialogue with and processed by live electronics, creating a lucid contemptualisation of these influential compositions."
Alice Musik Produktion
-"Erik Peters is a Swedish composer and performer working in the field of contemporary music and sound-art. Recent activities includes a project around interpretation and improvisation with POING, FEED and John Butcher, a collaboration with UK-based artist Mark Fell, and a CD-recording of American experimental music (Lucier, Tenney, Cage and Reich) for lute, prepared guitar, oud and live-electronics, with Swedish lute player Peter Söderberg. As a composer Erik Peters has created chamber music (with and without electronics), orchestral music, text/sound-compositions, radiophonic works and sound-installations, often exploring open and emergent forms. At the Gotland School of Music Composition he teaches studio technique, acoustics, soundscape composition, graphic notation and auditive analysis. He is also the Vice Chairman of the Society of Swedish Composers. Currently Erik Peters is studying at the Royal Institute of Art and Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts and aims at expanding his practice towards the borderland between performance, staging and audio-visual installation art."
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FEATURES
LEO KUPPER
JEAN-CLAUDE FRISON
JEANNETTE INCHAUSTE
- "This record highlights Leo Kupper's earliest unique compositions produced during the 1960's when he was ardently seeking out structures distinctly applicable to purely electronic sounds."
- "Leo Kupper was born in Nidrum, Hautes Fagnes (Eastern Belgium) on the 16th of April 1935. He studied musicology at the Liège Conservatory, then became the assistant of Henri Pousseur who, in 1958, had just founded the Apelac Studio in Brussels. Kupper started to work on his first pieces there, but he would finalize them only upon putting together his own studio in 1967: the Studio de Recherches et de Structurations Electroniques Auditives (which means 'studio of audio electronic research & structuring'). That is where he would compose, to this day, over forty works, most of them on instruments of his own design. In the '70s and '80s, he built a series of Sound Domes (briefly established in Rome, Linz, Venice, and Avignon), places where every sound, every phonem uttered by the listening audience was transformed by hundreds of loudspeakers of various sizes organized in a dome shape. This device transformed sounds through space AND time: something said could be morphed into another sound hours, days, perhaps years later. Leo had envisioned that a device like his, a place for contemplation, would be much-needed in cities where Nature had been evacuated.
In the late '70s, after discovering Iranian music master Hussein Malek, Kupper became one of the very few Western virtuosos of the santur. His first pieces were released by Deutsche Grammophon and, later, Igloo. His latest works have been released by the New York-based label Pogus.
In 1961, having terminated his musicology studies, Leo Kupper left Liège for Brussels. By that time, centres for music research such as those in Cologne, Paris and Milan had already produced works of experimental music, where pioneers were forging new and diverse routes in electronic music, 'musique concrète' and electro-vocal music. The GAME machine - Générateur Automatique de Musique Electronique (Automatic Generator of Electronic Music) was constructed during such period and spirit of renewal and technical exploration. The GAME consisted of a collection of variable 'sonic cells' sensitive to modulations of positive and negative voltages and programmable manually through the aid of colour-coded cables. Complex electronic loops and sound from loudspeakers and from microphone pick-ups were then either recorded by tape-machines or performed and interpreted by musicians who opened automatic channels, thus triggering automatic sound to exit the speakers. This in turn penetrated the machines by means of microphones and was replayed. Here then was an entirely new way of playing a musical instrument and how the works here were composed and performed."
Sub Rosa - Soundcloud
INTRODUCTION TO THE BAND
- URBAN SAX is the fruit of a long acoustic and architectural research that began in 1973 when Gilbert Artman, the bands Creator, Composer and Choreographer made the town of Menton, in the south of France, reverberate with strategically-placed 16 saxophonists. Over the years, from projects to projects, the band increased to its present form : 30 saxophonists, 10 chorus singers, 3 percussionists, 1 bass player and 2 dancers.
URBAN SAX can be augmented by local participants from Dance and Music Schools. This has no limit ; the band has sometimes numbered 200 !
Whenever its possible, Gilbert Artman likes the band to be joined by some musicians issued from different musical horizons. To give you a few examples, the band was joined in Jakarta by Balinese dancers and Gamelan musicians, in Vancouver by some Native American drummers and Scottish pipers, in Turkey by some sufis, in Tokyo by some traditional Japanese drummers...
URBAN SAX has been invited all over the world to perform in great events such as the inauguration of plazas, theatres, monuments..., opened and closed countless festivals, played in prestigious places (castles, caves, churches...), redefined truly urban environments like subways, factories, electric power stations..., and has been asked to participate in numerous Conventions.
PREPARATION OF A CONCERT
- Each site is carefully checked out beforehand so that its full spatial and acoustic potential can be realized. Thats what Gilbert Artman calls Acoustical Town Planning: to take over a space of environment and fill it with sound and movement. This concept he created is unique. Its during Gilbert Artmans visit that are decided the human and technical needs, the necessary authorizations and the running of the show.
Each performance of URBAN SAX is different ; Gilbert Artman works each time on a choreography specially adapted to the event and its location.
ABOUT THE BANDS PERFORMANCES
- Each performance is spectacular because the band literally invades the location. Some saxophonists are climbing down buildings, others are on the rooftops, behind the windows, some are arriving in helicopters... Everyone wears earphones and thanks to the transmitter, Gilbert Artman can be very precise his being, say, 200 meters from the musicians, who in turn might be 100 meters from each other.
The spectator is always surrounded by images and sounds and very often, there are some dancers and musicians suspended above him. URBAN SAX recreates the urban landscape and forever changes the relation between the people and their town.
More Urban Sax @ Emusers
http://www.musicprom.com/e_urban.html
- "This CD collects four chamber works in Newmans idiosyncratic, quirky style, performed by one of Berlins leading new music ensembles.
Newman appears a vocal soloist in the work Cologne. The texts are derived from a travel brochure about the city of Cologne which was filled with translation mistakes to a hilarious extent.
For Ghost Symphony, Newman writes: the majority of the piece consists of my own five chords to which I applied the rhythmic values of the first movement of Beethovens 5th Symphony, with the notable exceptions of the interpolations of Beethovens most structurally important chords which shine through.
Mode Records
- "Chris Newman is a contemporary composer, painter, author and performance artist living in Berlin. From 1976-79 he studied music at King's College London, taking a Bachelor of Music. During this time he met the Russian poet Eugene Dubnov and started to translate Russian poets (Mandelstam, Khlebnikov), an experience that proved important for his later work (e.g. from one medium to another, from life to art). He started writing his own poems in 1979. Moved to Cologne, Germany, in 1980 to study with Mauricio Kagel (New Music, Theatre/Video) at the Hochschule für Musik Köln. First public performance was singing his own songs in 1982. Founded chamber-punk rock band Janet Smith in 1983; met Morton Feldman in 1984. First concerts and video showings: Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Theater am Turm, Frankfurt; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Cooper Union, New York. Started to paint in 1989, which led (from 1994) to the two medium installations; in recent years presented paintings in a more sculptural and installed manner, cutting the canvas and rearranging the parts to form a new relationship within the painting. Since the beginning of the '80s Newman's compositions, have been performed at concerts and festivals and recorded for radio productions (including orchestral commissions). He has published books of poetry and prose and issued a number of CDs. From 2001 to 2002 he was professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart."
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review:
- "Every new modern composer you encounter forces you to start from the beginning, to blank the mind of expectations and let yourself open to what will come. Canadian composer Gordon Fitzell and his five-work album Magister Ludi (Centrediscs 20414) filled in the blank slate with some excellent high-modernist chamber music. The Ensemble contemporain de Montreal (ECM+) under Veronique Lacroix handle the performances with exceptional verve and creativity and the recording has first-rate presence.
Fitzell has come up with a notation system that structures the music yet allows the players improvisational latitude. From all aural appearances this is a fortuitous circumstance as the ECM+ rise to the occasion with music of considerable interest.
The five works performed on the CD cover a fair amount of time (from 2000 to 2014) yet go together quite seamlessly. "Pangea Ultima" has passages that show an affinity with avant jazz improv. (And the presence of Francis Houle, as well-respected avant improvisor, has some effect on that.) The bulk of the music has a distinctive spatial sprawl and fully high modernist abstraction. It does not suggest Darmstadtian serialism as much as it fits in with the more open-formed sounds that came after.
And so the hour-long program that includes the title work "Magister Ludi" (named after Hesse's provoking "Glass Bead Game" novel, for flute octet plus cello), "violence," "Flux" and "evanescence," the latter of which combines the ensemble with an electronics score, give us much to appreciate and contemplate.
This is serious, abstract, well-crafted modern chamber music in the grand avant tradition. The sound colors are vivid and the music excellently paced. Based on the recording Gordon Fitzell establishes his sound. He is a contender among the new, advanced style composers for the pantheon of most worthy Millennialists, I would say. Time will tell. In the meantime hear this album by all means. ECM+ sounds brilliant and the music no less so."
- "Canadian composer, performer and multimedia artist Gordon Fitzell has worked with many outstanding ensemblesNorwegian group BIT20 Ensemble, Brazils PianOrquestra, the pan-Canadian Ensemble 1534, and American sextet eighth blackbird, whose multiple Grammy-winning album strange imaginary animals features two of his works. In 2000 he began what would become a dynamic and longstanding collaboration with conductor Véronique Lacroix and ECM+; three of the works presented on this recording were commissioned and premiered by the group. In addition to concert music, Fitzell has presented multimedia installations in North America and Europe, most recently for World Music Days in Bruges, Belgium and Montreals Productions Totem Contemporain. Fitzell leads the eXperimental Improv Ensemble (XIE) and serves as Artistic Co-Director of the Winnipeg new music organization GroundSwell."
Canadian Music Centre
- An album that belongs in the history books.
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- " . . . . Despite an age difference of 51 years, Else Marie Pade and Jacob Kirkegaard speak a similar musical language and are prominent listeners and communicators of sounds that we tend to overhear. For the first time these two pioneers are collaborating on a new work: SVÆVNINGER investigates the variations that one can hear when sound waves collide. Both artists have previously worked on this phenomenon; Jacob Kirkegaard in his work Labyrinthitis (2007) and Else Marie Pade in her work "Faust Suite" (1962). For their new joint piece SVÆVINGER, they remixed some of Pade's early (and hitherto unreleased) sound experiments with some of Kirkegaard's recordings from his own ear, thus leading the audience straight into the undiscovered labyrinths of their own hearing."
Important Records
- "Else Marie Pade (b. 1924) is one of the pioneers of electronic music in Denmark. From the beginning of the 1950s, she, in close co-operation with technicians and assistants on Radio Denmark, produced a substantial amount of concrete and electronic music, partly in the shape of independent works for radio broadcasts, partly in the shape of accompaniments to various radio dramas. She started taking private lessons in composition from both Vagn Holmboe, Jan Maegaard and Leif Kayser. It was in 1952 that Pade discovered the means by which she could bring into being her universe of sound. The impulse came from a broadcast on Radio Denmark about Pierre Schaeffer, the originator of the new movement within the French field of electronic music: musique concrète. After visiting Schaeffer in 1952, Pade began to study the concrete aesthetics of music and the technique behind it. In the latter half of the 1950s, Pade, together with Lauridsen, organised an interimistic electronic sound studio at Radio Denmark, where one could work with both concrete and synthetically produced sound material - a synthesis which was also a prominent issue in the new Italian sound studio, Studio de Fonologia Musicale, where people like Luciano Berio, Henri Posseur and John Cage were working. From 1957 until the middle of 1960s, Pade experienced a productive period in which she created a long series of electronic works and thereby made a name for herself, both in Denmark and to a certain extent in international electronic circles."
Dacapo Records