In 1954, Henri Pousseur was twenty-five when he composed his first piece of electronic music in the studios of the Cologne radio, where Stockhausen (with whom he had a close relationship) had created most of his famous pieces.
This seventh and penultimate installment in the series Henri Pousseur had programmed around his experimental and electronic music features his earliest works -his first steps. Henri Pousseur studied at the Academies of Music in Liège and in Brussels from 1947 to 1953. He was closely associated with Pierre Froidebise and André Souris. He encountered Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio and thereafter devoted himself to avant-garde research. Henri Pousseur has taught in Cologne, Basel, and in the United States at SUNY Buffalo, as well as in his native Belgium. From 1970 until his retirement in 1988 he taught at the University and Conservatory of Liège where he also founded the Centre de recherches et de formation musicales de Wallonie.
Henri Pousseur, granddaddy of the Belgian electro-acoustic scene, was possessed by an incredibly complex yet undogmatically inspired creative imagination. He was lesser known within French and Anglo-Saxon experimental electronic music circles, but featured as somewhat of a leading figure in the scenes of his native country, as well as in those of the Netherlands and Germany. As a matter of fact, it was in the legendary Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne -- where Stockhausen, with whom Pousseur had a close relationship, famously created his first revolutionary electronic experiments -- that the merely 25-year-old Pousseur recorded the earliest piece collected here. 1954's revolutionary composition "Séismogrammes I" radiates and bleeps elegantly, and sounds like a lost gem of early electronic music. At a time when many other composers from the international avant-garde were still devoted to the cult of serialism, Pousseur was busy constructing an "open form" of composition, opening up his compositional method towards audience participation. Simultaneously, however, his musical vernacular was deeply informed by the tropes of medieval and renaissance music, and it is ultimately this sense of tradition that anchors the musical structures explored here. Henri Pousseur's work carefully reimagines existing musical motifs, while continually expanding forward-reaching otherworldly atmospheres and ancient dimensions.
- Dai Fujikura’s newest Minabel Records release is named after his daughter Mina, who was born just before he began composing the title piece on the recording, written for five soloists from the International Contemporary Ensemble. Fujikura brings his sense of wonder at the birth of his child to his compositional process in several of these pieces, exploring previously unexamined territory while continuing to rely on his interest in natural phenomenon for inspiration. “Mina” begins as if in the middle of the piece, and the quick character shifts in the music reflect the rapid change of mood one finds in a newborn’s behavior. Midway through the piece, a bass flute and prepared dulcimer duo evokes a dreamlike state, inspired by Fujikura observing his daughter sleeping and wondering what she might dream about at such an early age. “Prism Spectra” for viola and electronics is designed for the violist to control a virtual orchestra, though like a small child, this orchestra does not always obey, and occasionally has a mind of its own. The solo bassoon piece “Following”, a follow up to “Calling” also written for Rebekah Heller, is inspired by the image of viewing a river from above, constantly flowing forward despite vacillations in current and terrain. At the suggestion of the dedicatee Matthew Barley, “The Spirit of Beings” for cello and electronics is inspired by “pre-life”, or the period just before birth. The movements are meant to be re-ordered in different performances, giving the piece a modular structure that suggests many permutations and creates multiple transitions between reorganized movements. Not unlike “Prism Spectra”, where the viola generates material for a virtual orchestra, in the “Recorder Concerto” the real orchestra is meant to be an augmentation of the haunting articulations of the solo instrument. “Wondrous Steps” is also directly inspired by Fujikura’s daughter, as he observes her openness to risk in the process of learning to walk and exploring new activities. The music shifts character and expression quickly, as a child would, but also contains accelerating passages evoking the build up to a new triumph, and a dream sequence that miraculously produces a more skilled child than the one who fell asleep. Fujikura describes his daughter as a “risk management expert” in how she manages new experience; luckily we can enjoy her father’s observations from a safe distance and let Mina take the chances and explore."
- "Although Dai Fujikura was born in Osaka, he has now spent more than 20 years in the UK where he studied composition with Edwin Roxburgh, Daryl Runswick and George Benjamin. During the last decade he has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including Kazimierz Serocki International Composers’ Competition 1998 and a Royal Philharmonic Society Award in UK, Internationaler Wiener Composition Prize, the Paul Hindemith Prize in Austria and Germany respectively and both the OTAKA and Akutagawa awards in 2009. A quick glance at his list of commissions and performances reveals he is fast becoming a truly international composer. His music is not only performed in the country of his birth or his adopted home, but is now performed in venues as geographically diverse as Caracas and Oslo, Venice and Schleswig-Holstein, Lucerne and Paris. In his native Japan he has been accorded the special honour of a portrait concert in Suntory Hall in October 2012. In London where he chooses to live with his wife and family, he has now received two BBC Proms commissions, his Double Bass Concerto was recently premiered by the London Sinfonietta and in 2013 the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave the UK premiere of ‘Atom’ as part of the Total Immersion: Sounds from Japan. The French music world too has taken him to its hearts with numerous commissions, culminating in his first opera – an artistic collaboration with Saburo Teshigawara, which will be co-produced by Theatre des Champs Elysées, Lausanne and Lille. In Germany the European premiere of ‘Tocar y Luchar,’ the world premiere of which was given in Venezuela by Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, was given at the Ultraschall Festival in Berlin. His next German commission is ‘Grasping’ for the Munich Chamber Orchestra which was premiered in Korea before being brought back to Munich. Switzerland has featured his music at the Lucerne Festival, Austria at the Salzburg Festival and Norway at the Punkt Festival and a commission in 2013 from the Oslo Sinfonietta. Conductors with whom he has worked include Pierre Boulez, Peter Eötvös, Jonathan Nott, Gustavo Dudamel, the newly-appointed conductor of the Suisse Romande, Kazuki Yamada and Alexander Liebreich. His compositions are increasingly the product of international co-commissions. In 2012/13 the Seattle and Bamberg Symphony will each give continental premieres of ‘Mina’ for wind a percussion soloists and orchestra and the Asian premiere will be given by Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2011/12 the Arditti Quartet performed ‘flare’ in collaborating venues in London, Edinburgh and Tokyo. His opera, which is based on Stanislaw Lem’s novel, Solaris, will be co-produced in both France and Switzerland. In 2012 NMC released "secret forest", the first disc devoted exclusively to his music, and in 2013 Commmons released "Mirrors", an album including four of his orchestral works. His chamber music album, "Flare" has been released on his own label, Minabel and another album of his works, performed by I.C.E., is due to be released on the KAIROS label in the autumn. He has also collaborated in the experimental pop/jazz/improvisation world. A co-composition with Ryuichi Sakamoto was premiered in Hakuju Hall in Japan, collaborative works with David Sylvian are on Sylvian's "died in the wool" album and also Dai's co-compositions with Jan Bang and Sidsel Endresen feature on Jan Bang's album, released from Jazzland records."
- "Ensemble Signal, described by the New York Times as
“one of the most vital groups of its kind,” is a NY-based ensemble
dedicated to offering the broadest possible audience access to a diverse
range of contemporary works through performance, commissioning,
recording, and education. Since its debut in 2008, the Ensemble has
performed over 100 concerts, has given the NY, world, or US premieres of
over 20 works, and co-produced eight recordings. Signal was
founded by Co-Artistic/Executive Director Lauren Radnofsky and
Co-Artistic Director/Conductor Brad Lubman. Called a “new music dream
team” (TimeOutNY), Signal regularly performs with Lubman and features a
supergroup of independent artists from the modern music scene. Lubman,
one of the foremost conductors of modern music and a leading figure in
the field for over two decades, is a frequent guest with the world’s
most distinguished orchestras and new music ensembles.
Signal’s passion for the diverse range of music being written today is a
driving force behind their fearlessly adventurous projects. Signal has
been particularly noted for performing in the round, thereby engaging
the public in the unique communal experience of hearing rarely performed
works extremely up close. The Ensemble’s repertoire ranges from
minimalism or pop-influenced to the iconoclastic European avant-garde.
Signal’s projects are conceived through close collaboration with
cooperating presenting organizations, composers, and artists. Signal is
flexible in size and instrumentation - everything from solo to large
contemporary ensemble in any possible combination - enabling it to meet
the ever-changing demands on the 21st century performing ensemble.
At home in concert halls, clubs, and international festivals alike,
Signal has performed at Lincoln Center Festival, Walt Disney Concert
Hall, BIG EARS Festival, Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall, Tanglewood Music
Festival of Contemporary Music, Ojai Music Festival, Miller Theatre,
(le) Poisson Rouge, Cleveland Museum of Art, the Wordless Music Series,
and the Bang on a Can Marathon. They have worked directly with nearly
all the composers they perform in order to offer the most authentic
interpretations, a list that has included Steve Reich, Helmut
Lachenmann, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Oliver Knussen,
Hilda Paredes, and Charles Wuorinen. Other notable collaborations
include those with violinist Irvine Arditti and with longtime Philip
Glass Ensemble Music Director and producer Michael Riesman, who has
joined Signal as piano soloist, and produced four of their recordings.
Recent highlights have included the performance of Steve Reich’s video opera Three Tales, as well as David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe’s video opera Shelter, on the LA Philharmonic’s series at Walt Disney Concert Hall in May 2015, a headliner performance of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Radio Rewrite at the 2014 BIG EARS Festival in Knoxville, TN, and performing in the 2013 Lincoln Center Festival’s production of Monkey: Journey to The West,
with music by Damon Albarn, directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. Upcoming
highlights include the co-commission of a new work for large ensemble by
Steve Reich, to be premiered in 2016-17. Signal’s recording of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians was
released in May 2015 on harmonia mundi and received a Diapason d’or and
appeared on the Billboard Classical Crossover Charts. Additional
recordings include Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe’s Shelter (Cantaloupe); a CD & DVD of music by Lachenmann, with the composer as soloist in “...Zwei Gefühle...” (Mode); and Philip Glass's Glassworks and Music in Similar Motion (Orange Mountain).
Signal’s educational activities include workshops with the next
generation of composers and performers at institutions including the
Eastman School of Music, and the June in Buffalo Festival at the
University at Buffalo’s Center for 21st Century Music where they are a
resident ensemble. Additionally, their performances frequently feature
informative discussions with composers."
- "There are voices that speak our thoughts, emotions and needs. They vibrate the air to deliver the contents. We speak and talk. We hear and listen. And there are other kinds of voices that are alive but mostly unheard. Some loud and intense, some soft, almost mute, all saying something that needs to be heard. Although heard by no one yet, they are definitely and clearly there. A poet gives them actual voices using their instrument: words. For the two ensembles on this CD, violinist/composer Jason Kao Hwang chose poems that had personal resonance. “They felt like my voice speaking words of my own to express essences that I could not bring to consciousness before,” he says. “I also heard music in them. All the poems have an inherent and unique flow of rhythms, textures and colors that would challenge and engage music. Aware of this dynamic, I composed sonic spaces that allowed each poem to fully resonate.” Into those sonic spaces, Hwang invited musicians and vocalists who -- like poets -- hear unheard music, alive and well, but not yet shared. Throughout each poem’s sonic architecture, vocalists Deanna Relyea and Thomas Buckner were empowered to improvise and make the poems their own. Now, the voices, once unheard and impossible to reach, are here with us, welcoming us all to listen to them with open arms. Let us listen to them from every corner of our streets, memories and dreams. Here VOICE speaks to us in the most humble, personal and genuine timbres and tones, as we walk together or alone in this landscape called LIFE."
- "Jason Kao Hwang leads numerous ensembles, including his octet of Chinese and Western instruments (Burning Bridge), his quintet Sing House (violin/viola, trombone, piano, string bass, drum set), his trio Amygdala (violin/viola, gayageum, djembe/percussion) and a string orchestra, Spontaneous River. In 2012, National Public Radio selectedBurning Bridge as one of the year’s Top CDS and the Downbeat Critics’ Poll voted him “Rising Star for Violin.” As violinist, Mr. Hwang has collaborated with Will Connell, Jr., Pauline Oliveros, William Parker, Anthony Braxton, Yoshiko Chuma and many others. Mezzo soprano Deanna Relyea has appeared on the concert stage and with symphony orchestras in the Midwest region and throughout Canada. Deanna performs her one-woman cabaret show in many settings, most recently as guest artist at the Niagara-On-The-Lake Chamber Music Festival. She has previously collaborated with Hwang for the premiere performance of his "Lifelines" at John Zorn's venue The Stone in New York City. For more than 40 years, baritone Thomas Buckner has dedicated himself to the world of new and improvised music. Buckner has collaborated with a host of new music composers and made solo appearances at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, presenting a repertoire that includes more than 100 compositions, written for or dedicated to him. Buckner is featured on over 40 recordings, including six solo albums."
Released March 29, 2016, Yannis Kyriakides at his usual extremly high level of excellency:
.
Steven van Gils (tenor)
Tiemo Wang (baritone)
Maciej Straburzynski (bass-baritone)
Pepe Garcia Rodriguez (percussion)
Enric Monfort (percussion)
Frank Wienk (percussion/laptop)
Yannis Kyriakides (composition/text)
Fedor Teunisse (musical direction)
Romain Bischoff (vocal direction)
- "Lunch Music by composer Yannis Kyriakides is a set of pieces for voices,
percussion and live electronics, inspired by the 1959 book Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs. On this recording the virtuosity of
percussionists Slagwerk Den Haag (recently heard on the recording of
Michael Gordon’s Timber) and contemporary vocal specialists of Silbersee
are embedded in a rich sonic environment of electronics, modulated
voices, grinding pulses and hallucinatory noises.
The concept of the music revolves around the idea of the polyphony of
voices found in Naked Lunch. The effect of one voice speaking through
another, of mediumship and possession, is a central musical concept in
the piece, and it is manifested in the way the live electronics,
controlled by the percussionists modu- lates the voices of the singers
and the various fragments of samples heard: from the voice of Burroughs
to snippets of 50’s pop songs.
The piece, originally commissioned by Slagwerk Den Haag, was composed
for the dance/music theatre piece of the same name, produced by Club Guy
and Roni, Slagwerk Den Haag and Silbersee, that toured The Netherlands
in the season 2013/2014 and is touring again in Spring 2016."
Slagwerk Den Haag
- "performs and develops contemporary percussion music in
its most diverse forms: from existing repertoire, via a large number of
new commissions and collaborations with composers, to researching the
furthest limits of organized sound. The artists are highly versatile
creators and performers that aim to amaze time after time, in every
setting imaginable, exploring the traditional instruments as well as all
forms of experimental ones; porcelain, equine jaws, glass or 3D-printed
instruments.
The New York Times described Slagwerk Den Haag as ‘…dazzling percussion
group, similarly combined virtuosity and theatricality…’."
- "was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1969 , emigrated to Britain 1975 and has been living in the Netherlands since 1992. He studied musicology at York University, and later composition with Louis Andriessen and Dick Raaijmakers. He currently lives is Amsterdam with his wife and two sons.
As a composer and sound artist he looks for ways of creating new forms and hybrids of media that problematize the act of listening. The question as to what music is actually communicating is a recurring theme in his work and he is often drawn to the relation between perception, emotion and language and how that defines our experience of sound. In the last years his work has been exploring different relations between words & music, both in concert compositions and installations through the use of systems of encoding information into sound, synthesizing voices and projecting text to music. The latter work has led to about 20 music text films that play on the idea of imagined or inner voice. . . . ."
Enjoying this with the various phases it moves through, thanks B.N.
You are most welcome . . . Just in case you don't know the Perich / Chow album Surface Image - A really brilliant album and one of the highlights of 2014.
Just in at Soundcloud, available for streaming. The amazing vocal ensemble, Roomful of Teeth:
“They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so
sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the
experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently
worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their
country, their children, or their fate.” - James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis” (1970)
Coloring Book, a new piece for Roomful of Teeth by composer Ted Hearne, sets texts by black American writers.
But in fact I first spotted another heads up from yerself Roomful of Teeth / Caroline Shaw - Partitia for 8 Voices. Great if you give it some volume for after work (with a beer!) Must be something to do with the *gasp* sunshine in South London right now.
Released April 9, 2015 and December 2015 on Emusic:
- "The cycle of fifteen pieces that make up "Aus den Sieben Tagen" (1968),
including the work on this recording "Setz die Segel zur Sonne" (Set
Sail For the Sun), form an interesting contrast to a large number of
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s works.
Written in a year of personal and social turbulence (the same year Pink
Floyd set the controls for the heart of the sun), it represents for some
an immense departure in his oeuvre. For indeed it is the scientific,
even pedantic level of detailed notation (however novel many of the new
symbols he invented) both in subsequent and earlier works that lead
critics to align his music with the post-war atomic age; a new faith in
technology and progress perceived to be reflected in the complexity of
his written scores and new reliance on machines to realize precise
measurements of sub-atomic time and articulation.
Containing only a short text, these pieces ask the performer(s) to use
intuition to realize a composition with no written pitches, rhythms,
dynamics, or instrumentation; to listen to both inner projections and
often the sound production of the ensemble as a whole. Asking the
players to “…play a tone for so long until you hear its individual
vibrations…” may in essence not be so far removed from the monistic
examinations of sine tones and their combinations present in more famous
electronic works such as Kontakte or Gesang der Jünglinge.
The Salt Lake Electric Ensemble approached Set Sail For the Sun with
significant discussion of just what “pure, gently shimmering fire” would
really sound like, and the types of timbres both acoustic and
electronic that would permit the ensemble to “listen to the tones of
others…and slowly move…until you arrive at complete harmony”.
Recorded live, this music asks the listener to transcend form and
analysis, and use a similar inner instinct to navigate the ocean of
sound."
Matt Dixon, Brandon Garcia, Oliver Lewis, Charlie Lewis, Greg Midgely,
Patrick Munger, Brian Patterson, Dan Thomas, Ben Warden, Eric Waters,
Ryan Fedor, Ron Harrell, Nick Foster, Mike Wall
- "Salt
Lake Electric Ensemble is a group of musicians and artists who perform
music and multimedia with computers, other electronics, and instruments.
Current projects include music by Stockhausen, Reich, and Riley.
Formed in the summer of 2009, the Salt Lake Electric Ensemble grew out of the desire of group director Matt Dixon to explore
minimalist principles in contemporary electronic music. Recognizing
the importance of Terry Riley’s 1964 masterwork “In C", the idea of an
ensemble of laptop players was born. From early rehearsals comprising
only two or three members, the ensemble has steadily expanded to the
present collective of eight. The group unites the talents of local
visual/multimedia artists, electronic composers, and rock musicians.
Fusing the sophisticated tools of modern music software with acoustic
percussion, SLEE approach the often performed and recorded “In C” unlike
any other. After many careful months of planning and rehearsal, Salt
Lake Electric Ensemble debuted the piece at the University of Utah as
part of the 2009 Crosstalk Electroacoustic Concert, and then went to
work making a recording of their realization of Riley's score. On June
30th 2010, they will officiallyself- release their recording of “In C”
with a companion DVD, allowing listeners to enjoy their version of the
piece with accompanying “visual soundtrack”. Future collaborations
among the group hope to explore original electronic music, multimedia
arts, and other interpretations of seminal 20th Century composers."
Brilliant "mainstream" contemporary with a rock feeling:
Bruno Letort
Bruno Letort is a prominent figure on the contemporary French music scene. Formally trained in composition and harmony, his work is characterized by a deliberate indifference to sylistic boundaries. His orchestral pieces, his numerous string quartets and a ground-breaking interactive opera are evidence of an open-minded sensibilty as much to the American repetitive movement as to Eastern European tradition or ambient and electronic music. He has composed interactive inter-disciplinary works for stage, film and ballet. An educationalist, artistic director and writer, he has been a producer at France Musique since 1994, where he founded the National Radio label "Signature". As producer, he has collaborated with Pierre Henry, Fred Frith, Hector Zazou, Jean-Luc Godard and Elliott Sharp.
- "What forms can the concerto adopt today? The Belgian composer Benoît Mernier provides an answer to that question with these three works, receiving their world premiere recordings. A memorial to the soldiers who died at the front in World War I, his Concerto for violin and orchestra is, quite simply, a masterpiece, here performed fearlessly and brilliantly by its dedicatee, Lorenzo Gatto (a Prizewinner at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 2009) and the National Orchestra of Belgium. If the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire provided the inspiration for the piece, Mernier also draws on the letters of ordinary soldiers, whose eloquence survived the horror of the trenches. The next work is Vi(v)a!, a lively and good-humoured orchestral overture, written to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Liège Royal Philharmonic. The programme is rounded off with the refined pianism of David Lively, in partnership with the National Orchestra of Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, in a concertante-style work that bursts with the breath of life of improvised music. ‘La grâce exilée’ (Grace in exile), the title of one of Apollinaire’s war poems, can be understood to provide a linking theme for the composer, the soloists, the music directors and the orchestras, all internationally renowned."
- "He studied organ and improvisation with Firmin Decerf and harpsichord with Charles Koenig. He continued his studies at Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liège where he graduated in many subjects, including the Higher Diploma in organ in the class of Jean Ferrard, for whom he was the assistant for several years. He also studied organ with Bernard Foccroulle and with Jean Boyer at the National Regional Conservatoire of Lille, where he obtained the Diplôme de Perfectionnement.
Along with the organ, Benoît Mernier has devoted himself to composition. In this field, he was able to profit from the counsels of Claude Ledoux, Henri Pousseur, Luca Francesconi ; Emmanuel Nunes, Bernard Foccroulle, Célestin Deliège. He studied the composition with Philippe Boesmans.
His organ work Artifices was the prizewinner of the 1990 UNESCO International Composers' Tribune. In 1995 the Royal Academy of Belgium awarded him the Fuérison Prize for his Blake Songs for voice and chamber orchestra. His Clarinet Quintet was awarded the Paul Gilson Prize of the French-speaking Public Radios in 1999. . . ."
Music composed and performed by John Kada and Mike Patton Orchestra: stavanger symphony orchestra Recorded at Fartein Valen (Stavanger) and Wrongroom (Oslo ) Orchestrations by john kaada
- "Norwegian composer John Kaada and Mike Patton have partnered for Bacteria Cult, the pair’s first Kaada/Patton release since 2007’s Kaada/Patton Live DVD and the first album from the musicians since 2004’s Romances.
“Working with John Kaada on this latest release was an honor and pure pleasure,” said Patton of resuming work Kaada. “His compositions have always resonated deeply with me and his orchestral arrangements for this project are harmonically dense and delicious! Each individual piece is so well constructed and inventively assembled that my vocal passages practically sang themselves. I’m hoping very much that we can seduce some eardrums and welcome listeners into this lush sonic ‘otherworld.’”
“We wanted to try new things,” explains Kaada. “Fully utilizing new technologies, combined with a large orchestra, while putting more attention towards melody and structure.”
The eight-song, orchestral collection exudes the music Ipecac has become well known for: eclectic, experimental and cinematic. Similar in feel to Fantômas’ Director’s Cut, as Kaada describes it, Bacteria Cult“dwells in the twilight zone where spooky and seductive meet.”
FRANK GRATKOWSKI, who won the German
SWR Jazz prize , the Norwegian French horn player HILD SOFIE TAFJORD
(also known for her noise duo with MAJA RATKJE), the British trombone
player HILARY JEFFERY, who toured a.o. with JIMI TENOR, MARC WEISER
(cofounder of the Club Transmediale Festival in Berlin) and bass player
MARTIN HEINZE from the BERLIN PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA. RASHAD BECKER was
responsible for sound and recording.
“Kore” is a natural advancement of Reinhold Friedl’s earlier composition
“Xenakis [a]live!” (released 2007 on ASPHODEL) - a homage to the
French-Greek composer Iannis Xenakis. The piece is conceived for nine
amplified instruments demonstrating zeitkratzer’s well established
tradition of instrumental amplification (e.g. the early collaborations
with ZBIGNIEW KARKOWSKI or MERZBOW and more recently with WILLIAM
BENNETT of WHITEHOUSE) where playing amplified does not only mean making
things louder, it also entails having a microscopic view of sound in
which acoustic microsounds appear in a completely new context. Recorded
live January 2013 during KLUB KATARAKT festival in Hamburg, “Kore” adds a
stunning new chapter to ZEITKRATZER’s audacious catalogue and a new
sort of intensities to contemporary chamber music.
Zeitkratzeris sound
made visible, tangible, bodily – a truly unforgettable corporal
experience of live music. The physicality of sound is celebrated through
extended instrumental techniques, mutual understanding and
amplification of traditional instruments. A midpoint between
instrumental and electronic music turns out to be more bizarre and
surprising than either of these. It will make you expect more from music
than you did before!
Zeitkratzeris
a perverse subversion of musical genres. Keiji Haino meets Karlheinz
Stockhausen meets Whitehouse meets Terre Thaemlitz meets Iannis Xenakis
meets Lou Reed. The joy of the intensity of sound crosses all borders
and brings these musics together into zeitkratzer's plain of complex
textures. A challenge to both composers and non-academic noise-makers
thrown by the most talented performers, improvisers, sound artists and
composers around.
Zeitkratzeris
a soloist ensemble. Its strength comes from its members. Founded in
1999, it gathers nine musicians, light and sound engineers living in
different European cities from Amsterdam to London to Oslo meeting for
working phases in Berlin. zeitkratzer benefits from its musicians ¨C
their advanced and unique playing techniques, their acquaintance with
electronics and technologies, their hybrid experience and varied
backgrounds: new or improvised music, experimental Rock and Pop, Noise,
Ambient, Folk Music… Meanwhile, individual awards to zeitkratzer members
include the German Jazz Award (Gratkowski), a fellowship at the Kings
College Cambridge (Lukoszevieze) and composition commissions from the
French state (Friedl).
Zeitkratzeris
independent from music institutions. The ensemble finances itself
through free projects and international concerts. This freedom
facilitates an idiosyncratic and ground breaking repertoire that has
made zeitkratzer internationally recognized. Faithful only to their own
tastes and beliefs, they have established themselves to be one of the
most intriguing ensemble to collaborate with. Musicians working with or
for zeitkratzer include Helmut Oehring, Keith Rowe (AMM), Radu Malfatti,
Nicolas Collins, Jim O’Rourke, Merzbow, John Duncan, Pluramon aka
Marcus Schmickler, Bernhard Guenter, Alvin Curran, Lee Ronaldo (Sonic
Youth) and Elliott Sharp.
Zeitkratzer is driven
by unique programs. Blocks of repertoire created by the ensemble can
function either separately or mixed up. From Volksmusik of Danube
waltz-reminiscences and zither noises to Xenakis [A]Live – a hommage to
a great composer with a paraphrase of his “Persepolis”, the
Electronics series including music by and with Keiji Haino, Terre
Thaemlitz, Carsten Nicolai and William Bennett of Whitehouse, the Old
School series dedicated to New Music of John Cage, James Tenney and
Alvin Lucier, Noise with Merzbow and Zbigniew Karkowski, idiosyncratic
Songs for soprano and ensemble and the famous Metal Machine Music by
Lou Reed transcribed from guitar feedbacks to amplified instruments.
Tours with these programs has brought zeitkratzer to many
European countries where they regularly perform at renowned festivals
from Madrid, Rome and London to Vienna, Budapest and Berlin.
Zeitkratzeris not
worried about preserving the “purity” of New Music. Music, especially
so-called new music, thrives on continuous contamination. The idea of
„pure taste“ as an
independent aesthetic category was revealed by Pierre Bourdieu to be a
medium of social
distinction. “Thus, pure taste is based on nothing else but a rejection
or rather disgust for the objects that ‘force us to enjoy’, such as
disgust for such crude, vulgar taste that is also appealing in this
forced enjoyment”.
Zeitkratzer is serious music turned from stiff to joy !
- "Christopher Bailey’s “Glimmering Webs” is a comprehensive collection of his piano music written between 1993 and 2013 and displays several threads of influences and interests, from avant-garde modernism to irreverent pastiche and ambient sonic beauty to gleeful silliness. Some composers cultivate a singular focused voice that you can immediately recognize as soon as you hear it. Others are more restless, finding themselves drawn to several different aesthetics and excavating diverse voices within themselves. Bailey is in the second category, yet a clear voice emerges despite his omnivorous stylistic appetite. His music demonstrates a penchant for deconstruction and irony (witness “Fantasy-Passacaglia after Hall and Oates”, employing a compositional approach that Bailey calls “minimalism as a way into maximalism”, as applied to a typical chord progression from the 80s pop duo) paired with the romanticism and sensuality of ambient music (best demonstrated by the twenty minute long Brian Eno-esque “Meditation”, a deeply immersive work for piano and live processing). The overall result is that this two cd collection, performed with precision and elegance by New York based pianists Shiau-Uen Ding, Augustus Arnone, and Jacob Rhodebeck, encompasses a wonderfully balanced expressive range, from melodrama to humor, and from rhetorical compositional argument to deeply felt emotional music.
Bailey’s “Composition for Shitty Piano” engages with his interest in indeterminacy; the piece essentially embraces the unpredictability of sub-par pianos and makes that characteristic its core parameter. In this spirit, much of the piano part is written in graphic notation instead of designating specific pitches, acknowledging the reality of crappy pianos -- you never know which pitches will have problems. The inclusion of the musique concrete materials in the electronic part lends a tinkering quality to the sound world, as if we have found ourselves in a musical workshop.
Neo-classicism also plays an important role in Bailey’s work, particularly in the monumental “Piano Sonata,” which features an extended variations second movement and various experimental approaches to the classical structure of Sonata form. The last work in the two cd set, “Ditty”, also employs a Classical rounded binary form, but filtered through 19-tone equal temperament tuning. In a way, this short piece is a perfect summation of Bailey’s work -- grounded in compositional tradition but attracted to experimentation, and presented with a healthy dose of wit, self-deprecation, and irreverence."
- "Born outside of Philadelphia, PA, Christopher Bailey turned to music composition in his late ‘teens, and to electroacoustic composition during his studies at the Eastman School of Music, and later at Columbia University. He is currently based in Boston, but frequently participates in musical events in New York City. His music explores a variety of musical threads, including microtonality, acousmatic and concrète sounds, serialist junk sculpture, ornate musical details laid out in flat forms, and constrained improvisation.
Composition for Shitty Piano - gotta love it. I'm used to improv pianists complaining about those - though strangely folk like Christian Wolff just tend to get on with it. Sorry bit of a tangent. Thanks for (another) heads up.
- "Composer/performer Malcolm Goldstein (b.1936) has been active in the presentation of new music and dance since the early 1960s. He received an M.A. in music composition from Columbia University in 1960, having studied with Otto Luening. In the 1960s in New York City, he was a co-founder with James Tenney and Philip Corner of the Tone Roads Ensemble. His “Soundings” improvisations have received international acclaim for having ‘reinvented violin playing,’ extending the range of tonal/sound-texture possibilities of the instrument and revealing new dimensions of expressivity.
The pieces on this recording are structured improvisation compositions; none are through-composed, linear pieces with exactly notated tones and rhythms. The sound of the composed improvisations range from jazzy to dense microtonal sounds. The works on “Soweto Stomp” feature Goldstein not only as composer, but also as a soloist and ensemble performer.
Established in 1992, the eclectic Ratchet Orchestra serves as a meeting place for Montreal musicians interested in creating new and vibrant music. Many of the city’s most active and creative composers, instrumentalists and improvisers play in the ensemble.
Collectively, the Ratchet owe an enormous debt to Goldstein who has mentored and worked with many of the band members in the past. Their close connection is evident in the musical performances here."
- "The Ratchet Orchestra is an avant gardejazz musical group based in Montreal, Canada. The band was started in the early 1990s, when musical director Nicolas Caloia began experimenting with improvised chamber jazz. Members such as Tom Walsh, Jean Derome, Lori Freedman, Sam Shalabi, and Christopher Cauley soon joined.[1] Four members played on their 1994 eponymous debut.[2]
A partial list of past and present members includes Jean Derome Flute, Bass Flute, and Piccolo; Craig Dionne Flute; Lori Freedman Clarinets; Gordon Krieger Bass clarinet; Christopher Cauley Soprano Saxophone; Yves Charuest Alto Saxophone; Louisa Sage, Alto Saxophone; Damian Nisenson Tenor Saxophone, Ida Toninato Baritone Saxphone, Bassoon; Jason Sharp Bass Saxophone, Ellwood Epps Trumpet; Philippe Battikha Trumpet, Eric Lewis trumpet, euphonium; Craig Pedersen trumpet; Tom Walsh Trombone; Scott Thomson Trombone; Jacques Gravel Bass Trombone; Thea Pratt French Horn; Noah Countability Sousaphone; Gabriel Rivest Tuba; Joshua Zubot Violin; Guido Del Fabbro Violin; Brigitte Dajczer Violin; Jean René Viola; Gen Heistek Viola; James Annett Viola; Norsola Johnson, Cello; Nicolas Caloia Bass, Synthesizer; Chris Burns Guitar, voice; Sam Shalabi Guitar; Guillaume Dostaler Piano, Synthesizer; Ken Doolittle Percussion, Voice; Michel Bonneau Congas; Isaiah Ceccarelli Drums; John Heward Drums.
The orchestra performed at the Guelph Jazz Festival in 2010, and at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV) in 2011 and 2014. Their 2014 FIMAV performance featured guests Marshall Allen and Danny Thompson of the Sun Ra Arkestra in a program of Sun Ra's music in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Ra's birth. Other performances include l'Off Festival de Jazz de Montréal and the Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival.
Recently the Ratchet Orchestra has also performed the works of American composer and violinist Malcolm Goldstein."
Kati Agócs's High-Drama Setting of Love and Devotion:
- "The latest in the Boston Modern Orchestra Project's composer portrait series focuses on Kati Agócs, a Guggenheim-winning Boston-based, Canadian-born composer of Hungarian and American descent. The cross-cultural angle plays strongly into her latest project for the omnivorous Boston Modern Orchestra Project, which hurtles themes of love and devotion through a particularly intense prism of influences and language.
The album's main course and most recent composition is The Debrecen Passion, a spiraling work for 12 female voices and chamber orchestra. A glimpse of any given moment exposes waves of Krzysztof Penderecki-like vocal clusters, pulsing chant, flurries of Baroque trumpet and sumptuous Late-Romantic orchestration.
It's an overwhelming plate of emotion and color – the music's subject matter is, after all, the Passion of Christ. Agócs filters and rearranges the story through lenses of Hungarian poet Szilárd Borbély, Kabbalistic prayer and ancient Latin, Hungarian and Georgian religious texts. But it's more than a sum of disparate influences. The Debrecen Passion is high-craft, high-drama music that, in certain ways, goes down like an old-school Hollywood score cut to fit the fast, ADDinspired edits of modern television: think chase-scene drums against big-band orchestral statements, intensely unsettling a cappella drops and religious fervor at its most intense, all within a few bars... or at the same time.
The rest of the collection progresses accordingly, an all-stops-out grab bag of lyrical subject matter and orchestrational techniques. By the Streams of Babylon – the album's earliest work – sets Psalm 137 to a restless pairing of Agócs and fellow composer-soprano Lisa Bielawa. ...like treasure in a field takes its title from the Gospel of Matthew and winds the orchestra through a maze of left turns and unexpected flashes of discovery.
The final piece Vessel acts as a meditative, lyrical aftermath to the dizzying colors and twists of the previous music. At least relatively speaking: set for two sopranos, alto and seven instrumentalists, the music simultaneously delivers three poems in three languages – English, Hebrew and Latin Texts – building over a bed of shifting tempi and orchestral colors until only a single, repeated piano note is left to drift into (as the English text, by EE Cummings, declares) "the deepest secret nobody knows."
- "Kati Agócs, who is of Hungarian and American background, was born in 1975 in Windsor, Canada. Bridging the gap between lapidary rigor and sensuous lyricism, her music has been performed across the globe by leading musicians and ensembles and hailed as original, daring, and from the heart. A 2008 citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters praises the "soulful directness" of her music, its "naturalness of dissonance," and its "melody, drama, and clear design." The Boston Globe recently described it as "music of fluidity and austere beauty," while The New York Times has characterized it as "nimble", "striking," and "filled with attractive ideas," and has described her vocal music as possessing "an almost 19th-century naturalness." Appointed in 2008 to the composition faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, she is fast gaining international recognition as a significant voice of the younger generation."
Composers: John Luther Adams, William Brittelle, Glenn Kotche, Paola Prestini, and Shara Worden Performing Ensemble: Roomful of Teeth, percussionist Glenn Kotche, and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler Narrator: Mark Rylance Script & General Advisor: William deBuys Director: Murat Eyuboglu Cinematography: Sylvestre Campe & Murat Eyuboglu Editor: David Sarno Education Advisor: Michael Preston Writer/Educator: Christa Sadler
The Colorado is a music-based documentary that explores the Colorado River Basin from social and ecological perspectives across history. The project is conceived as equal parts documentary film, live performance, and an educational tool for classrooms.
The Colorado River has carved some of the most majestic landscapes on the planet for five million years, and its delta as a lush wetland is within living memory. Today, with a booming agricultural industry to support and nearly forty million people in a half-dozen major cities dependent on its waters, the Colorado is overused, overpromised, and unable even to reach its delta.
We believe that effective stewardship of land and water begins with love and knowledge and continues with dedicated activism. We have designed The Colorado to inspire the love, instill the knowledge, and encourage the activism.
The film component of the project is an immersive and sensorial experience in which music and images play a central role. Brief voiceover texts—narrated by the great Shakespearean actor Mark Rylance—lead the viewer into each section of the film. Contextual images along with lyrics—sung by the 2014 Grammy laureate Roomful of Teeth—explore topics ranging from the prehistoric settlements of the region to the present-day plight of the Colorado River Delta. The intervening sections cover crucial facets of the river’s history, such as the period of European exploration, the dam-building era and its legacy, and industrial agriculture and immigration, as well as the impact of climate change on the region.
A full-length textbook (approximately 400 pages), corresponding section by section to the film, will offer students and the general public the opportunity to explore any of the topics addressed in the film in greater depth. These educational materials include original text, along with timelines, maps, photographs, videos, teaching aids, and more. Making this content available in both an art-book– style print edition and a state-of-the-art website will provide all interested parties with a reference tool as well as a source of in-depth learning.
The mission of The Colorado is to create a crossroads between art, ecology and regional history, while sensitizing audiences to pressing issues of our times.
The Colorado is intended to be the first in a series of multi-media projects, cultivating a layered understanding of different regions, towards a better stewardship of resources."
Composed Improvisation for snare drum alone Variations I version for steel drums and mbira Child of Tree for solo percussion Composed Improvisation for one-sided drums with or withour jangles Inlets for three players of water-filled conch shells and one conch-player using circular breathing and the sound of fire 27'10.554" for a percussionist
- "Anyone performing John Cage’s music cannot avoid the phenomenon of silence. In his view, everything audible can in principle be music, even if it is not composed: “If you want to know the truth of the matter, the music I prefer, even to my own or anybody else's, is what we are hearing if we are just quiet.”
In all the works interpreted by him, Matthias Kaul deals with the question of which forms can principally take silence and how it can be realized in the most concrete way. Which instruments are used, how does the instrumentation develop throughout the entire piece, and how can the acoustic results remain exciting for almost half an hour? How can a large number of instruments and sounds be brought into play without conveying the impression of arbitrariness? Matthias Kaul is not only a percussionist, he is also a composer and therefore predestined for such a task. He develops his own concepts which then have to be checked for their compatibility with the score.
In "Variations I", Matthias Kaul plays with various forms of silence. From the arrangement of the score consisting of transparent sheets with dots and lines, the performer generates concrete tones, sounds and "pauses".
The playing instructions for "Inlets" are still more rudimentary; there are three performers, each of whom has four conch shells. The shells are filled with water and turned round and round; then a fire fueled by pine cones begins, and the piece ends with a tone from one of the shells blown like a horn.
In "Child of Tree", the instructions of the composer present a rather diffuse area of possibilities. The performer must toss coins and decide on the basis of the results as to how many sections he divides the eight minutes into and which instruments he uses in which sections.
In "Composed Improvisation", Cage gave exact instructions consisting of time brackets which provide a timeframe for the music. The tonal structure within this framework is left to chance.
"27´10.554´´" for solo percussion is a finished composition of this project, with the title indicating the duration of the piece. For this major project, Kaul used 90 different instruments and objects altogether."
- "began his musical career as a rock and jazz drummer. He studied percussion at the Hochschule for Music in Hamburg, receiving a soloist’s diplo- ma. He has worked with many important composers and performers such as John Zorn, David Moss, Elliott Sharp, Carla Bley, Malcolm Goldstein, Mauricio Kagel, Hans Werner Henze, Vinko Globokar, Hans Joachim Hespos, Alvin Lucier, and James Tenney. Numerous concert tours have taken Kaul throughout Europe, as well as to North and South America, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, Canada, and Africa. In Africa, he was deeply involved in the study of the traditional music of various ethnic groups including the Maasai and the Samburu. Kaul is a founding member of the ensemble L’ART POUR L’ART.
Matthias Kaul is a self-taught composer. He feels that premiering more than 300 works by other composers, most written in close collaboration with himself as performer, provided him with the best possible education as a composer. Kaul has received commissions from broadcasting institutions (Deutschlandfunk, Hessian Broadcasting HR, West German Broadcasting WDR, Saarland Broad- casting SR), opera houses (in Hamburg, Hanover, Munich, and Berlin), ensembles (such as L‘ART POUR L‘ART, Schola Heidelberg, Lucilin, Nomos Quartet, Klank, and one two one), festivals (Witten Days for New Chamber Music, the Bavarian State Opera’s avantgarde Festspiel+, Rainy Days Luxemburg, and the Salzburg Biennale), as well as from other institutions (such as Mutemus New York, IMD Darmstadt, and the Arno Schmidt Foundation).
Recordings of his performances and compositions are available on several labels. In 2012, Matthias Kaul received the ECHO Klassik prize and the German Record Critics’ Award."
- "The first vinyl release of Charlemagne Palestine‘s Godbear, a 1987 solo piano recording originally scheduled to sit alongside Sonic Youth and Swans in the catalogue of Glenn Branca‘s Neutral Records but eventually released on CD by the Dutch Barooni label in 1998. Although Palestine has worked in an enormous variety of media, his long form performances for solo piano are perhaps his most acclaimed works. Palestine immersed himself in the study of overtones throughout the 1960s, working first with carillons and then with electronic synthesis, searching for the ‘golden sound’. Beginning in the early 1970s he continued his exploration of the complexities hidden within seemingly simple tones and intervals on the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano, the ‘Rolls Royce’ of pianos. With the piano’s sustain pedal constantly depressed, Palestine hammers out rapidly repeated notes, allowing a complex cloud of overtones to rise above the percussive texture of the struck keys. Initially working with simple intervals such as octaves and fifths, Palestine gradually expanded the harmonic range of his piano performances over the years, while still retaining their ecstatically single-minded nature. Revisiting his signature piano style in 1987 after several years focusing on visual art, Godbear presents three distinct variations that demonstrate the development of his piano music after the classic recordings of the early 1970s. Occupying the entire first side, ‘The Lower Depths’ stages a slow descent from the piano’s mid-range to the Bösendorfer’s cavernous additional low octave, building into a thundering swarm of booming overtones. Breaking entirely with the stereotype of clinical minimalism, Palestine’s journey to the depths embraces passages of darkly romantic melody before slowly ascending to its starting point. The version of ‘Strumming Music’ performed here condenses the developmental arc of the piece into eleven minutes, fanning out from a single octave to a complex harmonic wash that calls to mind Palestine’s enthusiasm for Debussy and Ravel. ‘Timbral Assault’ is like an evil twin of ‘Strumming Music,’ transforming its insistency and harmonic complexity into aggressive intensity and creeping dissonance, foreshadowing Palestine’s later collaborations with Christoph Heemann. A classic release, and one that, because of the variety of approaches surveyed within, serves as an ideal introduction to Palestine’s ecstatic and mysterious sound world”
"In a curious bit of temporal coincidence, Godbear is being reissued at roughly the same time as La Monte Young’s Dream House, making 2016 a banner year for former Pandit Pran Nath students who released seminal albums on Shandar. Unlike Dream House, however, Palestine’s 1974 Shandar release Strumming Music got a major reissue in the '90s and kickstarted a career resurgence. Remarkably, given how prolific he is today, Palestine did not release a single album between 1974 and 1997–a hiatus that the doomed Godbear would have ended. Aside from being 1.) cursed, and 2.) quite good, Godbear is also significant for essentially being a reprise and improvement upon the 13-year-old Strumming Music. In fact, Godbear’s second piece is even called "Strumming Music," though it condenses the previous album's epic 52-minute duration into a mere 11. The other two pieces have different names, but the simple, underlying idea is very much the same for all: rapidly hammered notes at neutral intervals (octaves and fifths) that gradually become much more complicated and much less neutral.
The first side of the album is filled completely by the 20-minute "The Lower Depths," which is arguably the album’s highlight (though competition is fierce). The title likely has its root in the fact that the piece gradually descends into the more rumbling, lower reaches of the piano's range, but its infernal connotations are warranted as well. It does not take long at all for the ringing and rolling harmonies to descend into a darker mood, but Palestine does an excellent job rationing out the tension and dissonance, always returning to calmer, more consonant harmonies…until he finally stops circling around and decides to get dark in earnest. Taken on its face, "The Lower Depths" is a dynamic and compelling piece of music, but its real power is somewhat sneaky and not instantly apparent with casual listening: there are the notes that Palestine is actually playing and then there are the complex clouds of dissonance that start to cohere with increased regularity due to the use of the sustain pedal. Once I became fully aware of the latter, the piece took on a whole new unpredictable life for me. The combination of the clattering, rumbling lower keys and the oscillating, spreading black mass of overtones is quite spectacular when it comes together just right. Also, it is kind of a neat magic trick, as the piece often feels improvisatory and roving, but it is all in service of creating eventual rich and unexpected blossoms of looming, dissonant harmonies.
"Strumming Music" is considerably more radiant and rippling in nature, using the same tools to evoke a very different mood. It also seems considerably more structured and indebted to earlier minimalist composers than the rest of the album, as it feels like a single strong motif that recurs and evolves, whereas "The Lower Depths" is significantly more freewheeling and messy (albeit in a good way). That said, "Strumming Music" is still absolutely lovely, cohering into a wonderfully shimmering and undulating haze of bliss. That respite is brief, however, as things get heavy again for the closing "Timbral Assault," which immediately delivers exactly what it promises. In fact, it sounds a lot like an impressively prescient precursor to Tim Hecker’s "Virginal." Unlike "The Lower Depths," however, “Timbral Assault” is instantly dissonant and ominously minor key in mood. Also, it is the most rhythmically unusual and unpredictable piece on the album, as its forward motion is constantly disrupted by stuttering flurries of notes. Despite those strengths, or perhaps because of them, "Assault" is the weakest of the three pieces, as it lacks the slow-burning build-up to a pay-off that makes "Depths" and "Strumming" so satisfying. "Timbral Assault" certainly starts off wonderfully, but it does not leave itself many places to go when it does and consequently starts to fade and meander a bit as it unfolds.
Anticlimactic final act aside, Godbear boasts a solid half-hour of near-perfect music that is both distinctive and powerful, so it definitely deserves a place in the upper echelon of Palestine's oeuvre. It makes complete sense that the later phase of his career spread out in such varied, experimental, and eccentric directions, as Godbear and Strumming Music both took Palestine’s solo piano vision as far as it could reasonably go. Until they build a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano with even more keys in the lower octaves or make some radical breakthroughs in sustain pedal technology, there is no need to ever return to this well again. The definitive statements have been made–they are just waiting around to be heard."
Content: Orchestra - for orchestra (1976) Elemental Procedures - for soprano, mixed choir and orchestra (1976), text by Samuel Beckett Routine Investigations - for oboe, trumpet, piano, viola, cello and double-bass (1976)
- "In early 1976, Feldman had accepted a commission from the opera in Rome for the opera "Neither", based on a text by Samuel Beckett. His works "Orchestra", "Elemental Procedures", and "Routine Investigations", written in the short period between April and July in 1976, represented for Morton Feldman a "trilogy" with which he prepared himself for the work on his opera.
In all three pieces, Feldman uses a characteristic complex of material, clearly differentiated from his previous type of textural treatment and inserted as a fixed element into the course of the music. Feldman said, "All three pieces contain what I call ‘Beckett material’ – a long, continuous melodic line that I planned to use in my later Beckett opera. Now the opera "Neither" is finished, and I didn’t even use the ‘Beckett material’ there."
The basic model for the "Beckett material" consists of nine measures in which the pitches c, d-flat, d, and e-flat – chromatic neighbors – are repeated in an irregular sequence. This pitch material is accelerated and retarded and is accompanied by intermittent chordal attacks. The result is a consistent series of pitches that do not resemble a melodic line, with phrases and points of emphasis, so much as seemingly endless pitch activity.
The structure of the "Beckett material", oriented toward melody and accompaniment, is clearly in opposition to the chordal material that is the foundation for the compositional technique Feldman used in all his works. Even if Feldman did not use the "Beckett material" in his opera, he often deployed it in the long pieces based on repeating patterns that he wrote between 1977 and 1983, in order to generate fast motion within the slow unfolding processes characteristic of his music.
Release #2 in the PERIHEL series is one of the most famous
electroacoustic compositions by IANNIS XENAKIS. Mixed by MARTIN
WURMNEST, mastered & cut by RASHAD BECKER, “La Légende d’Eer” is
available as vinyl (180gr, DL code, insert with liner notes by REINHOLD
FRIEDL) and download for the very first time.
- "When IANNIS XENAKIS (1922-2001), who had fought against the occupation
as part of the communist Resistance, moved to Paris in 1947 it was the
start of a highly creative and impressive career. XENAKIS not only
studied composition with MESSIAEN and became one of the most innovative
composers of the 20th century, he also worked as assistant to LE
CORBUSIER and realized a.o. the Philips Pavilion for the World
Exhibition in Brussels 1958. His compositions often are based on
mathematical principles (in 1966 he founded the CEMAMu - Centre d'Etudes
de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales), which give his music an
unprecedented aesthetic and “shocking otherness” (The Guardian). The
most famous works of XENAKIS, who won the Polar Music Prize (considered
the unofficial Nobel Prize for music) in 1999, are his compositions for
orchestra Metastasis, Pithoprakta and Terretektorh (where the 88
musicians are spread within the audience) and the electroacoustic
compositions Persepolis (to be re-released later on as part of the
PERIHEL series), Concret PH, Bohor and La Légende d’Eer where XENAKIS
integrated his stochastic synthesis sounds for the first time. As
legendary as this piece itself is the impenetrable thicket of versions
and stories around La Légende d’Eer - it exists in different releases,
wrong sample rates, digitized backwards … this now is a new version,
using the 8-track-version that XENAKIS himself presented at Darmstädter
Ferienkurse in august 1978. As the automatic spatialization is lost,
this became the only original version of this composition and is
presented here (mixed down to stereo by MARTIN WURMNEST who tried to
preserve the spatial movements as perceptible as possible – mastered by
RASHAD BECKER at D&M) for the very first time. La Légende d’Eer not
only became a milestone of electroacoustic music but is also an
important reference for noise and industrial musicians up to the present
day!
Composers: Yves Bouliane, Bernard Falaise, Raymond Gervais, Malcolm Goldstein, Joane Hétu
- "The latest Ensemble SuperMusique album is made up of five pieces composed between 1976 and 2015 featuring twenty musicians playing in different combinations. Raymond Gervais’s Accords intuitifs (from 1976) and Champ (10 interventions), composed by Yves Bouliane in 1977, are paired with three contemporary pieces by composers Bernard Falaise (La trotteuse, 2015), Malcolm Goldstein (Jeu de cartes, 2014) and Joane Hétu (Pour ne pas désespérer seul, 2011). Here’s yet another fine example of the Ensemble SuperMusique’s commitment to creative music that reveals the tremendous improvisational quality and sensitivity of its members.
- "Joane Hétu and Danielle Palardy Roger have been leading the Ensemble SuperMusique since its inception in 1998. Featuring the most prolific musicians and composers from Montréal’s “musique actuelle” scene, ESM has always sought to combine both written music and improvisation, as well as acoustic and amplified instruments. Since its founding, ESM has premiered more than 50 compositions, commissioned to both members of the ensemble and other Canadian and international composers."
JACK Quartet; New Thread Quartet; Either/Or, Richard Carrick, piano, conductor; w/Elliott Sharp, electroacoustic guitar/Joshua Rubin, clarinet; Rachel Golub, violin; Jenny Lin, piano
- "For nearly 40 years, Elliott Sharp (b. 1951) has created a body of work that is exemplary in both its breadth and its depth. Sharp's discography, which numbers more than 300 separate items, includes works for orchestra, string quartet, rock band, blues band, solo guitar, multiple guitars. He is constantly in search of new sounds, processes, ways to create narrative arcs, ways to find music in unexpected places. His work is fed by acoustics, mathematics, philosophy, visual arts, and history. Central sonic concerns are melodies and grooves both micro- and macro-, harmonic saturation, density and texture, the vocalistic, the hyper-real. The goal is psycho-acoustic chemical change. He consistently tries to create structures with the spontaneity and energy of an improvisation.
These four works exemplify the wide variety of approaches to the manifestation of his core concepts over a period of nearly twenty years. They reference influences and philosophies and, in addition, the diversity of their sound-worlds present sonic strategies that are unique to his compositional approach, including personalized extended techniques that extend the range of the instruments beyond notes. All are receiving their premiere recordings, stunningly realized by an array of stalwarts of the contemporary-music scene."
- "Mathematics and the various sciences are just ordered ways of looking at and analyzing all of the raw data supplied by the universe. It's all about mappings and correspondences. At the same time, my work often takes a speculative and irrational/intuitive approach. It includes both the ordered and rational, the intuitive and irrational, and the acoustics of the ear."
- "Murcof builds loops and sound textures that echo Vanessa Wagner's piano playing in real time, shifting from ambient electronics to contemporary classical.
Each artist presents their own version of 'Gnossienne 3' (Erik Satie)
and 'What Arms Are these for You' (David Moore) on each side of the 12"
record. This fascinating ping-pong game immerses the listener in a
timeless, endless world of sound.
4 unique pieces acting as a tantalizing tease of their forthcoming full album expected for late summer 2016."
Comments
- Sub Rosa
- Review by Niels Van Tomme @ Other Music<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.henripousseur.net/index.php">http://www.henripousseur.net/index.php</a><br>1. MINA
CONCERTO FOR 5 SOLOISTS AND ORCHESTRA (LIVE RECORDING)
performed by International Contemporary Ensemble (Claire Chase [flute, bass flute], Nick Masterson [oboe, bells], Joshua Rubin[clarinet, bass clarinet, bells],
Rebekah Heller [bassoon, bells], Nathan Davis [hammered dulcimer]),
Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor: Martyn Brabbins
2. PRISM SPECTRA
FOR VIOLA AND ELECTRONICS (STUDIO RECORDING)
performed by Miranda Cuckson (viola) + David Adamcyk (electronics)
3. FOLLOWING
FOR BASSOON (STUDIO RECORDING) performed by Rebekah Heller
4. THE SPIRIT OF BEINGS
FOR CELLO AND ELECTRONICS (STUDIO RECORDING) performed by Matthew Barley
5. RECORDER CONCERTO
(LIVE RECORDING)
performed by Ensemble Resonanz, Jeremias Schwarzer (recorder) conducted by Peter Rundel
6. WONDROUS STEPS
FOR 6 PLAYERS (LIVE RECORDING) performed by LUCERNE FESTIVAL Ensemble conducted by Chin-Chao Lin
Minabel / New Focus Recordings
- Undefinable more likely . . .
Innova Recordings - Soundcloud.
Released March 29, 2016, Yannis Kyriakides at his usual extremly high level of excellency:
Steven van Gils (tenor)
Tiemo Wang (baritone)
Maciej Straburzynski (bass-baritone)
Pepe Garcia Rodriguez (percussion)
Enric Monfort (percussion)
Frank Wienk (percussion/laptop)
Yannis Kyriakides (composition/text)
Fedor Teunisse (musical direction)
Romain Bischoff (vocal direction)
- Unsounds - Emusic - SoundcloudSlagwerk Den Haag
Enjoying this with the various phases it moves through, thanks B.N.
- A really brilliant album and one of the highlights of 2014.
Just in at Soundcloud, available for streaming.
The amazing vocal ensemble, Roomful of Teeth:
Released April 9, 2015 and December 2015 on Emusic:
https://www.facebook.com/SLEEarts/info/?tab=page_info
Matt Dixon, Brandon Garcia, Oliver Lewis, Charlie Lewis, Greg Midgely, Patrick Munger, Brian Patterson, Dan Thomas, Ben Warden, Eric Waters, Ryan Fedor, Ron Harrell, Nick Foster, Mike Wall
On eMusic: it's $10 retail and $6 as member (which is a normal difference, I know).
Lorenzo GATTO violin
NATIONAAL ORKEST VAN BELGIË ORCHESTRE NATIONAL DE BELGIQUE
Andrey Boreyko
ORCHESTRE PHILHARMONIQUE ROYAL DE LIEGE
Paul DANIEL
David LIVELY piano
ORCHESTRE NATIONAL MONTPELLIER LANGUEDOC-ROUSSILLON
Ernest MARTINEZ IZQUIERDO
- Cypres
Kaada/Patton - Bacteria Cult
Music composed and performed by John Kada and Mike Patton
Orchestra: stavanger symphony orchestra
Recorded at Fartein Valen (Stavanger) and Wrongroom (Oslo )
Orchestrations by john kaada
- Ipepac Recordings - Emusic
Karlrecords - Bandcamp
- New Focus Recordings
Christopher Bailey: Composition For Shitty Piano
- Wiki
http://jeanderome.com/annee
- BMOP
Composers: John Luther Adams, William Brittelle, Glenn Kotche, Paola Prestini, and Shara Worden
Performing Ensemble: Roomful of Teeth, percussionist Glenn Kotche, and cellist Jeffrey Zeigler
Narrator: Mark Rylance
Script & General Advisor: William deBuys
Director: Murat Eyuboglu
Cinematography: Sylvestre Campe & Murat Eyuboglu
Editor: David Sarno
Education Advisor: Michael Preston
Writer/Educator: Christa Sadler
Content:
Composed Improvisation for snare drum alone
Variations I version for steel drums and mbira
Child of Tree for solo percussion
Composed Improvisation for one-sided drums with or withour jangles
Inlets for three players of water-filled conch shells and one conch-player using circular breathing and the sound of fire
27'10.554" for a percussionist
- Wergo
Charlemagne Palestine - Godbear
–Francis Plagne @ Black Truffle
- Brainwashed
interpreter: Claudia Barainsky
booklet writer: Sebastian Claren
choir: WDR Rundfunkchor Koeln
conductor: Peter Rundel
orchestra/ensemble: WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln
Content:
Orchestra - for orchestra (1976)
Elemental Procedures - for soprano, mixed choir and orchestra (1976), text by Samuel Beckett
Routine Investigations - for oboe, trumpet, piano, viola, cello and double-bass (1976)
- Wergo
- Karlrecords.
- This is also on História da Música Eletroacústica CD 23
Yves Bouliane, Bernard Falaise, Raymond Gervais, Malcolm Goldstein, Joane Hétu
- Ambiances Magnétiques - Emusic
- More Supermusique at Emusers
- New World Records
- Elliott Sharp
Murcof x Wagner : EP.01
Infiné - Emusic
Murcof x Vanessa Wagner - Variations For The Healing Of Arinushka
(Arvo Pärt - Edit Version)
And a truely gorgeous live recording:
Murcof & Vanessa Wagner (live @ InFiné Workshop 2013)
- A "must check out" for people who likes Leyland Kirby.