Wolf Fifth Archive

Brighternow

WFA has been on Ubuweb for quite some time and there's years of work left to complete it with the usual "Ubuweb speed".

"Wolf Fifth was a modernist music blog, featuring out of print and orphaned classics. Like so many great blogs, they fell victim to the cloud locker wars. Fortunately, UbuWeb's pal Justin Lacko downloaded the entire archive before they went down and donated the collection to UbuWeb. As you can see by the list below, there's a ton of stuff, and it's going to take quite some time to get this all sorted and posted on Ubu. So stay tuned. We're working on it."

Since Tuesday, July 28, 2015 a new blog has uploaded the Archvie with an impressing speed. All neatly packed in easy downloadable zip files with covers and everything . . .

- Some albums are on the Ubuweb Goodies thread and my plan is to post some recommendations here over time.

Feel free to chip in.

Brighternow

 Roberto Gerhard at Emusers

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies

b.8 September 1934 - d.14 March 2016
- "With over 200 published works in every medium which are performed worldwide, Peter Maxwell Davies is acknowledged as one of the foremost composers of our time. He lives in the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland where he writes most of his music.

His major theatrical works include the operas Taverner, The Martyrdom of St Magnus and The Doctor of Myddfai; the full-length ballet Salome; and the music theatre works Eight Songs for a Mad King, Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot and Vesalii Icones. His large output of orchestral works includes ten symphonies and seventeen concertos, as well as the highly popular An Orkney Wedding with Sunrise which was written as a commission for the Boston Pops Orchestra, and seen by millions of TV viewers all over the world at the Last Night of the Proms. He has also written a large repertoire of works for performance by children.

Maxwell Davies is also active as a conductor. He was Associate Conductor/Composer of the BBC Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras for a ten-year period, and is Composer Laureate of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, for whom he has written a series of ten Strathclyde Concertos. He has conducted many major orchestras in Europe and North America, including the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Russian National Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Maxwell Davies works from recent decades include the music-theatre work Mr Emmet Takes a Walk which has received over 50 performances to date, the Antarctic Symphony (Symphony No.8), jointly commissioned by the Philharmonia Orchestra and the British Antarctic Survey, and Sea Orpheus (2009) commissioned for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra's Brandenburg Project. Since 2000 the composer has placed a special emphasis on music for chamber ensembles and choirs, including Seven Skies of Winter (2003) for the Nash Ensemble and a String Trio premiered at the St Magnus Festival in 2008. From 2012 Naxos embarked on a major project to reissue the composer's recordings originally made for Collins Classics in the 1990s, including his symphonies.

In 1987 Maxwell Davies was knighted and was Master of the Queen's Music between 2004 and 2014, in which role he seeks to raise the profile of music in Great Britain, as well as writing many works for Her Majesty the Queen and for royal occasions."

- Boosey & Hawkes - http://www.maxopus.com/

Brighternow

One more:

"Necessary french album on the Erato label presenting electroacoustic, concrete and spectral pieces by 3 of the main representatives of the "spectral school".

Some info on the release:  Original pressing on french Erato label. Are featured the 3 main representatives of the spectral music "school": Hughes Dufourt, Jonathan Harvey & Gerard Grisey. Jonathan Harvey's "Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco" is for concrete sounds processed by computer. Grisey's work "Modulations" uses electroacoustic transformations, while Dufourt's "Antiphysis" is a spectral piece. Instruments are performed by the Ensemble Intercontemporain directed by Pierre Boulez. The record comes together with the original booklet.

Grisey was amongst the "founders" of the spectral music musical style. Spectral music (or spectralism) refers to a musical composition practice where compositional decisions are often informed by the analysis of sound spectra. Computer based sound spectrum analysis using a Fast Fourier transform is one of the more common methods used in generating descriptive data. Using FFT analysis, features of a particular sound spectrum can be visualized using a spectrogram. This particular style of composition originated in France in the early 1970s and the techniques were primarily developed, and later refined, at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, Paris, by composers such as Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail. Murail has described Spectral music as an attitude towards composition rather than a set of techniques, an aesthetic rather than style. This attitude being that "music is ultimately sound evolving in time". The term "spectral music" was coined by Hugues Dufourt in an article published in 1979. Dufourt, a trained philosopher as well as composer, was the author of several interesting flagship articles associated with this movement, although the relationship of his own music to this trend has remained ambiguous. In any case, it was the better part of a decade before the term was in very wide circulation. It was initially associated with composers including Dufourt, Horatiu Radulescu, Iancu Dumitrescu, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Michael Levinas, and the late Claude Vivier. Since the mid eighties, the movement has broadened out into one of the most important contemporary compositional trends. Among recent composers building on the spectral idea are Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, Phillippe Leroux, Phillippe Hurel, Joshua Fineberg and Julian Anderson. However, it has been suggested that a number of major practitioners of this compositional method consider the term inappropriate, misleading, and reductive

Characteristic spectral pieces include Gérard Grisey's Partiels, Tristan Murail's Gondwana, Stockhausen's Stimmung, and Jean-Claude Risset's Mutation. John Chowning's Stria (1978) and Jonathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango Vivos Voco are examples of electronic pieces that embrace spectral techniques. Kaija Saariaho's Adriana Mater (2006) is an opera influenced by spectral techniques.

Proto-spectral composers include Varèse, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis, as well as André Jolivet, Friedrich Cerha, Giacinto Scelsi, and, to some degree, La Monte Young. Theoretical predecessors include some of the composers mentioned and Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, and Paul Hindemith.

This music began to emerge in the 1970s both in France amongst the composers of the Groupe de l'Itihe, influenced by work of composers such as Maurice Ravel and Olivier Messiaen, both of whom created harmonies and orchestrations based on the harmonic and inharmonic partials contained in complex sounds, such as multiple-stop organ tones, bell sounds, and bird song. Spectral music simply carries this principle much further and with more radical precision, made possible with the aid of computerized FFT analysis. The music of Scelsi, with its concentration on long-held, single tones, continuously mutating in timbre and other parameters, is also another important contribution to spectral music.

- Popsike.com

Brighternow

And one more:

François-Bernard Mâche

(b. 4 April 1935, Clermont-Ferrand).

"French composer of mostly orchestral, chamber, choral, vocal, piano, and electroacoustic works that have been performed throughout the world; he is also active as a writer.

Mr. Mâche was born into a family of musicians and began composing at age eight. He studied harmony with Émile Passani at the Conservatoire à rayonnement régional Emmanuel-Chabrier in Clermont-Ferrand and graduated with prizes in piano in 1951 and harmony in 1952. He later studied with Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, where he earned the Prix de Philosophie de la Musique in 1960. He also studied classical literature at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris from 1955–59 and there earned a diploma in archaeology from Greece in 1957 and the teaching certificate Agrégation de lettres classiques in 1958. He then took classes in ancient art at the Université Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV in 1959 and later studied in Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand in 1972. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens in 2011.

Among his honours are the Prix de la Biennale de Paris (1963, for Safous Mélè, Op. 5), the Grand Prix du Disque from the Académie Charles-Cros (1971, for a recording of Danaé, Op. 21), the Prix Georges Enesco from SACEM (1973), the Prix Italia (1977), the Prix Chartier from the Académie des Beaux-Arts (1984), the Grand Prix National de la Musique from the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication of France (1988), the Prix Rossini from the Académie des Beaux-Arts (1998), and the Grand Prix de la Musique Symphonique from SACEM (2002). He has been a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts since 2002. In addition, he was named a Docteur d'État ès Lettres et Sciences Humaines in 1980 and a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1990, both by the government of France. More than 40 portrait concerts have been given in the Americas, Asia and Europe.

As a writer, he served as music critic of the magazine La Nouvelle Revue française from 1969–78. He has written more than 100 articles, mainly on musicological subjects, as well as the book Musique, mythe, nature ou les dauphins d'Arion (1983, Klincksieck; second edition, 1991; Italian translation as Musica, mito, natura, 1992, Cappelli Editore; English translation as Music, Myth, Nature, 1993, Harwood Academic Publishers), the collection of his articles Entre l'observatoire et l'atelier (1998, Éditions Kimé), the book Un Demi-Siècle de Musique (2000, Éditions L'Harmattan), the book Musique au singulier (2001, Éditions Odile Jacob), and the retrospective Cent opus et leurs échos (2012, Éditions L'Harmattan). Moreover, he has made French translations of modern poems from Greece, including works by Odysseas Elytis, and served as editor of the books Music, Society and Imagination in Contemporary France (1993, Harwood Academic Publishers) and Portrait(s) de Xenakis (2002, Bibliothèque Nationale de France).

He is also active in other positions. He produced experimental films for RTF in 1958 and was a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris from 1958–63, during which time he served as a second lieutenant in Algeria from 1960–62. He worked at the studio for electronic music in Gravesano in 1965 and in Warsaw in 1966. He produced a broadcast series for France Musique in 1976 and served as president of the section in France of ISCM from the late 1970s–early 1980s.

He taught literature at the Collège Sévigné in Paris in 1959–60, the Lycée Marceau in Chartres in 1962–63 and the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly-sur-Seine from 1963–68. He taught at Middlebury College in Vermont and Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, both in 1968, and taught classical literature from Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and France at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris from 1968–83. He then taught musicology at the Université de Strasbourg from 1983–93, where he founded the Centre Primus in 1987, and served as director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1993–97. He has given lectures in 25 countries."

Brighternow

 

Jean Schwarz

French composer and ethnomusiclogist born in Lille, France in 1939. Member of the Laboratory of Ethnomusicology at Musée de l'Homme 1965-99. Member of the Groupes de recherches musicales (GRM) from 1969-99. Teacher at Gennevilliers's Conservatory of music (near Paris) 1979-97.

rostasi

You may have noticed something I provided to them -
a box set about 5 titles below the Schwarz one.

Brighternow

rostasi said:

You may have noticed something I provided to them -
a box set about 5 titles below the Schwarz one.

Yes I did. There's really tons of things to go for.

Special Note:

We are pleased to announce that the wolf5th archives blog has reached the end of the original Wolf Fifth's set, with a number of posts restored as true as we can.

Over the past 10 months there have been 186 posts. These posts include the Wolf Fifth's posts as well as the posts contributed by Justin Geplaveid, Ricarditoj, @rostasi and the anonymous visitor. So we have a lot of fun exploring the vast expanses of the avantgarde music.

Where do we go from here? Well, there is a to-do list we keep and we are always open to considering new ideas. So please let us know what you think.

Brighternow

  

Discogs

It looks like all the files is now in Ape which my Winamp player can't handle.

I managed to convert them into 320 kbps mp3. (I couldn't find an Ape to Flac converter).

The sound is quite ok, though.

- Great stuff from Ivo Malec, BTW . . .

Brighternow

 

Iannis Xenakis: Persephassa

Les Percussions De Strasbourg

1971 - Philips Prospective 6521 020

Series: Prospective 21e Siècle

Persephassa is a piece for six percussionists composed by Iannis Xenakis in 1969. The piece was commissioned jointly by the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF) and the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of Arts (presided by the Empress of Iran), held at the historic site of Persepolis (Gluck 2007, 22). The title is one of the variant names of the goddess Persephone / Proserpina, "the personification of telluric forces and of transmutations of life",[this quote needs a citation] and also refers to the names "Perseus", "Perceval", and "Persepolis" (Gaillard 1971, 751). It was performed in its premiere by Les Percussions de Strasbourg (France).

Persephassa gains much of its effect from having the six percussionists distributed around the audience. The treatment of space as a musical parameter is one of the most important preoccupations of Xenakis' music, particularly in his works of the mid-to-late 1960s. The dramatic impact of utilizing the performance space in this manner is evident many passages throughout the piece in which accents or imitative rhythms are passed around the ensemble.

The percussionists use a wide range of instruments and sound effects during the piece, including sirens, maracas, and pebbles, along with an arsenal of drums, wood blocks (simantras), cymbals, and gongs.

djh

Mega thumbs up for reminding me about this archive. Now safely bookmarked.
So far:
Harry Sparnaay - Bass Clarinet Identity
Pierre Boulez - Le Marteau Sans Maitre
Vinko Globokar, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Carlos Roqué Alsina - Discours II, Sequenza V, Solo, Consecuenza
 
Endless hours of fun etc.

Brighternow

In memory of the late Pierre Henry.

Brighternow

 

Born in Warsaw, Kotoński studied there with Piotr Rytel and Tadeusz Szeligowski at the PWSM, graduating in 1951. In an initial period of activity he took an interest in folk music from the Podhale region in southern Poland. After attending the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1957–61, he adopted punctual serialism in works like Sześć miniatur ('Six Miniatures') for clarinet and piano of 1957 and Muzyka kameralna ('Chamber Music') for 21 instruments and percussion in the following year. This trend culminated in 1959 in Musique en relief for six orchestral groups (Thomas 2001). His Etiuda na jedno uderzenie w talerz ('Study on One Cymbal Stroke') was the first Polish piece of electronic music, created at Polish Radio's Experimental Studio. He also worked in various electronic music studios abroad, amongst others in Cologne, Paris, Freiburg, and Berlin.

In 1967 he was appointed lecturer in composition at the Frédéric Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw, where he also directed the electronic music studio. Notably, he wrote the first book in Polish on the field of electronic / electroacoustic music.

In the years 1974–1976 he was head music editor at the Polskie Radio and head music director for the Polish Radio and Television. In the years 1980–1983 he was vice president, and in 1983–1989 president of the Polish Section, International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). He presented guest lectures in composition and electroacoustic music at foreign universities in, amongst others, Stockholm, Buffalo, Los Angeles, and Jerusalem.

His students included: Jacek Grudzien, Jarosław Kapuściński, Krzysztof Knittel, Konstancja Kochaniec, Stanislaw Krupowicz, Owen Leech, Hanna Kulenty, Pawel Mykietyn, Pawel Szymanski. See: List of music students by teacher: K to M#Włodzimierz Kotoński.

Brighternow

  
Epitaffio performed by Herbert Blomstedt & Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra
Response I performed by Per Nyhaug & Per Erik Thorsen
Canon performed by Sverre Bruland, Astri Herseth, Willy Andresen, Käre Kolberg, Bjørn Jon Johansen, Knut Guettler & Per Erik Thorsen
Galaxy performed by Bjørn Fongaard

confused

I just wanted to add this one here as well, as it was an absolutely terrific listen

Roland Kayn / Luigi Nono  from Wolf Fifth Archive at UbuWeb
 
1970     (1969) Unfortunately the Nono               1977   
track is a duplicate of Kayn's Cybernetics III
 
1971 (1964, 1960 & 1965)                                 1976      (1960, 1967 &1960)
Ps - I forgot to post this. I've listened twice more since then & still really enjoy the listen. I'm a little more partial to the Musique Concrète tracks but enjoyed the voices very much.

Brighternow

confused

Well, I thought I'd leave a copy here - the electronic panorama was terrific and the quartet most enjoyable. 
From some Ubuweb exploring and the Wolf Fifth Archive 
 
Dutch Contemporary Music (1969)                   1970    Electronic Panorama: 
    Willem Pijper, Ton De Leeuw,                                  Paris, Tokyo, Utrecht, Warszawa
      Peter Schat, Carel Brons                                    Ps- A most enjoyable listen!
Cello - Max Werner
Design [Hoesontwerp] - Phil Grisel
Viola - Jan van der Velde
Violin [1st] - Jos Verkoeyen
Violin [2nd] - Jan Brejaart

Brighternow

 

Rec. live, Royal Festival Hall, London, 11-12 April 1996

Jon Garrison (tenor): Orpheus The Man 
Peter Bronder (tenor): Orpheus The Myth / Hades 
Jean Rigby (mezzo): Euridice The Woman 
Anne-Marie Owens (mezzo): Euridice The Myth / Persephone 
Alan Opie (baritone): Aristaeus The Man 
Omar Ebrahim (baritone): Aristaeus The Myth / Charon 
Marie Angel (soprano): The Oracle of the Dead / Hecate 
Arwel Huw Morgan (baritone): The Caller
Stephen Allen (tenor): Priest / Judge 1
Nicholas Folwell (baritone): Priest / Judge 2
Stephen Richardson (bass): Priest / Judge 3 
Juliet Booth (soprano): Woman / Fury 1
Philippa Dames-Longworth (soprano): Woman / Fury 2
Elizabeth McCormack (mezzo): Woman / Fury 3
 
BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins
Andrew Davis

Electronic material realised by Barry Anderson in association with IRCAM

- Birtwistle at Emusers

- Magic stuff from an excellent composer.

Brighternow

Speaking of Valentin Silvestrov . . . and from the Philips Prospective 21e Siècle series:

 

 

"French series devoted to electroacoustic and avant-garde music curated by François Bayle and Pierre Henry begun in 1967. It was notable for using on its covers the "Procédé Heliophore" which engraves patterns on aluminum foil that cause optical effects. Some later pressings replaced the foil with standard gray ink. Although the series was French, there are editions of some titles that were released in The Netherlands, England, Spain and Japan".

Brighternow

confused said: March 2018

I just wanted to add this one here as well, as it was an absolutely terrific listen

Roland Kayn / Luigi Nono  from Wolf Fifth Archive at UbuWeb
 
1970     (1969) Unfortunately the Nono               1977   
track is a duplicate of Kayn's Cybernetics III
 
1971 (1964, 1960 & 1965)                                 1976      (1960, 1967 &1960)
Ps - I forgot to post this. I've listened twice more since then & still really enjoy the listen. I'm a little more partial to the Musique Concrète tracks but enjoyed the voices very much.

Bumping . . .

I just came across the Kayn album . . .

Many thanks to @confused

Brighternow

Polskie Nagrania Muza - 1971

Brighternow

 

Guy Reibel (1936, Strasbourg, France) is a conductor, a composer, a teacher and a promoter of electroacoustic music. Reibel studied music at the Conservatoire de Paris (now CNSM). He has been a member of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) from 1963 to 1983. He's also responsible for the realization of the sonic version of the Traité des objets musicaux from Pierre Schaeffer.

- Discogs

Brighternow

Frank Zappa's main influence in contemporary classical music . . .

- Wolf fifth at Ubuweb