Browse by Artist: BYRON, MICHAEL

Artist:	BYRON, MICHAEL
Title:	Music Of Nights Without Moon Or Pearl
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 002CD

"Music of Nights Without Moon or Pearl is a 1998 work for string quartet, contrabass, two pianos, and electronic keyboard. An arch-form work that unfolds slowly and insistently, at its point of greatest activity, the texture of Music of Nights ... might be likened to the sound of rainfall on a roof -- delicate, resonate, active, continuously changing while, in some sense, seeming to remain the same. Invisible 'Seeds' for James Tenney is a 1998 work scored for the same forces as Music of Nights. Entrances is a mid-1970s work for four pianos -- all four parts stunningly played by David Rosenboom, who also realized the specific construction of the version of this somewhat open-form piece that is heard here. Starting with intermittent bursts of notes, it builds to an extraordinarily dense barrage of sound."

Artist:	BYRON, MICHAEL
Title:	Awakening At The Inn Of The Birds
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 012CD

"Michael Byron's music is one of contrasts, rioted for its intertwining of minimalist and maximalist techniques and rigorous processes with freely composed music. In its unique way, it reconciles traditional notions of beauty with boisterous, almost-out-of-control instrumental writing. This new CD collects four of Byron's works written in the last three years arid a new recording of a piece from 1981, all performed by some of today's most-respected new-music champions: Sarah Cahill, Joseph Kubera, Kathleen Supov6, and the FLUX Quartet. Continents of City and Love arid Tidal, written 20 years apart, are both arch-form pieces scored for two pianos, synthesizer, string quartet, and doublebass. Evaporated Pleasure is a fiery work for piano, four hands. Composed from an equal-tempered approximation of the harmonic and sub-harmonic series and multiple corrupted stochastic processes, it starts out almost hesitantly and builds to a wild, swirling barrage. Awakening at the Inn of the Birds is built from sets of rhythmic units that continuously change and develop."

Artist:	BYRON, MICHAEL
Title:	Dreamers Of Pearl
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80679CD

Performed by Joseph Kubera, piano. If you've ever been to a strip club with Willie Winant, you must buy this CD! "Michael Byron (b. 1953) was a pupil of James Tenney, and later, of Richard Teitelbaum. The body of music he has composed over the past thirty years has been harmonically rich, rhythmically detailed, and increasingly virtuosic. Dreamers Of Pearl (2004-2005) evinces a sensitivity for the sound of the piano, a sensibility of extended playing/listening, and an interest in repetition and change through gradual and seemingly clandestine processes that transform and extend what we hear. Despite the lyrical (and, one might assume, programmatic) titles of the three movements ('Enchanting the Stars,' 'A Bird Revealing the Unknown to the Stars,' 'It Is the Night and Dawn of Constellations Irradiated'), Dreamers Of Pearl is a self-contained piece of pure ('absolute') music without obvious quotation or extra-musical references. Dreamers makes its case within a classically-balanced architectural design: three extended 'fast-slow-fast' movements of roughly equal length (263, 199, and 226 measures, respectively). The notation is meticulous, specific, precise. Much of the work's texture could be characterized as baroque, given the perpetual motion of the consistent two-voiced polyphonic layering -- some of it cryptically and distortedly imitative. Dreamers belongs to a rare class of recent piano music --monumental compositions of great length, beauty, and depth -- all self-consciously bound to tradition-oriented genres and their deeply ingrained structures, yet inventive and thrilling in ways that inspire a few brave pianists to dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to these often mercilessly difficult pieces. Joseph Kubera, the tremendously gifted pianist for whom Dreamers Of Pearl was written, is one of those brave few."

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