Browse by Label: NEW WORLD RECORDS

Artist:	TAYLOR UNIT, CECIL
Title:
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80201CD

Two classic sessions from 1978 from this peak version of Cecil Taylor's Unit: Jimmy Lyons (alto sax), Raphé Malik (trumpet), Ramsey Ameen (violin), Sirone (bass), and Ronald Shannon Jackson (drums). "This record presents further evidence of his genius and awesome ability to work within the group context, in which he furthers his exploration of the piano 'as catalyst feeding material to soloists in all registers.' This music at times gets very intense. It will take you down forgotten little streams in your mind and swell them with rivers of sound as Taylor pours notes on your ears." -- Spencer Richards.

Artist:	TAYLOR, CECIL
Title:	3 Phasis
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80303CD

Second album from the same sessions as above, recorded 1978."3 Phasis is a masterwork, a testament to the perfectionism and unpredictability that go hand in hand in Taylor's music...The more you listen, the more you hear. For me, there is sometimes the impression of an inspired wizard and his five disciples conversing at midnight, chewing over ideas, rephrasing them, listening; at other times I'm attracted to the cathartic, exquisitely controlled violence. Cecil Taylor has brought to music a synthesis we've long waited for. 3 Phasis is one its landmarks." -- Gary Giddins

Artist:	USSACHEVSKY, VLADIMIR
Title:	Film Music
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80389CD

1990 CD release of these scores from the 1960s. "One of the founders, with Babbitt, Luening and Sessions, of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre in 1959, Ussachevsky has maintained a flexible attitude toward sound sources, and employs recordings of live sounds, analog studio, and computer generated material. In this he always differed from the originally quite restrictive approaches of the German pure electronic and French musique concréte schools. Though prepared for films, a medium that usually imposes considerable restrictions on a composer, both these scores were innovative and have considerable power. The 'Suite from No Exit' (1962) comes from the film of Sartre's Huis Clos directed by Orson Welles, while 'Line of Apogee' (1967) is the soundtrack of Lloyd Williams' film of the same name. Its great musical interest notwithstanding, the former is the usual kind of film score in that it is a background for spoken dialogue, whereas in 'Line of Apogee' there are few spoken words and Ussachevsky's music comments more directly on Williams' extraordinary flow of strange, sometimes dreamlike visual images. In both pieces this composer's favorite musical form, that of variations on several alternating themes, is in use, and the themes do not have traditional timbral or pitch characteristics. Consider for example his use of the human voice in 'No Exit', going from the electronically modified screams of the opening scene to the voices of distant children, etc., and on to the end, where the sound of men laughing is abruptly silenced by rifle fire." -? Max Harrison, The Wire

Artist:	BABBITT, MILTON
Title:	Philomel
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80466CD

1995 CD that collects various early Babbitt compositions using electronics and/or tape, including his classic electroacoustic piece from 1964, 'Philomel' (which is excerpted on the the Ellipsis Arts Ohm: Early Gurus of Electronic Music 1948-1980 3CD box). Featured works are: "Philomel" (for soprano, recorded soprano, and synthesized sound), "Phonemena" (1969, for soprano and piano), "Phonemena (1975, for soprano and tape), "Post-Partitions" (1966, for piano) and "Reflections For Piano and Synthesized Tape" (1975).

Artist:	VA
Title:	Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80521CD

"Cut-rate selection of vault reels (dated from 1961 to 1973) from the first electronic music center to be established in the US. Compositions by Ilhan Mimaroglu (distant tone-wash dedicated to Varèse), Bülent Arel (prime-era low-bit microtonal-blap, as primal as it gets), Ingram Marshall (a pure sound-discovery opus; molten lava rising to render downtown Decatur an impasse...), Alice Shields (voice and tape etudes of high-deviant sonics and junkyard source-mass), Charles Dodge (a somewhat melodic tone-study), and Daria Semegen (a heterodyning stereo-heavy monster). As vital as any of the INA/GRM/STEIM/SECAM/Darmstadt/Mills output, only surprisingly more obscure, and, by far, more damaged. Really." --Hrvatski

Artist:	LEACH, MARY JANE
Title:	Ariadne's Lament
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80525CD

New York Treble Singers; Cassatt String Quartet; The Rooke Chapel Choir; Libby Van Cleve, oboe; Patrick Burton, clarinet; Klyph Johnson, bassoon; David Lee Echeland, tenor, countertenor. "Mary Jane Leach (b. 1949) explores the physicality of sound, working very carefully with the timbres of instruments, creating combination, difference, and interference tones. The use of sound phenomena, however, is only a means to an end, the ultimate goal being musicality. Early music, with its imitative polyphony and modal harmonies, is the primary source of inspiration for the compositions on this disc, four of which are part of an ongoing project focusing on the myth of Ariadne -- 'Ariadne's Lament' (for a cappella women's chorus), 'Song Of Sorrows' (for mixed choir), 'O Magna Vasti Creta' (for women's chorus and string quartet), and 'Call Of The Dance' (for a cappella women's chorus). Two of the pieces draw their material directly from Renaissance works: 'Ariadne's Lament' from Monteverdi's 'Lamento d'Arianna,' and 'Tricky Pan' (for solo countertenor and tape) from the 14th-century poet and composer Solage. The languages Leach sets -- early Italian and French, Ancient Greek, and Cretan -- also evoke a sense of connection to a remote past. In contrast to most of her contemporaries, Leach's music is from the aesthetic which favors prolongation, resonance, long statements of subtly varied persistence. In that sense, her music is both easy to follow and mellifluously unpredictable. She has a careful ear for pacing and structural unfolding, often building her pieces to ardent expressive arrivals. Past and present meld in a music of ethereal and limpid beauty."

Artist:	TUDOR/JOHN CAGE, DAVID
Title:	Rainforest II
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80540CD

David Tudor: (live electronics); John Cage: (voice, pre-recorded tape). "This historic release of a simultaneous performance by David Tudor and John Cage of 'Rainforest II' and 'Mureau', recorded live by Radio Bremen on May 5, 1972, preserves the only surviving performance of the second of Tudor's Rainforest series. In addition, it documents one of the precious few recorded collaborations between these two visionaries. In 1970 Cage composed the piece called 'Mureau', in which phrases from Thoreau's journals (in particular, passages which touch on the subject of music) are used as the springboard for an elaborate collage. The resultant fabric combines elements of sense and nonsense, as it veers between contextual meaning and a sort of abstract, linguistic vocalise. In Cage's public readings of 'Mureau', he explored a number of performance variables?differences in tempo, vocal timbre, pitch, register, and dynamics. A similar range will be apparent, in fact, when listening to this recorded performance. This simultaneous performance of 'Mureau' and 'Rainforest II' took place in a large concert hall before an audience, rather than privately in a recording studio. Whereas in other performance realizations (such as their legendary Indeterminacy collaboration) the two men had been placed in separate isolation booths, here the two shared the same performance space, so that each could hear and see the other person's activity. In fact, Cage and Tudor sat quite close to one another at the center of the stage, Cage performing 'Mureau' as a four-channel realization -- one live channel against three pre-recorded tracks, all of them his own voice?and Tudor actively engaged in real-time processing of Cage's vocal material, using it to generate electronic loudspeaker-filter events. Essential listening for anyone interested in the work of either composer."

Artist:	LA BARBARA, JOAN
Title:	ShamanSong
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80545CD

"Composer/performer Joan La Barbara has been an influential figure in experimental music since the early 1970s. She has devoted her career to the exploration of the human voice as a multi-faced instrument. ShamanSong features three premieres of vintage La Barbara 'sound paintings' of pensive beauty and spiritual resonance. ShamanSong is a concert suite comprised of selected excerpts from a film score. 'Plaintive descending chords of soft hammers striking an ancient Balinese gamelan instrument, tar and dumbek, shakuhachi, music box tines, rainstick and African rattles all are blended with sighs and whispers, lamentation and ululations, calls, cries, lullabies and vocal winds to weave a strange mystery...'Rothko' is a series of sound paintings designed to reflect the mood, texture and emotion of Mark Rothko's final paintings for this very special chapel -- dark, intense, but with an inner light and moving figures that are sometimes heard, sometimes hidden.'"

Artist:	SCHOTT, JOHN
Title:	Shuffle Play: Elegies for the Recording Angel
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80548CD

"Shuffle Play is designed to be played in the 'random' or 'shuffle' mode of a CD player, reconfiguring the story it tells with each listening. However, because not all players have this feature, consideration was also given to the normal sequencing of tracks. It comprises 28 meditations on the history of recordings, including several tracks that use cylinder recordings from the earliest decade of recorded sound (1888-1900)- many of them previously unpublished- direct from the Edison archives in New Jersey. The idea was to develop the material from as many angles as possible: free improvisation, musique concrete, post-war composition, AACM-derived strategies, and pop music, to name a few." Features: Steve Adams, Beth Custer, Ben Goldberg, Dan Plonsey, Trevor Dunn, Gino Robair, Myles Boisen, etc.

Artist:	FELDMAN/STEFAN WOLPE, MORTON
Title:	Choral Music of Morton Feldman and Stefan Wolpe
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80550CD

Performed by the Choir of St. Ignatius of Antioch, New York City/Harold Chaney, conductor. Benjamin Ramirez, Thomas Kolor: (percussion); Stephen Foreman: (tuba). "Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972), one of the great teachers in twentieth century music, is also now recognized as one of its most significant composers. His 'Two Chinese Epitaphs', composed in Jerusalem in 1937, illustrates the composer's deep allegiance to socialist issues. He wrote the work swiftly and in anger, just after learning that the Basque town of Guernica had been bombed by the Fascists the previous week. He chose to set two poems by Louise Peter that decry, in a few short phrases of stark imagery, the atrocities committed against oppressed workers. The 'Four Pieces for Mixed Chorus' (1955) were composed for a contest sponsored by the government of Israel. It is a setting of four Hebrew texts -- three from the Bible and one from Israeli poet Gershon Shofman. All the texts express hope for the new nation of Israel. Morton Feldman (1926-1987) studied with Wolpe for several years and was deeply influenced by his modernist aesthetic, particularly his interest in the visual arts. 'For Stefan Wolpe' (1986), for chorus and two vibraphones, is Feldman's tribute to his venerated teacher. It alternates between vocal and instrumental passages. The two never intermingle, even though Feldman lets the vibraphones ring into the voices. As is characteristic of his late music, the piece combines the quiet, atonal, austere textures of his earlier music (of which Christian Wolff in Cambridge [1963] and Chorus and Instruments II [1967] are stellar examples) with several new elements -- greater duration, minimalist repetition, and bigger gestures. All five works are making their first appearance on CD. An indispensable addition to the discographies of both composers."

Artist:	WHAT WE LIVE
Title:	Quintet For A Day
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80553CD

What We Live: Lawrence Ochs (tenor and sopranino saxophones), Dave Douglas, (trumpet), Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet), Lisle Ellis (bass), Donald Robinson (drums). "What a treat to hear five superb musicians, all of them splendid composers in their own right, creating spontaneous music of such formal richness and quiet splendor! The music unfolds with a measured sense of drama and inevitability that attests to the musical heights possible when such enormous compositional and virtuosic talents converge. Definitely not for the faint of heart, Quintet for a Day is challenging and contentious, yet richly rewarding on many levels."

Artist:	MAXFIELD/HAROLD BUDD, RICHARD
Title:	The Oak of the Golden Dreams
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80555CD

Important reissue of two historic minimalist albums, originally released on LP via the Advance label and out of print for decades now. Mastered from original tapes according to the composers original specifications. Packaged with informative liner notes by Kyle Gann, including an overview discography for seminal works within the field of minimalism. "This timely CD reissue combines two LPs from the Advance label -- Richard Maxfield's Electronic Music and Harold Budd's The Oak Of The Golden Dreams -- both containing seminal works which are key to a better understanding of the complex origins of minimalism. A mostly forgotten figure, Richard Maxfield (1927-1969) exerted a powerful influence over a broad range of composers through his classes at The New School. The works here predate the minimalist movement while forecasting a wide range of developments in the future of electronic work. The prophetic 'Pastoral Symphony' (1960) is composed of continuously generated electronic tones; while 'Bacchanale' (1963) is a musique concrète collage juxtaposing jazz with Korean folk music, spoken word, and various instrumental contributions, including Terry Jennings on saxophone. 'Piano Concert for David Tudor' (1961) draws its multifarious noises from a single source -- antedating in that respect Stockhausen's 'Mikrophonie I' for amplified tam-tam (1964). Tudor plays live alongside a three-channel montage constructed from sounds made on the inside of the piano with chains, spinning a gyroscope on the strings, showering the strings with tiddlywink discs, and other unusual operations. 'Amazing Grace' (1960) mixes tape loops from two sources which are played back at various speeds, causing the fragments to overlap in complex ways, predating both Riley's and Reich's tape-loop pieces. If the Maxfield pieces represent the state of new music in the months before minimalism was born, Harold Budd's (b. 1936) works from 1970 reflect minimalism's initial impact. 'The Oak Of The Golden Dreams' was made on the Buchla Box which Budd uses here as an electric organ capable of the kind of fast modal improv, over an unchanging E-flat drone, that Terry Riley and La Monte Young had been doing on saxophone and piano. 'Coeur D'Orr' features a soprano sax improv against an electronic background on organ comprised of two tracks, one of which is another 1970 Budd work, the famous 'Candy Apple Revision'."

Artist:	RILEY, TERRY & ARTE QUARTETT
Title:	Assassin Reverie
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80558CD

"A free spirit, maverick par excellence, creator of a personal compositional style that has spawned entire generations of epigones, Terry Riley (b. 1935) embodies the best aspects of the American pioneer spirit, the positive and uncorrupted image of America (and California in particular) that still holds abroad: an America free from the weight of European tradition, a privileged space where a fusion of Western and Eastern cultural trends can be produced. It is interesting to note that the most significant musical influences on Riley's style -- blues, jazz and Indian classical music -- share relevant common features: modal structures and improvisatory practices intended as careful treatment of a set of more or less strict, codified rules. By emphasizing common ground, Riley reconciles different cultures within the same inventive fusing process. 'Uncle Jard' (1998) (saxophone quartet, piano, harpsichord, and voice) is a particularly compelling example of this. In this piece, Indian classical music and blues/jazz elements co-exist in a stylistically coherent whole: ragtime and raga have never been so closely intertwined. The piece is divided into three parts. While in the first and second parts the texture of the saxophone ensemble is enriched by the voice and keyboard, in the third part the voice is not featured. 'Assassin Reverie' (2001), for saxophone quartet and tape, is a piece in a single movement, but structured in three different sections differentiated by sound material and stage direction. It is one of the more disturbing pieces written by Riley; the second section features an extremely aggressive audio track -- gunshots and helicopter sounds are heard throughout it. Written right after 'In C, Tread on the Trail' (1965) (this version for 12 saxophones is by the ARTE Quartett) is in fact based on similar construction principles. The music in both pieces is a ludus, a game in which Riley re-injects into western music a new-found vitality. Through a free exploration of the score, musical performance recovers here its true essence as a playful collective ritual."

Artist:	ZIPORYN, EVAN
Title:	Gamelan Galak Tika
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80565CD

"Both works on this disc are extended pieces for full Balinese gamelan with various Western instruments. 'Tire Fire' is written for gamelan and electric guitars, while 'Amok' is scored for gamelan and digital sampler. In both pieces, Ziporyn explores the interpretation and blurring of boundaries which result from the interaction between Western technology and a Balinese gamelan. Artists: Gamelan Galak Tika, Robert Black (double bass), Eric Beyers, Mark Stewart (electric guitars), Yukiko Ueno (keyboard), Blake Newman (electric bass)."

Artist:	POLANSKY, LARRY
Title:	Lonesome Road (The Crawford Variations)
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80566CD

"Larry Polansky (b. 1954), though known primarily for his work in the field of computer music, has produced a major addition to the keyboard literature, this massive theme-and-variations on Ruth Crawford Seeger's arrangement of the folk song 'Lonesome Road'. Inspired by his deep engagement with her music, 'Lonesome Road' (1988-89) is a prime example of Polansky's penchant for building large architectonic structures through complex transformational processes. The work is in three sections of seventeen variations each. This is the world-premiere recording of this mammoth piece, a wonderful amalgam of Ivesian pianism, gamelan patterns, jazz-tinged harmonies, and folk song. Its size and grandeur hark back to a pianistic outsider tradition of sui generis works and it is the most important American keyboard work since Frederic Rzewski's 'The People United Will Never Be Defeated'."

Artist:	VA
Title:	Music From The ONCE Festival 1961-1966
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	5CD
Price:	$75.00
Catalog #:	NW 80567CD

Long awaited historic first issue of recordings from this early 60s avant-garde festival. Elgantly packaged in 5 slimline CDs within a sturdy box, with a 138 page book of notes and photos. Over the top presentation. "Music From The ONCE Festival 1961-1966: Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, Donald Scavarda, David Behrman, George Crevoshay, Philip Krumm, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Sheff, Bruce Wise.

       Ann Arbor, Michigan, seems an unlikely site for the establishment of a major avant-garde festival that would shake the new-music community. Tucked away in America's heartland, the city is equally removed from the Eastern metropolises whose artists pride themselves on sensing the pulse of the times, and from the nonconformist West Coast. Yet during the 1960s Ann Arbor played host to one of the most extraordinary adventures in American music history: the annual ONCE Festival and its nexus of related activities.

       The primary aim of ONCE's founders -- Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, George Cacioppo, Roger Reynolds, and Donald Scavarda -- was to create a forum for the presentation of cutting-edge music. To this end they were phenomenally successful. Performers and composers -- whether little-known or renowned -- embraced the endeavor, demanding almost nothing in return. Perhaps most important, however, ONCE acted as a creative stimulus for its organizers. Scavarda describes the adventure as an explosion of pent-up energy: 'Suddenly we could write anything we wanted and have it heard.' And they did. The ONCE composers -- and many guest artists -- wrote a host of new works, some experimental, others more traditional.

       What united the ONCE composers was their exploration of sound, whether through the medium of extended techniques on traditional instruments, electronic (or electronically modified) timbres, or the intersection of musical sounds with those of the environment. A major slice of ONCE's rich musical legacy -- 35 works constituting six hours of music -- is presented here, almost all for the first time. These pieces are as diverse in style as they are compelling in expression. This landmark set, the most comprehensive document ever released of this legendary event, is an opportunity for anyone interested in contemporary music to hear history in the making. Included in the set is a 140-page booklet with a lengthy scholarly essay by musicologist and biographer Leta Miller and numerous rare photos of ONCE personages and performances."

Artist:	TENNEY, JAMES
Title:	Selected Works 1961-1969
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80570CD

"The work of James Tenney (b. 1934) as a composer, theorist, performer, and teacher, is of singular importance in American music of the past four decades. He is by nature a quiet, almost publicity-shy musician, but his musical and theoretical works are steadily becoming widely known, despite the fact that few have been published and only a relatively small number, to this date, are readily available on recordings. This recording is a reissue of the 1992 Frog Peak/Artifact CD, the first recorded collection of James Tenney' s music of the 1 960s. Many of the pieces on this CD were realized at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1961 to 1969, where Tenney used Max Mathews's digital synthesis program, which eventually became Music IV. This software became the model for many of the common computer music environments of the last forty years, and was the first system of its kind available to composers. Tenney's pieces from 1961-64 constitute the first significant and developed body of computer-composed and synthesized music by en American composer. Tenney was a very young composer when he wrote these pieces. He was working with a new medium, a technology that was still being developed, and a new aesthetic. It is perhaps easy to overlook the importance of the latter in the light of the tremendous technical and historical importance of these pieces -- but it is characteristic of Tenney that he was not content just to explore the sonic and technical capabilities of a new technology. To this day, his work from this period remains an important example for composers who work with new technologies: the new world of 'computer music' needed a radically new definition of music itself. The 32-page booklet includes greatly expanded liner notes by composer and former Tenney pupil Larry Polanaky."

Artist:	RASKIN QUARTET, JON
Title:	The Bass & The Bird Pond
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80574CD

"The Bass & The Bird Pond exalts the individual and collective talents of three of the most distinguished composers/improvisers currently enriching and extending the jazz vocabulary -- ROVA stalwart Jon Raskin, the inimitable Tim Berne, and bassist extraodinaire Michael Formanek. Aided and abetted by the nuanced and sensitively colored percussion work of Elliot Kavee, they plumb the depths in the way only musicians of this calibre, operating at this level of intuitive understanding, can. Impeccable compositional instincts facilitate the interweaving of individual epiphanies within intricate structures to create four rich, emotionally resonant works."

Artist:	MARSHALL, INGRAM
Title:	Ikon and Other Early Works
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80577CD

"This CD comprises the text-sound works (1974-1980) on which Ingram Marshall concentrated throughout the 70s and falls into two parts: the works from the Fragility Cycles period ('Cries Upon the Mountains', 'SUNG', 'Sibelius in His Radio Corner', and 'IKON') and the earlier works ('Cortez', 'Weather Report', and 'The Emperor's Birthday'). "'Cortez', 'Weather Report', and 'The Emperor's Birthday' form a kind of trilogy representing my work with "text-sound" in the early seventies. The techniques used to generate musical fabrics and structures out of spoken text are similar in all three works, but the source materials are all quite different. I used tape loops to create repetitive patterns from words or phrases; musical structures were developed out of the resulting fabric. It is not the original utterance or sound bit that is the building block, but the whole cloth created from it."-- Marshall. 'SUNG' and 'IKON' are both based on poems by Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. The first piece, referring to the Sung Dynasty, is scored initially as a solo/duo recitative by painter Jan Håfström and dancer Margareta Åsberg, after which the tape processes multiply their voices into a ghostly chorus as Marshall's spectral bass appears with the English translation, to be in turn transformed into its own small chorus. 'IKON', Marshall's setting of Ekelöf's Ayiasma, is a mystical meditation on an ancient ikon seen in a Greek church. The air of apocalyptic finality in the text is enhanced by the electronics, with the pervasive soundscape being that of an entropic cosmic machine. Marshall again intones the English translation; the incantatory recitation of the Swedish original is by Ekelöf himself. "'Rop på fjellet (Cries Upon the Mountains)' again uses materials 'collected' in Scandinavia, most significantly an ancient recording of locklåtar and rop from Swedish mountain herdinner (shepherdesses) traditionally used to call goats and cattle from great distances, although clearly also cultivated for their own intrinsic, shrill beauty. The live element is my own voice, a high keening processed through a tape delay system." -- Marshall.' Sibelius in His Radio Corner' was inspired by a photograph of the Finnish composer during his 'forty years of silence,' sitting in an armchair and listening to his own work being performed on the radio. "In his old age Sibelius enjoyed pulling in distant broadcasts of his music off the short-wave. I imagined that with all the static and signal drift, some of these listening experiences might have been proleptically like a modern-day electronically processed kurzwellen piece." Marshall's brooding, mysterious sonic landscapes are essential listening for anyone interested in Minimalism and the musique concrète tradition in electronic music."

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	Schlingen-Blängen
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80578CD

"Schlingen Blängen is an invaluable addition to the slender but precious discography of Charlemagne Palestine, one of the legendary figures of the amazingly fertile New York and West Coast experimental music/art scene of the sixties and seventies. He is considered to be a seminal figure of early minimalism -- as important as his better-documented contemporaries. His performances on the giant bells at St. Thomas Church and his evening-length Bösendorfer shows are still spoken of with awe by those who were present. Palestine left the music scene in the mid-seventies to focus on his visual art; he eventually moved to Europe where he still resides. Schlingen Blängen -- a 70 minute long perambulation through the organ's sonic landscape -- was recorded in 1988 (ten years after its initial performance) in a small Dutch church near the North Sea. It is difficult to describe because so little happens in it, yet at the same time an immensity of activity is going on and there is so much of it that it boggles the mind. We experience sounds set into motion by the initial choosing of a chord and its timbres (the setting of the registers or stops); the melodic changes that occur are subtle and few. In short, it is a relentless and uncompromising exploration of the physicality of sound as well as its spiritual dimensions. Palestine's music left its mark on a number of slightly younger composer-performers, among them Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca. Absolutely essential for a comprehensive understanding of the roots of minimalism and its offshoots."

Artist:	GABURO, KENNETH
Title:	Five Works for Voices, Instruments, and Electronics
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80585CD

"Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) composed works for instruments, voices, electronics, multi-media, theater, and a variety of other resources. Foremost among his many interests was a concern with the voice and with language -- how we shape language and how we are shaped by it -- and with making works that existed somewhere between the boundaries of music and language. Of the works on this CD, three are intensely concerned with what Gaburo termed 'Compositional Linguistics' (Antiphony III, Antiphony IV, and Mouth-Piece), while concerns with balance and perceptual edges seem to be his foremost concern in the other two [String Quartet in One Movement and The Flow of (u)]. In Antiphony IV (1967), for three instruments and two-channel tape, the two channels are literally separate-vocal sounds (each phoneme, in order, of the source poem) on the left channel, and electronic sounds on the right channel, with the instruments in the middle. In Mouth-Piece (1970) the trumpeter attempts to present six contrapuntal lines simultaneously and to maintain a sense of coherent timbral identity with each. For Antiphony III (1962), for sixteen voices and electronics, a poem by Virginia Hommel again provides the basis. Here, however, it is articulated contrapuntally, one word at a time, by both the chorus and the tape. The Flow of (u) (1974) consists of one note sung by three singers for twenty-three minutes."

Artist:	BERNE, TIM
Title:	The Sevens
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80586CD

"ARTE Quartett: Tim Berne (alto saxophone); Marc Ducret (acoustic guitar); David Torn (electric guitars, loops, sonic redistribution). The Sevens is Tim Berne's most explicitly 'compositional' statement in some time. The album's core, a pair of through-composed movements performed by the ARTE saxophone quartet, could serve as an apotheosis of chamber writing in the Tim Berne vein. 'Repulsion' features four melodies (or is it one melody in four voices?), variously in dialogue or in chorus. Moving through a range of tonal colors, the piece reflects both Berne's fondness for friction and his less-celebrated sensitivity. In fact, certain sections sound almost wistful, as Berne cloaks his dissonances in subtle shadows."

Artist:	COLEMAN, ANTHONY
Title:	Lapidation
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80593CD

"The music of Anthony Coleman (b. 1955) draws from so many varied, disparate, and even contradictory sources, yet still emerges with a distinctly singular and consistent voice. Listening to any of the five works on this CD -- 'Lapidation' (2002), 'East Orange' (2007), 'I Diet On Cod' (2007), 'Mise En Abîme' (1997), 'The King Of Kabay' (1988) -- is to enter into a particular world, highly specific in material but nearly hallucinatory in formal development. The music starts, becomes linear, suspends, goes vertical, goes backward, goes forward, produces vague memories, and ends. This recording is a compelling portrait of one of the most original, literate, and versatile musicians working today. As one might imagine would be the case with a composer who has spent many years working in many improvising bands as both a leader and side person, there is a strong element of collaboration in Coleman's music. Several musicians on this recording (most notably Doug Wieselman, Marty Ehrlich, Jim Pugliese, and Joseph Kubera) have worked with him for several decades and the individual "sounds" of each of these outstanding musicians have contributed to his palette and voice. This is, in many ways, very similar to the way Ellington (a primary influence) worked with and was shaped by members of his band. In looking at the scores of Coleman's music (all of which are clearly and fully notated) one can hear the transformation on the recording of the written music into the living sound. The effect of the individual musicians who play his music is palpable and an essential part of each of these compositions."

Artist:	ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER
Title:	In The White Silence
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80600CD

"Since 1978, Alaska has been John Luther Adams' (b. 1953) home and a major inspirational source for most of his compositions. Almost all of his compositions evoke natural phenomena, in particular the wintry Northern landscapes, light, and colors as well as elements of indigenous Alaskan cultures. Adams's music thus shares aesthetic features with nature-inspired works of such composers as Debussy, Ives, Sibelius, and Hovhaness. Due to the use of certain 'minimalist' strategies Adams's music is often classified as 'minimalist' or 'post-minimalist.' He avoids expressive musical rhetoric, prefers reduced and elementally simple musical material, and frequently uses sustained tones and static textures. Adams's compositions embrace just intonation, consonance, and modal harmony, and they often feature a meditative quality and extended length reminiscent of Feldmanesque dimensions. In the White Silence slowly unfolds over the course of about seventy-five minutes. The work's extended length and non-dramatic structure suggest the idea of music as an 'immeasurable space' and reflect the desire to transcend the conventional boundaries of musical composition. In the White Silence, a large-scale work of structural refinement, balance and arresting beauty, gently envelops the listener and thus becomes a 'musical presence equivalent to that of a vast tundra landscape'."

Artist:	CHASALOW, ERIC
Title:	Left To His Own Devices
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80601CD

"The seven electro-acoustic works on this disc illustrate the salient virtues that have distinguished Eric Chasalow's work in the genre over the past twenty years -- an unerring sense of drama and a rhythmic verve that makes for compelling listening. Two in particular, 'Left to His Own Devices' and 'Suspicious Motives', pay homage to his Columbia-Princeton mentors; the former is built from vocal samples of Milton Babbitt and the sound of the RCA synthesizer while the latter incorporates two motives from Davidovsky's music--primarily the opening to 'Synchronisms #6'. That the composer is equally at home outside the studio is amply borne out by the two purely acoustic chamber pieces, 'In the Works', and 'Yes, I Really Did,' clearly cut from the same aesthetic cloth as the tape pieces. As Chasalow has said, 'In spite of my long history with electronic music, the technology is not my focus.' This is clearly evident from the works on this disc, crafted in a musical language as subtle and complex as it is tactile and expressive."

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Vespers And Other Early Works
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80604CD

"Alvin Lucier (b. 1931) is best known for his pioneering work in the mid-sixties in the exploration of sonic environments, particularly sounds that we would never perceive under ordinary circumstances. Vespers and Other Early Works restores to the catalog several of his key works from that time. In 'Vespers' (1969) performers with Sondols (sonar-dolphin), hand-held pulse wave oscillators, explore the acoustic characteristics of given indoor or outdoor spaces by monitoring the echoes of the pulse waves off the walls, floors and ceilings, as well as any objects or obstacles in range of the sound waves. Over time, the listener receives an acoustic signature of the room. In 'Chambers' (1968), battery-operated radios, tape recorders, and electronically powered toys of various kinds are hidden in paper bags, shoes, kettles, and small suitcases and other small resonant environments. As performers carry these small 'rooms' into larger ones, such as concert halls, football stadiums and underground cisterns, the sounds, already altered by the acoustics of the small environments, are altered a second time by the acoustics of the larger ones. This version was recorded in 2002. 'North American Time Capsule' (1967), for voices and vocoder, is described metaphorically by Lucier as a message to listeners who don't know about us. '(Middletown) Memory Space' (1970) is a reenactment of the composition called '(Hartford) Memory Space', for any number of instrumental players with recordings of environmental sounds. 'Elegy for Albert Anastasia' (1961-1963) is described as composed 'for electromagnetic tape using very low sounds most of which are below human audibility.' Liner notes by Robert Ashley."

Artist:	MARONEY, DENMAN
Title:	Fluxations
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80607CD

Ned Rothenberg (bass clarinet, alto saxophone); Dave Ballou (trumpet); Denman Maroney (hyperpiano); Mark Dresser (contrabass); Kevin Norton (drums, vibraphone). "Denman Maroney (b.1949) is known for his unique 'hyperpiano' style, which involves playing the keys with one hand and the strings with the other using copper bars, brass bowls and other objects. Maroney is a rare example of a composer/improviser who has made 'pulse fields' an ongoing platform for both his writing and improvising. An approach to time used by such American experimentalist icons as Charles Ives and Conlon Nancarrow, pulse fields are rhythmic relationships expressed as ratios such as 3:4:5. Though they are polyrhythmic, they should not be considered to be synonymous with polyrhythms. A pulse field can present a rhythmic ambiguity that is beguiling to the listener, but is vexing to the performer, which partially explains why pulse fields have remained more a tool for through-composition than for works that privilege improvisation. Fluxations is the first instance in which Maroney has utilized them in an album-length work, which gives some idea of the difficulty the use of pulse fields presents if the material is realized by musicians with less than impeccable ensemble and improvisational skills. For this daunting proposition, Maroney turned to some of his closest associates, Dresser being foremost among them, given their fifteen-year association in various co-op settings. While the resumes of Rothenberg, Kevin Norton and Dave Ballou are not as entwined with Maroney's, they nevertheless exemplify the rigor Fluxations requires. Within this intricate compositional framework, Maroney and his cohorts create a challenging, enormously engaging work of wonderful rhythmic variety and delicate shadings that blends composition and virtuosic improvisation in fresh, unpredictable ways."

Artist:	ANDERSON, BETH
Title:	Swales and Angels
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80610CD

"Beth Anderson (b. 1950) writes chamber music of great beauty, generally simple tonality, and luminous textures. She's adopted a deceptively unmilitant motto -- 'To make something beautiful is revolutionary' -- and describes herself oxymoronically on her web page as a 'neo-romantic, avant-garde composer', words that wouldn't fit together for any other composer. Her chamber music betrays its twentieth-century roots in its pervasive use of collage. Her preferred form, and one she invented herself, is the swale: a term for a meadow or marsh in which a lot of plants grow together, and by extension a musical piece in which diverse musical ideas and even styles grow side by side. In Anderson's swales, then -- five of which are on this recording -- different themes, styles, moods pop up and succeed each other with cheery disregard for linear development-though, as in any field, the same plants recur amongst each other, giving the disparate collections a family unity. Thus she has evolved a music that seems texturally and tonally conventional measure-by-measure, but whose succession of styles -- modal, nineteenth-century, Bartókian, bluegrass -- chart out radical postmodern territory indeed. Yet, unlike the collage techniques of Cage, Stockhausen, and John Zorn, Anderson is never abrupt or mechanical, but smooths her swale elements together in an intuitively convincing stream of consciousness."

Artist:	TENNEY, JAMES
Title:	Postal Pieces
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80612CD

"James Tenney (b. 1934) is one of the most important American composers and theorists of the past fifty years. For a very long time, his work was known mainly to other musicians and its tremendous influence was belied by its obscurity. In the past twenty years, however, as his music and writings have been more and more published, recorded, performed, and studied, his place in the context of American contemporary music has become far better understood. He has pioneered musical fields as diverse as computer music, tuning theory, and integrating ideas from acoustics and music cognition into his work. Tenney has also been important as a teacher, performer, and scholar of other radical American composers. This CD contains recordings of the complete set of his Postal Pieces, written primarily during a very brief tenure at California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s. These works, although frequently performed over the years, have not been recorded (with a few exceptions). This recording is a natural and important companion to the recent New World reissue of Tenney's computer and electronic music from the 1960s. Both collections represent complete, highly individualistic and essential bodies of work by a major American artist."

Artist:	IVES, CHARLES
Title:	The Unknown Ives, Volume 2
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80618CD

Premiere recordings of unpublished works and new critical editions. Donald Berman, piano; (with Stephen Drury, piano 2). "The works on The Unknown Ives, Volume 2 include some of his best and most searching experiments: fragments, personal explorations, cerebral excursions, and works of unabashed amusement. What emerges from their juxtaposition is a sense of canon. The spectrum of pieces, from adolescence to maturity, simple to complex, illustrates the boundaries of the complete oeuvre. From fragment to complete work, gestures meld, and motivic detours begin to describe a broad musical profile of Ives the complete musician. This recording completes the catalogue of Ives's short, though substantial, piano compositions presented on The Unknown Ives. Honing the unpublished manuscripts has brought to light some 40 piano works, two hours of music, apart from the two major piano sonatas of Ives. Hearing them illumines a more complete picture of Ives the composer. Meeting that music on its own terms is a fitting tribute to the composer who desired to make music that had a life of its own roaring volition. This recording includes published pieces that I have re-evaluated and revised. Many were initially edited by my teacher John Kirkpatrick (1905-1991), the American pianist, editor, and ardent champion of Ives. His meticulous efforts to identify, index, and catalogue loose manuscript sheets after Ives's death unquestionably comprise one of the heroic achievements in twentieth-century American music. Kirkpatrick's fastidious quest to divine playable editions of the music is a fascinating and at times problematic counterpoint to the compositions' rough edges. But essentially, Ives's volcanic nature and ambivalent attitudes likely served to obstruct public hearings of the music during his life; Kirkpatrick's asserting influence brought much of that music to light, including this recording." -- Donald Berman.

Artist:	PARTCH, HARRY
Title:	The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 1
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80621CD

Reissue of CRI 751. "This newly remastered reissue marks a welcome return to the catalog of the first volume of the classic 4-CD collection that was formerly available on the CRI label. The works recorded on this disc span the first six years of what Harry Partch (1901-1974), slightly tongue-in-cheek, called the 'third period' of his creative life. They show him moving away from the obsession with 'the intrinsic music of spoken words' that had characterized his earlier output (the vocal works of 1930-33 and 1941-45) and towards an instrumental idiom, predominantly percussive in nature. This path was to take him through the 'music-dance drama' King Oedipus (1951) -- the culmination of his 'spoken word' manner -- to the 'dance satire' The Bewitched (1954-55), in which his new percussive idiom manifests itself. The three works on this disc show Partch before, during, and after this period of transition. In their quiet, forlorn way, the Eleven Intrusions are among the most compelling and beautiful of Partch's works. The individual pieces were composed at various times between August 1949 and December 1950, and only later gathered together as a cycle. Nonetheless they form a unified whole, with a nucleus of eight songs framed by two instrumental preludes and an essentially instrumental postlude. Although foreshadowed by the dance sequences of King Oedipus, the Plectra and Percussion Dances (1952) are the first of Partch's major works to be wholly instrumental in conception. The final work on this disc is Ulysses at the Edge, written at Partch's studio at Gate 5 in July 1955. Ulysses, which Partch describes as a 'minor adventure in rhythm,' is unique among his mature compositions in that, in its original form, it did not call for any of his own instruments."

Artist:	PARTCH, HARRY
Title:	The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 2
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80622CD

New version of CRI 752. Features: "And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma," "The Wayward: U.S. Highball; San Francisco; The Letter; Barstow." "Harry Partch's compositions of the 1940s -- and to some extent his work in general -- have remained until recently an unwritten chapter in the history of American music. And yet it was these very pieces -- the collection of four works he would later collectively entitle The Wayward -- that brought him to the attention of the New York musical world. His concert of these pieces for the League of Composers (April 22, 1944) established for him a small but permanent reputation as a musical maverick who had wandered off well-worn tracks and had developed a sort of lateral extension of his art, independently of any of the main circles of American music. The musical starting point of the compositions of The Wayward is the inflections and rhythms of everyday American speech. From the beginnings of his mature output in 1930 Partch had been devoted to what he called 'the intrinsic music of spoken words,' and these four works capture something of the spontaneous musicality of the conversations of the hoboes he befriended during the Depression. In their original form these pieces used only the small collection of instruments Partch had built or customized by 1943: Adapted Viola, Adapted Guitar, Chromelodeon, and Kithara. The versions recorded here are all later reworkings, sometimes with only small changes (as in the case of San Francisco), and sometimes involving a substantial amount of recomposition (as in the case of U.S. Highball). The final work on this disc dates from twenty years later than the compositions of The Wayward, and represents one of the high points of Partch's later instrumental idiom. 'And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma' was composed in Petaluma, California, in March-April 1964, and revised at various times and places until the completion of the final copy of the score in San Diego in October 1966. It marks a radical departure from the theater works he had written at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s, and shows a renewed concentration on technical innovation and on fusing his activities as composer and instrument-builder within the context of a single composition. Newly remastered."

Artist:	PARTCH, HARRY
Title:	The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 3
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80623CD

"The four works on this newly remastered CD are eloquent testimony to Harry Partch's aesthetic of corporeality. The music he composed for The Dreamer That Remains, for Rotate the Body in All Its Planes, for Windsong, and for Water! Water!, was intended as only one component in the total artistic experience. In these works music joins with drama, with film, with dance, even with gymnastics, as integral parts of the composer's vision. The eloquent and affecting The Dreamer That Remains (1972) was Partch's last work. It was commissioned by the patroness Betty Freeman for her film on Partch which was directed by Stephen Pouliot. Rotate the Body in All Its Planes (1961) was a spin-off of the 'Tumble On' sequence in Partch's large-scale theatre piece 'Revelation' in the Courthouse Park. It was premiered at the National Collegiate Gymnasts Championship in 1961. Windsong (1958) was also written for film, the soundtrack to a film by Madeline Tourtelot in which Partch saw the Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo. (A later version of the work was named Daphne of the Dunes). Finally, somewhat akin to a Broadway musical, Water! Water! (1961) is perhaps Partch's most lively and lighthearted work. It pokes fun at many targets, especially the rush of audiences for water at the interval; thus the subtitle: 'An Intermission with Prologues and Epilogues'."

Artist:	PARTCH, HARRY
Title:	The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 4 - The Bewitched
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80624CD

2005 remaster, from original mono master tapes (recorded in 1957). "The Bewitched was Partch's first work solely intended for dance (and mime-dance at that; he was not overly enamored in his lifetime of so-called 'modern dance'). Drawing heavily from his deep affection for the music-theatrical performance traditions of Greek theater, as well as those from Africa, Bali, and Chinese opera, Partch conceived of a contemporary American music ritual-theater where musicians not only play, but also function at times as movers-singers-actors. Such is the case of The Bewitched, where the instruments are the set, in front of (and around) which dancers 'dance,' but where the onstage musicians also move and sing. Partch's masterpiece has been lovingly remastered from the original mono masters and the 24-page booklet includes never-before-published photographs from productions of The Bewitched. This is the definitive document of this very important work." "The Bewitched is in the tradition of world-wide ritual theatre. It is the opposite of specialized. I conceived and wrote it in California in the period 1952-55, following the several performances of my version of Sophocles' Oedipus. In spirit, if not wholly in content, it is a satyr-play. It is a seeking for release --through satire, whimsy, magic, ribaldry -- from the catharsis of tragedy. It is an essay toward a miraculous abeyance of civilized rigidity, in the feeling that the modern spirit might thereby find some ancient and magical sense of rebirth. Each of the 12 scenes is a theatrical unfolding of nakedness, a psychological strip-tease, or -- a diametric reversal, which has the effect of underlining the complementary character, the strange affinity, of seeming opposites." -- Harry Partch.

Artist:	CURRAN, ALVIN
Title:	Maritime Rites
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80625CD

Featuring the foghorns and other maritime sounds of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and solo improvisations by John Cage, Joseph Celli, Clark Coolidge, Alvin Curran, Jon Gibson, Malcolm Goldstein, Steve Lacy, George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, and Leo Smith. "Rich in ambient detail, Maritime Rites presents the foghorn as indigenous American 'found' music par excellence and the source of one of the most enduring minimal musics around us. The series is also a comprehensive aural documentary of our regional and national maritime heritage including such historical sounds as the Nantucket II Lightship, now out of service and doing service as a museum docked in Boston Harbor. The Lightship's horn is the only one of its kind (and the loudest!) on the East coast and was recorded extensively during an exclusive session ten miles off shore with the special cooperation of the ship's crew. As the foghorn gives way to other electronic navigational aids, this work may serve as a historical document of some of the most beautiful and mysterious sounds of the sea. As an expression of sonic geography, Maritime Rites brings together different areas of the Seaboard in a single musical moment. The series was expressly conceived for radio, the only medium that can safely accommodate over sixty foghorns at once and bring an entire coastline, seemingly live, into anyone's home! An essential document for anyone interested in sound art."

Artist:	HWANG, JASON KAO
Title:	The Floating Box - A Story in Chinatown
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80626CD

"Jason Kao Hwang (b. 1957) is a highly respected improviser who also has a number of compositions and film scores to his credit. The Floating Box is a major contemporary work that gives voice not only to the Asian immigrant experience in America in particular but also to the immigrant experience in general. With the collaboration of librettist Catherine Filloux, The Floating Box is an original story inspired by the oral histories of Chinese-Americans living in Chinatown. The story of Eva/Yee-Wa, a young Chinese-American woman living with her mother, is the story of many diasporic peoples who have sought a better life in new, often harsh surroundings. The poetry of Filloux's libretto fuses perfectly with Hwang's eclectic score, beautifully capturing the complex, intimate relationships among these three characters. The opera employs both Chinese and Western instruments in an ensemble of eight players: piccolo/flute/alto flute; Bb clarinet/bass clarinet; vibraphone; pipa (Chinese lute); accordion; percussion, including Tibetan chimes and singing bowls, whirling air tubes, Chinese tom toms, and a Buddhist fan drum; erhu/gaohu/zhonghu (a family of two-stringed Chinese violins categorized as huqin); and cello. In Hwang's skilled hands, these instruments together forge a rich amalgam of sound -- in the composer's words, 'complex suspensions rather than homogenous solutions.' The precision with which Hwang mines each instrument's sonic possibilities and the imaginative ways with which he draws upon subsets of the full ensemble result in a vibrant musical narrative that propels the drama forward to its conclusion. The kaleidoscopic range of musical styles employed --atonality, blues, Broadway, Chinese opera, chromaticism, impressionism, jazz, pop -- establishes The Floating Box as the work of an artist who is completely comfortable bridging multiple musical worlds."

Artist:	DAVIS, ANTHONY
Title:	Amistad: An Opera In Two Acts
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80627CD

"'Amistad is an opera that was ten years in the making. Thulani and I first discussed the idea of making an opera on the Amistad Rebellion in 1986, after the premiere of our opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. We were drawn to the drama of the story, a successful uprising of captives on a slave ship, and the implications of the Amistad incident in an understanding of ourselves and the American experience. Through the Amistad, we could revisit the story of the Middle Passage, the contradictions implicit in the ethos of America, and also explore the emergence of the African-American as a cultural entity. Amistad is my most ambitious work to date and gave me the opportunity to expand upon what I learned from my previous operas as well as the chance to explore new musical areas.' -- Anthony Davis. The music of Anthony Davis (b. 1951) embodies an intercultural approach, drawing not only upon traditional and current African-American sources, but upon Javanese gamelan, American minimalism, and the European and American avant-garde. Amistad, Davis' fourth, is an opera in two acts with full orchestra, double chorus, and an integrated jazz ensemble with trap drums that drives its motoric rhythmic flow. In many ways, Amistad revisits aspects of Davis' previous operas, X and Tania, but in a form that exhibits maximum focus and a tightened compositional practice. The musical language is marked by constant motion and kaleidoscopic permutation of the same elements, including a four-note ending cadence that appears constantly, but in ever-shifting guises. This recording is drawn from Lyric Opera of Chicago's 1997 world-premiere performances."

Artist:	LUCIER, ALVIN
Title:	Wind Shadows
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80628CD

"The music on these CDs takes us into a new realm of music making, one that Alvin Lucier (b. 1931) has defined for us and one that demands that we start to listen anew. His work has been more often described in terms of science than of art as if it were a series of quasi-scientific experiments, but to put the emphasis here is to miss the point, for its purpose is never 'explanatory' (the goal of science) but, like all art, 'revelatory.' This is not to suggest that the composer has some spiritual agenda in the usual sense of this term. On the contrary, it is the physical behavior of sound itself that he so elegantly reveals, each work unveiling an otherwise hidden or ephemeral aspect of aural phenomena and allowing us time to witness its beauty. He achieves this by ruthlessly excluding any trace of self-expression, or indeed anything extraneous to the phenomenon itself. The Barton Workshop has been the only group to really work closely with Lucier in terms of doing 'portraits' of his work (the first in 1995), commissioning new works (40 Rooms, Bar Lazy J, and Q) and performing older/extant pieces. This 2CD set is the fruit of this long collaborative process. In Memoriam Stuart Marshall [bass clarinet and pure wave oscillator] (1993/rev. 2003), 40 Rooms [quintet and digital reverberation system] (1996), In Memoriam Jon Higgins [clarinet and slow sweep pure wave oscillator] (1984), Letters [clarinet, violin, cello, piano] (1992), Q [quintet and pure wave oscillators] (1996), A Tribute to James Tenney [double bass and pure wave oscillators] (1986), Bar Lazy J [clarinet, trombone] (2003), Fideliotrio [viola, cello, piano] (1987), Wind Shadows [trombone and closely tuned oscillators](1994)."

Artist:	BEGLARIAN, EVE
Title:	Tell The Birds
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80630CD

"'One of new music's truly free spirits' and a 'remarkable experimentalist,' Eve Beglarian (b. 1958) is a composer and performer whose music has been described as 'an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.' Tell The Birds is her latest sampler plate of ideas, a set of pieces both cohesive and pleasingly eclectic. Four of the six pieces here deal with texts, from such disparate writers as William Blake, Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, and American poets Linda Norton and Stanley Kunitz. Musically, Beglarian charts her progress in finding ways to combine her use of samplers and electronics with breathing, real-time musicians, extant new music ensembles and an orchestral showpiece for good measure. The compositions contained here -- 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' (1994), 'Creating the World' (1996), 'Robin Redbreast' (2003), 'Wonder Counselor' (1996), 'Landscaping for Privacy' (1995), 'FlamingO' (1995, revised 2004) -- represent a range of ideas and vintages in the Beglarian oeuvre, from the mid-nineties forward, with some revision of older works and a generally gleaming account of her continuing artistic saga. Beglarian continues to carve out a path in music not quite like any other in contemporary music, not so much breaking rules as ignoring the ones she has no use for, and nurturing ideas or combinations she finds useful and appealing."

Artist:	MUMMA, GORDON
Title:	Electronic Music of Theatre and Public Activity
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80632CD

"Gordon Mumma (b. 1935) has played a pioneering role in the development and evolution of 'live-electronic' music. 'Live-electronics' as a concept and practice appears to have originated in the United States in the late 1950s, outside the few institutional electronic studios and often in the context of innovative theatre activity. From its inception, it frequently involved two processes: (1) live performance with accompanying or interacting sound materials on magnetic tape; and (2) the use of electronic circuitry as sound-modifying and sound-producing instruments. Beginning with his classic 'Megaton for Wm. Burroughs' of 1963, Mumma's live-electronic and cybersonic works of the 1960s and 1970s, especially 'Medium Size Mograph' (1963) and 'Hornpipe' (1967), display his resourceful use of both live-electronic processes. 'Cybersonic Cantilevers' (1973) extends them to include the active participation of audience members, many of them children and teenagers who were quick to grasp the artistic potential of cybersonic technology, while 'Conspiracy 8' (1969-70) is an early example of live interaction between performers and computer. A major addition to the contemporary music discography, this is essential listening for anyone interested in the history of electronic music."

Artist:	GANN, KYLE
Title:	Nude Rolling Down an Escalator: Studies for Disklavier
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80633CD

"Like many composers of subsequent generations, Kyle Gann (born 1955) was captivated by Cowell's theories and Nancarrow's music. His book, The Music of Conlon Nancarrow, is the essential source for any serious study of Nancarrow's work. Knowing so much about Nancarrow's music, it's hardly surprising that it would occur to Gann to consider the question of how he might make the mechanical piano his own. His answer is the music on this recording. The instrument isn't exactly the same. Nancarrow employed the old-fashioned player piano, driven by paper rolls with holes punched in them. Gann uses the more recent Disklavier, which is controlled by a computer via MIDI data. However, like Nancarrow, Gann employs the mechanical piano for both musical and practical reasons. The musical attraction, of course, is the one Cowell observed: the instrument allows the composer to compose with tempo relationships and rhythmic velocities not readily playable by human performers. The practical appeal is that Gann felt that not enough people were playing his music. So in the do-it-yourself spirit of Nancarrow, Lou Harrison, Harry Partch and so many other American composers, he decided to take matters into his own virtual hands. But although Gann's reasons for working with the mechanical piano are similar to Nancarrow's, the musical results are quite different. Gann picks up where Nancarrow left off, developing his own personal methods of working with multiple tempo layers, and weaving elements of popular and classical music into his vivid and distinctive musical tapestries. Gann's music embraces a wide range of influences but sounds like no other. His fascination with complex tempo structures and microtonal tunings places him in the experimentalist tradition from Cowell to La Monte Young. Yet the directness and accessibility of his music reveal his affinity with American populists such as Roy Harris and Virgil Thomson. In this highly personal blend of experimentalism and populism, Gann's closest musical forebears are Partch and Charles Ives. In the spirit of Ives, Gann's music invokes ragtime, jazz, folk music and Native American music on equal footing with classical music and purely abstract sonic speculations."

Artist:	BRANT, HENRY
Title:	Music for Massed Flutes
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80636CD

"The long and illustrious career of American composer Henry Brant (born 1913) can be framed with the music he has written for the flute. The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer's three epic works for multiple flutes do not fit into any standard category of instrumentation or form; rather, they span the creative life of a man who for all of his life has been referred to as a 'maverick,' a 'pioneer,' an 'experimentalist,' and, since the 1950s, the 'world's leading composer of 'spatial' music,' in which the placement of the musicians around the performance space is as important a compositional element as the timbre, time, or pitch. It is with the development of his use of space as an intrinsic part of his musical vocabulary that Brant established himself as a major figure in American music of the twentieth century. Brant wrote 'Angels and Devils' (1931), now recognized as the first flute orchestra or 'flute choir' piece of the twentieth century, in 1931 at the age of 18, after having heard a performance of Stravinksy's Symphony of Psalms and being struck by the unique use of five flutes in the orchestration. This recording of 'Angels and Devils' is a re-mastering of the historic LP released on CRI in 1956. Brant's compositional precociousness in this seminal work is creative and sophisticated. The harmonic language features a generous use of jazz-like polychords with up to eleven notes, one pitch for each instrument, alternating with a playfully light, less dense 'normal' harmonic vocabulary, often borrowing from the popular music language of his musical environment. 'The Mass in Gregorian Chant for Multiple Flutes' [1984] (subtitled Mass for June 16), composed in 1984, is scored for as many flutists as possible with approximately twenty percent of the flutists doubling on piccolo. 'Ghosts and Gargoyles' (2001) is scored for solo flute (also playing piccolo and bass flute) with an octet comprised of piccolos, C-flutes, alto flutes and bass flutes, plus a jazz drummer."

Artist:	JOHNSTON, BEN
Title:	String Quartets Nos. 2, 3, 4 & 9
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80637CD

Performed by Kepler Quartet. "Ben Johnston's (b. 1926) music has reached a wide and diverse audience, both at home and abroad, without compromising its high seriousness or its depth of philosophic purpose. His music shows the confluence of several traditions of music-making that have flourished within the United States. In the 1950s his output was characterized by the neoclassicism of his teacher Darius Milhaud. In the 1960s he explored serial techniques and, at the end of the decade, indeterminacy. From 1960 onward the overriding technical preoccupation of his music has been its use of just intonation, the tuning system of the music of ancient cultures as well as that of many living traditions worldwide. Johnston is a pioneer in the use of microtones and non-tempered tuning, rationalizing and going beyond Harry Partch's achievements in this domain. His ten string quartets are among the most fascinating collections of work ever produced by an American composer. And yet, like similarly imposing peaks in the American musical landscape -- Ives's Universe Symphony, for example, or the Studies for Player Piano of Conlon Nancarrow -- these works have, for decades now, remained more known about than known, more talked about than played. The scores have been analyzed by musicologists and theorists fascinated by their fusion of advanced compositional techniques (serialism with just intonation, for example; microtonality with a kind of neoclassical revisionism), but they have been too little heard. The Kepler Quartet's recordings -- this disc is the first of a series of three, prepared with Johnston's active support and supervision -- offer lively and scrupulously accurate readings that unlock the door to these marvelous pieces. Like Ives and Nancarrow before him, there is the sense that Johnston's time has finally come."

Artist:	EASTMAN, JULIUS
Title:	Unjust Malaise
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	3CD
Price:	$45.00
Catalog #:	NW 80638CD

"This three-disc set marks the first appearance on disc of the music of the African-American composer Julius Eastman (1940-1990), who died fourteen years ago under unexplained circumstances and whose musical legacy was thought lost. This comprehensive and definitive document, which comprises almost all of Eastman's signature works, will undoubtedly be a revelation for those who have thus far been unable to hear his work. In his book American Music in the Twentieth Century, composer/author Kyle Gann briefly sums up Eastman's work and its importance: 'Born in New York, he graduated from the Curtis Institute in composition and was discovered by Lukas Foss, who conducted his music, including Stay On It (1973), one of the first works to introduce pop tonal progressions and free improvisation in an art context... Applying minimalism's additive process to the building of sections, he developed a composing technique he called 'organic music,' a cumulatively overlapping process in which each section of a work contains, simultaneously, all the sections which preceded it. The pieces he wrote in this style often had intentionally provocative titles intended to reinterpret the minorities Eastman belonged to in a positive light: for example, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla (all circa 1980). These three pieces, all scored for multiple pianos, build up immense emotive power through the incessant repetition of rhythmic figures.' Eastman was an energizing underground figure, one whose forms are clear, whose methods were powerful and persuasive, and whose thinking was supremely musical. His works show different routes minimalism might have taken, and perhaps some of those will now be followed up. This set of discs is a bold beginning to restoring to history the works of one of the most important members of the first post-minimalist generation."

Artist:	GREGORIO, GUILLERMO
Title:	Coplanar
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80639CD

"Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1941, Guillermo Gregorio has lived variously in Europe and the United States since 1986. He was an active participant on the Argentine music scene throughout the 1960s, '70s, and early '80s. 'What affects me more than any other thing,' Gregorio says, 'is my involvement in visual arts, and my architectural and design experience.' In his compositions, a reinterpretation of the fundamental and structural concepts of Constructivism converges with the historical experiences of Argentinian Conceptualism, Fluxus, intermedia synthesis, certain aspects of serialism, and graphic music. In addition to the acceptance of sound as material, constructive and geometrically generated ideas are used in scores ranging from conventionally notated statements to graphs, including planimetric projections of spatial structures. In January 2001, he founded the Madi Ensemble of Chicago, which performs original and historical scores that draw from the conceptual foundation of diverse Argentinian avant-garde currents."

Artist:	VA
Title:	Works for Violin
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80641CD

Works for Violin by George Antheil, Johanna Beyer, Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, Charles Dodge, David Mahler, Larry Polansky, Stefan Wolpe." Performed by Miwako Abe, violin; Michael Kieran Harvey, piano. "Henry Cowell (1897-1965), in the introduction to the first edition of his prophetic 'symposium' titled 'American Composers on American Music (1933)', described features of contemporary American music and outlined categories of composers. The first group he introduced -- 'Americans who have developed indigenous materials or are specially interested in expressing some phase of the American spirit in their works' -- might be taken as a historical framework for the composers represented on this recording. The tradition that Cowell saw emerging from the music of Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Charles Seeger, and others supported the work of a handful of iconic names -- Cowell himself, also George Antheil (1900-1959), Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972), and Ruth Crawford (1901-1953). Their place in that tradition lies at the heart of this recording by Miwako Abe (violin) and Michael Kieran Harvey (piano). What links these composers to their friends, peers, and colleagues who join them here -- Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888-1944), Charles Dodge (b. 1942), David Mahler (b. 1944), and Larry Polansky (b. 1954) -- is their collective commitment to developing an artistic environment in which individual voices in American music could support one another, could find means of distribution, and, most importantly, could be heard. This program traces music written for violin by progenitors of this independent strain in American music from the earlier-century composers: Seeger, Beyer, Antheil, Cowell, and Wolpe, to a 'younger' generation of composers (born in the 1940s and 1950s): Dodge, Mahler, and Polansky -- with a selection of works spanning over seventy years (the earliest, Antheil's 'Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano,' was composed in 1923; the latest, Dodge's 'Etudes for Violin and Tape', was composed in 1994)."

Artist:	IVES, CHARLES
Title:	The Complete Recordings of Charles Ives at the Piano
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80642CD

1933-1943. "The invention of sound-recording devices late in the nineteenth century made possible the preservation of definitive performances played or led by some important composers of the first decades of the twentieth century. Elgar, Rachmaninoff, Richard Strauss, and Stravinsky, among others, left a significant legacy of recordings of their own works. Charles Ives, however, did not approach recording in order to leave a legacy. At least at first, he simply wanted an opportunity to listen to some of his music with advantageous detachment (and possibly to shortcut supplying to Henry Cowell and others variants of his music). With virtually no performances of his important music occurring during the first two decades of the century, Ives certainly had a backlog of curiosity about the sound of his own compositional efforts, and the need to judge them as such. By 1933 Ives had retired from his insurance business and had largely finished writing his autobiographical Memos. He had heard some performances of his instrumental works (mostly in very disappointing efforts), but none of his piano works. While on an extended European vacation, he introduced himself to recording, at the Columbia Graphophone Company in London. Over the course of a decade that included four such sessions, Ives recorded seventeen different pieces, ranging from the early 'March No. 6' and rejected 'Largo for Symphony No. 1' to the 'improvisations' that indeed may have been freshly created in front of the microphone in 1938. But most of the music recorded -- the 'Four Transcriptions from 'Emerson,' the 'Studies Nos. 2, 9, 11, and 23,' and the 'Emerson' movement of Sonata No. 2 for Piano: 'Concord, Mass.' -- is related closely to Ives' early, unfinished 'Emerson Overture' for Piano and Orchestra (circa 1910?11). This meticulously re-mastered reissue restores this historic recording, originally issued by CRI, to the catalogue. The booklet includes complete tracking information and extensive historical notes and documentation."

Artist:	HARRISON, LOU
Title:	Chamber and Gamelan Works
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80643CD

"Lou Harrison (1917-2003) believed fervently in music's power to create cultural bridges. To this end he applied his prodigious skills and creative energies to creating syncretic works that link diverse musical languages. Faulted at times for his eclecticism, Harrison responded with a vibrant defense of hybridity, cultivating a musical multiculturalism long before that term -- or even the concept -- held the currency it now enjoys. Harrison's major contributions to twentieth-century American music lie in three main areas: (1) the development of the percussion ensemble as a viable performance medium; (2) the linkage of Asian and Western musical styles; and (3) the exploration of just intonation tuning systems. All three are represented in the works on this disc. The influences manifest in the works on this disc remained with Harrison for the rest of his career. He ultimately composed over three dozen gamelan pieces and the estampie became one of his favorite forms (he used it in a dozen works, ranging from solo keyboard to full orchestra). Nor did his advocacy of just intonation systems diminish: he called for pure intervals in works in all genres. But the most distinctive characteristic of Harrison's music lies in its inherent plurality. He was drawn to community, both in performance groups such as the gamelan and the percussion ensemble, and in the compositions themselves, which unite elements from various times and places. Harrison's originality lay in the way he creatively combined these elements to produce novel syntheses. His fervent advocacy of hybridity led to a type of transethnic music that truly foreshadowed the post-modern celebration of diversity. The reissue of this long-unavailable release from the CRI catalog features extensive new liner notes by Harrison biographer Leta Miller."

Artist:	VA
Title:	Pioneers of Electronic Music
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80644CD

Works by Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, Pril Smiley, Bülent Arel, Mario Davidovsky, Alice Shields. "In 1950, the Columbia University Music Department requisitioned a tape recorder to use in teaching and for recording concerts. In 1951, the first tape recorder arrived, an Ampex 400, and Vladimir Ussachevsky, then a junior faculty member, was assigned a job that no one else wanted: the care of the tape recorder. This job was to have important consequences for Ussachevsky and the medium he developed. Electronic music was born. Over the next ten years, Ussachevsky and his collaborators established the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, which Ussachevsky directed for twenty years. It was the first large electronic music center in the United States, thanks to the path-breaking support of the Rockefeller Foundation and encouragement from two of the country's leading universities. The Center became one of the best-known and most prolific sources of electronic music in the world. All of the music on this historic reissue (originally released on CRI) is the result of the pioneering work of the Center and its composers. The guest composers and Columbia-associated composers who have produced pieces at the Center include Bülent Arel, Luciano Berio, Mario Davidovsky, Jacob Druckman, Arthur Kreiger, Daria Semegen, Pril Smiley, and Edgard Varèse. Ussachevsky's own students at the Center included Jon Appleton, Wendy Carlos, Charles Dodge, Robert Moog, Alice Shields, Harvey Sollberger, and Charles Wuorinen. Of the seven composers most closely associated with the Center from its early years, six are present on this disc. Vladimir Ussachevsky: Sonic Contours (1952), Piece for Tape Recorder (1956), Computer Piece No. 1 (1968), Two Sketches for a Computer Piece (1971); Otto Luening: Low Speed (1952), Invention in Twelve Notes (1952), Fantasy in Space (1952), Moonflight (1968); Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Incantation (1953); Pril Smiley: Kolyosa (1970); Bülent Arel: Stereo Electronic Music No. 2 (1970); Mario Davidovsky: Synchronisms No. 5 (1969); Alice Shields: The Transformation of Ani (1970)."

Artist:	BENARY, BARBARA
Title:	Sun On Snow
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80646CD

"Among the many composers who have drawn inspiration from the music of Indonesia, the one whose outlook became most pervaded by the structure of gamelan music may be Barbara Benary (b. 1946), co-founder and guiding spirit of New York's Gamelan Son of Lion. A quiet, self-effacing presence on the New York music scene for almost four decades now, Benary has maintained a low profile, but behind the scenes she is well connected. A child of Manhattan's conceptualist movement, she was the designated violinist of early minimalism, a pioneer in American gamelan, and an early example of an increasingly frequent type, the ethnomusicologist-turned-composer. Chances are you've never heard her music on compact disc before this, but New York's Downtown scene has regarded her highly for a long time. Hers is a spiritual music, and the spirituality resides in the universality of her lines, universal because they are simple, particular to no one culture. Like Harrison and Virgil Thomson, Benary has a faith in the power of music's most basic elements, which she knits into intricate patterns before letting them unravel again. The title Aural Shoehorning (1997) refers to the listener's tendency to confront unusual tuning systems, such as those of Javanese gamelan, by trying to 'shoehorn' them into the framework of our familiar diatonic scales. Heterophony is the overall theme of the piece, and the various ways in which a gamelan and a diatonic ensemble of clarinet/bass clarinet and keyboard percussion can interact as a mixed marriage in which neither partner attempts to convert the other. Barang 1 & 2 (1975) are solo and duo explorations of a Javanese pentatonic mode called Barang. Sun on Snow (1985) is based on a poem of five lines, five one-syllable words per line, which can be read or sung both horizontally and vertically. The basic melody's pitches are derived by assigning notes on the basis of number of letters in each word. The melody is then developed and elaborated in five variations. Downtown Steel (1993) is an adaptation for the instruments of the Downtown Ensemble of an earlier piece, 'Hot-Rolled Steel', written for Gamelan Son of Lion, whose keyboards are made of that material. The structure of the piece is based on an English bell-ringing permutation known as Grandsire Doubles."

Artist:	ANTHEIL, GEORGE
Title:	Dreams, Piano Concerto No. 2, Serenade No. 2
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80647CD

"A concert pianist and vanguard composer, George Antheil (1900-1959) became known as the 'Bad Boy of Music.' The ultimate American in Paris, Antheil was an avant-garde provocateur of the first order who made his name composing iconoclastic compositions: the loudest and brashest classical music of his time. But this album gives us three new performances -- two of them world-premiere recordings -- which reveal another, forgotten side of Antheil: the incurable romantic. Written in 1926, after the height of Antheil's radical period, the 'Piano Concerto No. 2' is an experiment in classical form. The work contains the same sudden juxtapositions and abrupt contrasts of mood as his futurist music. But the excesses of his recent ballet mécanique (written for 16 player pianos!) are compensated for by an almost spare, baroque orchestration and motifs that draw on Bach as much as on Stravinsky. In three movements, Antheil employs a more restrained but still exuberant style. The beautifully meditative slow movement is followed by a virtuosic and compelling toccata. Each movement ends on an overtly Bachian cadence, most obvious in the sweetly naive coda of the final movement. The ballet 'Dreams' (1935) had a prior existence in Paris. It was called 'Les Songes,' and Darius Milhaud wrote the original music in 1933, later discarded in favor of Antheil's score. Antheil plays sarcastically with contradictions: waltz vs. march; folk song vs. orchestral romanticism. This is marvelous ballet music, and the unexpected structural and melodic changes keep us on the edge of our seat: amused and entertained. The lack of a formal structure does not hamper Antheil; he seemed to thrive on it, both in this piece, and in many others he wrote. Despite the cut-and-paste exoticism and the predictable thematic material, this music sounds appealingly American -- folksy, populist, and engaging. Antheil's brilliant orchestration makes these works shine. Not much is known about the genesis of the 'Serenade No. 2' (1948). As the work neared completion, Antheil wrote, the 'Serenade' '...is as important, for me, as a new symphony; indeed, it can be played by a major symphony orchestra.' It's a beautifully orchestrated, lush work. Both serenades are in three movements -- the first is for strings alone while the second adds a wind section and a percussionist."

Artist:	BROWN, EARLE
Title:	Selected Works 1952-1965
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80650CD

This long-awaited reissue of the CRI recording of Earle Brown's (1926-2002) music is the best overview of his seminal early works. "It is obviously a great pleasure for me that CRI is re-releasing its 1974 recording of my work, and an even greater pleasure that I am able to add to the repertoire. The performance of 'Times Five' and 'Novara' (recorded in Holland) still seem very fine representations of the works and are performed brilliantly by the Dutch musicians. December 1952 as realized by the late, brilliant pianist and composer David Tudor is, in my opinion, the best of many performances he made of this graphic score. It is fascinating to hear the realizations by Michael Daugherty of November 1952, December 1952 and 'Four Systems' (all published in 'Folio' (1952-54) -- immensely inventive and marvelously performed on piano, tape and computer, with the newer technology that was not available to Tudor at the time he recorded his version in December 1952. This recording of 'Nine Rare Bits' is one of six versions that Antoinette Vischer (who commissioned the work) and George Gruntz surprised me with when I returned to Basel after my lectures in Stockholm in 1965. Although I very specifically compose the sound events, it is an 'open-form' score, subject to innumerable formal shapes, arranged by the performers themselves. 'Music for Violin, Cello and Piano' is a very early (1952) twelve-tone serial piece in very strictly metric notation. It uses Schillinger-suggested 'serial' techniques, very similar to Messiaen, as it turned out. In contrast, 'Music for Cello and Piano' is a completely subjectively composed work, in what I called 'time notation' (contrary to metric) which is now referred to as 'Proportional Notation'."

Artist:	TUDOR & GORDON MUMMA, DAVID
Title:	Rainforest/4 Mographs, 2 Sections from Gestures II
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80651CD

"This historic recording features the first-ever release of the two earliest surviving recordings of David Tudor's seminal work, Rainforest. Sandwiched in between are six keyboard works by Gordon Mumma in recordings featuring the composer and his close collaborator, Tudor. In early 1968, Merce Cunningham created a new dance whose apparent impetus was Colin Turnbull's The Forest People, with its account of life among the Mbuti pygmies of the Ituri Forest in Zaire. For the music, Cunningham turned to Tudor and for the first time asked him for an original work. When he learned that the dance was to be called 'Rainforest,' Tudor said, 'Oh, then I'll put a lot of raindrops in it.' Raindrops were just the beginning: using audio transducers originally designed by the Navy for hearing under and above water simultaneously -- eight small objects programmed with signals from sound generators, phonograph cartridges, and two sets of speakers -- Tudor created a world of sound in perpetual but unpredictable motion, a steady state at once abstract and evocative. The first recording, made from the Teatro Novo orchestra pit on July 30, is an excellent document of the sound character of Tudor's 'Rainforest' work when it was performed with the Cunningham Dance Company in those early years. The second recording documents the first concert performance of 'Rainforest', in March 1969, several months after the Rio de Janeiro dance performance. The venue was a large conference space at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. The equipment was set on tables in the center of the space, with the audience seated around the performers. Four separate channels of sound were used and widely spaced, with two in the foreground and two in the background. The sound sources had also expanded from the earlier Cunningham performances, with Tudor now adding recordings of small sounds from insects and birds, in conjunction with the previous electronic sounds, all modified by his acoustical resonant devices. Gordon Mumma's 'Gestures II' and the 'Mographs' are two sets of pieces for two pianists, composed between 1958 and 1964. During the 1960s Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma toured with their concerts of New Music for Two Pianos, including parts of 'Gestures II' and some of the 'Mographs.'"

Artist:	VA
Title:	New Music for Electronic & Recorded Media
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80653CD

Subtitled: Women in Electronic Music 1977. Works by Johanna M. Beyer, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Megan Roberts, Ruth Anderson, and Laurie Anderson. This is a long-awaited reissue of the CRI CD of the classic 1750 Arch LP. "The music on this album exhibits an exciting, wide-open, freewheeling approach to the medium of electronic music which has come to be typical of this genre in the late 1970s. No longer are composers obsessively concerned with the agonizing, expressionistic, and purely 'electronic' (synthesized) sound formulas which marked much of this music composed between the mid-'50s and the late-'60s. Instead, today we have composers willing to mix media and sonic materials in thoroughly inventive ways to achieve ends which are new-sounding, and often more engaging, than that of the 'academic' avant-garde. This is the outgrowth of a fundamental change in concerns which has been evolving not only among the composers on this album but also in a growing segment of the musical avant-garde, of which these members are some of the most fecund and inspired. These new sources of inspiration certainly were not as widely shared fifteen years ago. Several composers represented here are deeply concerned with Eastern influences: meditation, healing, trance, states of serenity. Others are inspired by traditional (or 'ethnic') musics and their subsequent metamorphoses into such popular forms as rock and roll. Still others bring to bear a sense of wit and satire, rarely a prominent feature of avant-garde music in the early 1960s. This first anthology of women's electronic music demonstrates great refinement and skill at work in a variety of different styles, several of which are unfamiliar or new even to those who follow contemporary music. The fact that these pieces are more listenable than that of the '60s avant-garde does not point to a musical regression as some critics have overeagerly assumed when discussing modern works using, say, consonant harmonic structures. Rather, and I think this is a common denominator for these pieces and something which women composers and artists have been instrumental in legitimizing again for this period in time, these works signify a new consciousness of the relationship of art to human life and the important and positive interaction which can be the role of a more personalized art in our day-to-day experience." --Charles Amirkhanian, August 1977

Artist:	USSACHEVSKY, VLADIMIR
Title:	Electronic and Acoustic Works 1957-1972
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80654CD

"In 1950, the Columbia University Music Department requisitioned a tape recorder to use in teaching and for recording concerts. In 1951, the first tape recorder arrived, an Ampex 400, and Vladimir Ussachevsky (1911-1990), then a junior faculty member, was assigned a job that no one else wanted: the care of the tape recorder. This job was to have important consequences for Ussachevsky and the medium he developed. Electronic music was born. Over the next ten years, Ussachevsky and his collaborators established the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, which Ussachevsky directed for twenty years. The Center became one of the best-known and most prolific sources of electronic music in the world. This composer portrait features seven of his pioneering works in the medium as well as two of his choral works, an aspect of his output that was just as important to him. The final two works on this CD make extensive use of the human voice. The first of these, 'Three Scenes from The Creation' (1960; rev. 1973), is based on texts from Ovid's Metamorphosis and the Akkadian creation epic Enuma Elish, telling the story of the primordial gods and their struggle to create order out of chaos. The recorded choral tracks were edited, assembled, and manipulated 'with electronic accompaniment' in the studio. The Prologue was played in concert and also issued on a Columbia recording. The Interlude, originally 'Interlude and Conflict,' dates from the same time and used recorded soprano and bass voices with electronic and concrète sounds and a live mezzo-soprano. In addition to the vocal and electronic sounds, recordings of piano, bell, and Chinese dinner plate sound are used, modified with the studio techniques that the composer had developed over the years. In the early 1970s, Ussachevsky returned to acoustic music after nearly two decades of immersion in the electronic medium. It was natural for him to use choral music as the medium of this return. The composer wrote that 'growing up as I did in the Russian Orthodox Church, serving as reader and altar boy, the sound of the choir singing the traditional service and works by all the best nineteenth-century Russian composers left an indelible impression. . . .' 'The Missa Brevis' (1972) uses the traditional core texts of the mass-Kyrie, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei-without any particular reference to electronic music."

Artist:	ZUMMO, PETER
Title:	Zummo with an X
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80656CD

Performed by: Arthur Russell, amplified cello and voice; Bill Ruyle, tabla, marimba; Peter Zummo, trombone; Rik Albani, trumpet; Guy Klucevsek, accordion; Mustafa Ahmed, percussion. "With accuracy and humor, Peter Zummo (born 1948) often describes his unique music as 'minimalism plus a whole lot more.' He is an important exponent of the American contemporary classical tradition whose compositions explore the methodologies of not just minimalism, but also jazz, world music, and rock, while seeking to create freedom in ensemble situations. Zummo's realization of the contemporary urge to make music that behaves like 'Nature in its manner of operation' (John Cage) is to encourage spontaneous, individual decisions within a self-structuring, self-negotiating group of performers. His scores provide unique strategies (such as a 'matrix of overlapping systems,' freely modulating repetition rates, etc.) and materials for achieving that aim. 'Song IV' (1985), a trio version of the final song from the four-song suite composed for the Trisha Brown Dance Company's Lateral Pass, is a continuous tabla-and-amplified-cello groove with trombone (with voice multiphonics) and vocal (Russell) melodies and harmonies. 'Instruments' (1980) is a composition in seven movements for duet, trio and quartet. Short phrases based on intervallic jumps are repeated at individual repetition rates; the ensemble listens for a unison playing of the phrase, and reverses the phrase at that moment. Different notes sound together in unplanned ways, resulting in combination (bass) tones. The complete version of 'Lateral Pass' (1985) makes its first appearance on disc and features a previously unissued performance of 'Song IV' for quintet. Zummo with an X is an essential document for anyone interested in the multifaceted evolution of American experimental music, especially in the vibrant downtown New York scene of the 1970s and '80s."

Artist:	FELDMAN, MORTON
Title:	The Viola in My Life
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80657CD

"The music on this recording illustrates the essential integrity of the work of Morton Feldman (1926-1987) and one of its fundamental strengths -- its continuously unfolding unanimity of purpose. There are few composers of his generation whose first and last published work (in Feldman's case 'Journey to the End of Night' of 1949 and 'Piano and String Quartet' of 1986) span youth and final years with such a concentrated viewpoint. There are, however, landmarks in the music of Feldman that are largely technical and notational. There are the graphic pieces, the first from 1950 and the last from 1964, in which some parameter of composition is not specified (often pitch). There are the 'free duration pieces,' both solo and ensemble, in which there is instruction either for sections of the piece or for its entirety. 'False Relationships and the Extended Ending' (1968) is a late example of this kind, although 'Why Patterns?' (1978) is a variant of the principle. There are also the conventionally notated works in his oeuvre, one of which is 'The Viola in My Life' (1970). It may be that Feldman's music will always strike a certain kind of listener as idiosyncratic -- a denial of the time-honored ways in which music articulates itself. I think that Feldman was deeply offended by this response, by this notion that his music was singular because it was, as some might say, 'missing something.' Though it is true that his values of graduation can be exceedingly fine, when one enters this scale and comprehends it, something truly new and wonderful opens up in the art of music -- a world in which the relative and the absolute become engaged with themselves."

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	Ten Exercises
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80658CD

This marvelous recording of these elusive works features composer-supervised performances by a hand-picked group of renowned new-music exponents. "Your first encounter with the music of Christian Wolff leaves you with the impression you've just heard (or played, or read) something totally strange, unlike anything else you know. And yet, upon reflection, you realize it is at the same time something completely ordinary and normal, as familiar in its way as any number of repetitive actions characteristic of everyday life, getting up in the morning, going to school, work, church, washing the dishes, performing the daily tasks of home and family. Weird little tunes, sounding as if they had been beamed at some remote point in the universe and then bounced back again as a kind of intergalactic mutant music; recognizable melodic and rhythmic patterns, somehow sewn together in monstrous pairings, sometimes reminiscent of the demons of Hieronymus Bosch, composites of animals, fish, flowers, and common household objects: there is order, but also constant interruption, intrusions of disorderly reality upon regularity and lawfulness, combining to create an effect of both familiarity and strangeness: Shklovsky's ostranenie. You could say this music is surrealist -- not reproducing familiar forms, but revealing, behind these, life's unpredictability. You could say it is political; improvisatory; concerned with collaborative, non-hierarchical forms of social organization; but you can't really say what it is like (although John Cage came close when he said, after a performance of the Exercises in New York, that it was like the classical music of an unknown civilization)." --Frederic Rzewski

Artist:	CORNER, PHILIP
Title:	Extreme Positions
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80659CD

"Philip Corner (b. 1933) studied composition with Henry Cowell and Otto Luening and musical analysis with Oliver Messiaen. During the 1960s and '70s he was an active member of Fluxus, a founder (along with James Tenney and Malcolm Goldstein) of the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble, the resident musician and composer for the Judson Dance Theatre, and co-founder of Gamelan Son of Lion (with Barbara Benary and Daniel Goode). The musical opportunities that these ensembles and their performances offered Corner insured that he was both prolific and had or developed a deep understanding of the important artistic influences of that time. Corner uses a variety of scoring methods -- some scores are conventionally written out, some are graphic scores with added commentary and some are, indeed, only text or commentary by which Corner creates an attitude to sound-making materials, the manner of eliciting sounds and the manner of responding to the activities of others. He is truly the equal of John Cage in forcing us to examine what we call music and how we understand music-making. He is a master of the art of presenting what amounts to a Zen koan to the performer or performing ensembles. He sets interpretive challenges of the highest order while often creating music which can be realized by amateur or professional musician alike. Corner has commented that being drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Korea was in fact a 'fortuitous' event in his life: 'One of the things I learned in Korea was to go into the quality of sound ... to enter into this thing that the Orient had explored that the West hadn't.' This set of recordings includes two of the seminal pieces from this period -- Sang-teh (Situations) and Lovely Music -- and proceeds to explore music from five decades of work under the direction of Corner's earlier collaborator, James Fulkerson, and the composer himself. This is the first comprehensive overview of his work, including many of his key compositions, and is an ideal introduction to an important but overlooked figure of the American avant-garde."

Artist:	DUNN, DAVID
Title:	Autonomous and Dynamical Systems
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80660CD

"A relentless explorer, composer, performer and theorist, David Dunn (b. 1953) uses electro-acoustic resources, voice, non-human living systems, as well as traditional instruments. A creator of text-sound compositions, environmental installations, and works for radio and video, he has also written and published extensively. Underlying all his work is a common regard for music as a communicative source with a living world. Growing up in San Diego in the '60s and '70s, he encountered people like Harry Partch and Kenneth Gaburo. He worked with Partch for about five years, and continued to be in his ensemble for a decade after his death. His association with Gaburo was even longer, and lasted until Gaburo's death in the early 1990s. This CD features four new compositions, all for electronic sound makers of one sort or another, and all four reveal his innate musicality. These are works that live between the arts and the sciences, coming from his lifelong involvement with interdisciplinary ideas. 'Lorenz' (2005) is a collaboration between Dunn and chaos scientist James Crutchfield. In 'Nine Strange Attractors' (2006), Dunn guides us through a whole zoo of chaotic attractions. Each one has different behavior, and each produces a different sound world. This is a work that is not simply about playing with new mathematical toys -- it's a work that exemplifies the structure of those toys, placing human, computer, and sound-making machine into a feedback loop that embodies the essential characteristics of that new science (chaos), and then lets us live within it for an extended period of time. 'Gradients' (1999) is a work Dunn made with a freeware graphics-to-sound conversion program. In this program, graphic lines become sounding sines, each single pixel-wide line being realized as one sounding pure electronic sine wave."

Artist:	JOSEL, SETH
Title:	The Stroke That Kills
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80661CD

Performed by Seth Josel on electric guitar, electric bass. Works by Eve Beglarian, Alvin Curran, David Dramm, Michael Fiday, Tom Johnson, and Gustavo Matamoros. "Over the past twenty-plus years, Seth Josel has established himself as a leader in helping to shape the electric guitar's burgeoning future as a 'classical' instrument. This album is a statement not only of his artistry as a performer, but also as a curator of new music for the guitar. The six pieces on this recording demonstrate a variety of means and approaches spanning the reified electric flamenco of David Dramm to the sound-art abstractions of Gustavo Matamoros. David Dramm's (b. 1961) 'The Stroke That Kills' (1993) is rooted in the fierce rhythmic strumming of the flamenco style, but its translation to the electric guitar propels the music to a harder, more vicious place. Michael Fiday's (b. 1961) 'Slapback' (1997) is inspired by a live recording of The Who in which the guitarist Pete Townsend plays a duet with himself as his sound echoes off the arena wall. In 'Slapback,' the guitar performance --heard in the right stereo channel -- is repeated, by means of an electronic delay unit, one eighth-note later in the left stereo channel. Like 'Slapback,' Eve Beglarian's (b. 1958) 'Until It Blazes' (2001) utilizes an electronic delay to augment the guitarist's performance, but unlike in the Fiday, Beglarian's use of echo does not create a separate contrapuntal line. Rather, it helps create a soundspace in which the delay effect promotes a sense of ambient depth and a more subtle sense of syncopation. Tom Johnson's (b. 1939) 'Canon For Six Guitars' (1998) is a process piece where rigorous adherence to its initial conditions of pitch and rhythm ultimately produces something of a commentary on itself. The idea of building a composition around a formalized exploration of the guitar as a harmonic medium is also taken up by Alvin Curran (b. 1938) in 'Strum City' (1999). The first movement is relatively straightforward and presents a long series of chords, not unlike a chorale, through the aural gauze of the strum. While 'Strum City''s first movement is uncritically and unabashedly strum-centric, the second and third movements break apart the strum's dual temporal nature, each focusing on one of the strum's dual aspects. Gustavo Matamoros's (b. 1957) 'Stoned Guitar' (2005) comprises two separate sub-pieces: 'Stoned Guitar' and 'TIG Welder.' 'TIG Welder' is a recording of the eponymous device that is played simultaneously with the performance of the 'Stoned Guitar' score. The balance between guitar and recording is determined by means of external electronics as stipulated by the composer."

Artist:	LEVERING, ARTHUR
Title:	Still Raining, Still Dreaming
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80662CD

"Arthur Levering (b. 1953) has throughout his career written music that stresses clarity and lightness of touch, even when it is dense with information or intense in its sonic impact. There's a marvelous athleticism to Levering's music. His rhythmic sense is unerring, and probably does more than anything else to clarify and drive his ideas. Changes of texture, tempo, and harmony all occur just where they should, and keep up the momentum. One thing that makes him exceptional among composers who feel an allegiance to modernism is his transparent orchestration. It's more than just a glittering surface; his choice of color and texture is as important a structural tool in the music's development as any other parameter. Still Raining, Still Dreaming (1996, rev. 2001), scored for 'Pierrot' sextet, is a memorial tribute to the Japanese master Toru Takemitsu, as the presence of both 'rain' and 'dream' in the title suggests. 'Echoi' (1999), a three-movement work for violin and piano, is not the expected traditional sonata. The 'echoes' of the title seem to exist on multiple levels. One feels cross-references of ideas from one movement to another and the extensive use of repetitive motives is another sort of 'reverberance.' 'Sppooo' (2001) is a piece that makes you wonder why there isn't already a literature for celesta and vibraphone. 'Tesserae' for viola and piano (2002) is a set of variations on a 32-note theme. While a close cousin of Still Raining, Still Dreaming, with its measured tremolo, sharp low thuds, and tolling center section, those similarities in fact demonstrate how a composer can develop a set of devices that s/he then recycles creatively from one work to another. 'Catena' (2000) is a work for piano and a chamber orchestra of sixteen players."

Artist:	LEBARON, ANNE
Title:	Pope Joan, Transfiguration
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80663CD

"Anne LeBaron (b. 1953) is one of the most vital composers of the post-war generation. Her overall aesthetic is steeped in the sound world of the European/American avant-garde of the mid-twentieth century, but like others of her post-war generation, LeBaron rejects the premise of stylistic continuity that underlies much classical music. LeBaron's aesthetic is defined by supplementation: the sound world of the European/American avant-garde is supplemented with a host of others -- popular music, jazz, historical styles of the classical tradition, religious music, and so on. The two works on this recording, 'Pope Joan' (2000) and 'Transfiguration' (2003), are relatively new works that sustain LeBaron's blossoming aesthetic of supplementation while at the same time refining and refreshing it. Both are theatrical works for soprano and chamber ensemble. 'Pope Joan' was conceived as a dance opera, and while the recorded version here is for concert setting, the dramatic nature of the work shines through. 'Transfiguration' is a concert work but entails dramatic staging, gestures, and props that move it toward ritual. 'Pope Joan' develops its dramatic meaning through a combination of semantic, gestural, and musical resources, much like a traditional opera. 'Transfiguration,' however, relies little on the semantic meaning of its text for dramatic meaning; rather, the text serves as one element of musical design. Thus, its dramatic meaning arises from sonic design, allusions to semantic meaning, and performance gestures. Both works utilize a variety of different forms of vocal delivery performed primarily by the soprano but occasionally by the instrumentalists, such delivery ranging from fully expressive aria-like melodic singing to recitative-like declamation to impassive chanting. Both pieces rely on a large number of timbrally diverse percussion instruments that are essential to the dramatic design."

Artist:	CAGE/MORTON FELDMAN, JOHN
Title:	Music For Keyboard 1935-1948/The Early Years
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80664CD

"This double-CD set combines two of the key titles of Columbia Records' legendary 'Music of Our Time' series curated by David Behrman. Jeanne Kirstein's recording of Cage's early keyboard works remains a touchstone of Cagean interpretation notwithstanding the passage of time. Christian Wolff recalls, 'I remember Cage saying that Jeanne Kirstein's playing caught the spirit in which the pieces were written at the time he wrote them -- a kind of simple excitement and enthusiasm (also, surely, out of the discovery of the preparing of the piano and the great new sounds).' The seminal 1959 Columbia LP that introduced Feldman's work to the listening public features historic performances that still resonate with passion and conviction more than four decades later. The works maybe divided into three categories: the earlier, precisely notated music ('Extensions 1 for Violin and Piano,' 'Extensions 4 for Three Pianos,' 'Two Pieces for Two Pianos,' 'Structures for String Quartet,' 'Three Pieces for String Quartet'); the first graphic notation pieces ('Intersection 3 for Piano,' 'Projection 4 for Violin and Piano'); and the first free durational composition ('Piece for Four Pianos'). To quote a prescient critic of the time, '[All eight works are] are full of spots, sparks and spangles of radiant color; a single note becomes an event of epical portent; the final result is to compact hours into seconds with an almost overwhelming intensity and depth of feeling.' John Cage: 'Two Pieces,' 'Metamorphosis,' 'Bacchanale,' 'The Perilous Night,' 'Tossed As It Is Untroubled,' 'A Valentine Out of Season,' 'Root of an Unfocus,' 'Two Pieces for Piano,' 'Prelude for Meditation,' 'Music for Marcel Duchamp,' 'Suite for Toy Piano,' 'Dream.' Morton Feldman: 'Piece for Four Pianos,' 'Intersection 3 for Piano,' 'Extensions 4 for Three Pianos,' 'Two Pieces for Two Pianos,' 'Projection 4 for Violin and Piano,' 'Structures for String Quartet,' 'Extensions 1 for Violin and Piano,' 'Three Pieces for String Quartet.'"

Artist:	VA
Title:	Io
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80665CD

Flute Music by Johanna Beyer, Joan La Barbara, Larry Polansky, James Tenney, and Lois V Vierk. "Margaret Lancaster has burst onto the scene as our leading proponent of the avant-garde flute . . . What distinguishes Lancaster is her versatility, her willingness to let her flute be the focus of anything from technopop to theater to tap dancing, along with a breathless fluidity of line that raises every performance above the merely technically correct." -- Kyle Gann, Village Voice. "This gathering of music by five composers spanning more than 70 years demonstrates the richness and possibility of the stylistic freedom that is sometimes called the American experimental tradition. Timelessly potent for their careful exploration of musical material, these are works which have no cause to be esoteric, by leading American composers who deserve much higher regard. And in the hands of a performer and new-music advocate, Margaret Lancaster, who curates her repertoire with an attention to a continuum which composer Johanna Beyer calls 'future, present, past,' we are given the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of how this tradition lives. These are all, with the exception of 'Seegersong #2,' world-premiere recordings."

Artist:	HARRISON, LOU
Title:	In Retrospect
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80666CD

"Although the compositional style of Lou Harrison (1917-2003) evolved and matured during his long and productive life, he held fast to a number of basic aesthetic principles: a devotion to beautiful melody; the foregrounding of rhythm, melody, and counterpoint over harmony; a preference for just-intonation tuning systems; and the integration of influences from diverse world musics. On the present disc, which includes works from 1939 to 1987, all of these characteristics are in evidence. Despite its early origin, 'First Concerto for Flute and Percussion' (1939) has remained one of Harrison's most frequently performed and recorded works. The ballet 'Solstice' (1950) is written for octet: three treble instruments (flute, oboe, trumpet), three bass instruments (two cellos and string bass), and two keyboards (celesta and tack-piano). Harrison found that by combining the tack-piano with the celesta he could create a sound that resembled that of an Indonesian gamelan, which he first encountered in 1939. The complex rhythms and exuberant melodies of gamelan became a major source of inspiration. The gamelanish sounds in 'Solstice' can be heard most prominently in the fourth movement ('Earth's Invitation'), when the solo flute line is accompanied by celesta, tack-piano, and pitched percussion created by the bass player, who strikes the strings of his instrument with drum sticks below the bridge. The text for 'Strict Songs' (1955, revised 1992), modeled on Navajo ritual song, is of Harrison's own invention. Harrison's interest in gamelan had led him to explore the possibilities of pentatonic modes. Each of the four movements of 'Strict Songs' is based on a different pentatonic mode. All intervals are tuned to exact mathematical proportions, rather than to the impure compromise-intervals of present-day equal-temperament. The fixed-pitch instruments in the ensemble (piano and harp) are retuned to produce non-beating intervals; the strings and trombones match these pitches by ear. The effect of the retuning is a rich palette of intervals, far more varied in size than those in equal temperament (where all intervals of a particular type are the same). 'Ariadne' (1987) draws inspiration from the music of India. Harrison's music combines Indian and Western influences. The opening movement, 'Ariadne Abandoned,' functions like an alap -- an introductory piece that introduces the mode and spirit of the work. In the second movement, 'The Triumph of Ariadne and Dionysos,' Harrison employs a compositional principle related to the Indian tala, a complex repeating rhythmic pattern."

Artist:	DIDKOVSKY, NICK
Title:	Ice Cream Time
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80667CD

"Nick Didkovsky (electric guitar, laptop); Thomas Dimuzio (sampling, live sampling, and processing); ARTE Quartett: Beat Hofstetter (soprano and baritone saxophone), Sascha Armbruster (alto and baritone saxophone), Andrea Formenti (tenor saxophone), Beat Kappeler (baritone saxophone). Nick Didkovsky (b. 1958) is an accomplished composer, virtuoso guitarist, and computer programmer who works on the cusp between the concert hall and the rock-and-roll club-territory that is only now beginning to be taken seriously. Didkovsky's compositions are rigorously conceived, yet leave plenty of room for spontaneous input. He has tapped into what one might describe as a typically American way of making music -- iconoclastic and formalist without being overly uptight. Combining complex rhythms, harmonies and textures with the visceral energy of rock music, he creates work that is cutting-edge (albeit more downtown than uptown), rigorous, and subversive. His employment of asymmetrical meters, gratuitous dissonance, and tonally ambiguous harmonies rubs against the pop sensibility implied by the compositional forms and instrumentation with which he works. The sense of compositional and technological inventiveness in Didkovsky's music bears resemblance to that of other maverick composer-hacker-performers such as Salvatore Martirano, Larry Polansky, David Rosenboom, and George Lewis. Didkovsky's music reflects current trends and practices including the use of live, interactive computer-assistance, genre jumping and blurring the distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow. Although the accoutrements of Western tonality are never far off, his musical sensibility allows for some radical departures from the stock-and-trade of tonality. Didkovsky is attracted to the ambiguous boundaries between human-generated and software-generated materials. 'Ice Cream Time' (2003) is a multi-movement piece scored for saxophone quartet, electric guitar, and live electronics. As might be expected, Ice Cream Time embraces, or engages with, a wide range of influences and material contrasts. Nine of the movements feature live sampling by Thomas Dimuzio, whose job was to capture and process the saxophone and guitar sounds in real time, using his Kurzweil K2600RS. Because the unaltered signals are also heard, a rich and subtle texture is produced."

Artist:	ROSENBOOM, DAVID
Title:	Future Travel/And Out Come the Night Ears
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80668CD

"David Rosenboom, Buchla Touché & 300 Series Electric Music Box, piano, violin, percussion, texts. David Rosenboom (b. 1947) is a composer, performer, interdisciplinary artist, conductor, author and educator. Since the 1960s, he has explored ideas about spontaneously emerging musical forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques in scoring for ensembles, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art and multimedia, the interactive music of the infosphere, an approach to compositional modeling termed propositional music and extended musical interface with the human nervous system. His work is widely published, recorded, distributed, and presented around the world, and he is known as a pioneer in American experimental music. Future Travel (1981) is a journey in sonic imagery. It is set sometime in the future and its starting point is Earth. The traveler, whose point of view we imagine, is a spirit being representing the first awareness of a new form of consciousness to which humans have evolved. At an earlier point in the evolution of the Earth, human beings had become aware of the unstoppable momentum of the course they had set and the unlikelihood of their surviving. Consequently, attention was turned towards learning to direct the process of their evolution to a new form. This form is a macroscopic one, a large-scale organism, to which all individual entities of earlier earthly forms contributed. The first awareness of this new form of existence is beginning now. And Out Come the Night Ears (1978) is a solo for piano interfaced with an electronic system developed through a particular improvisation practice that manifests anew in each performance. Because this practice has an identity in my mind associated with specific piano exercises I composed for myself, certain musical materials, particular interactive electronics techniques, and a body of performances, it is as such a piece that is not a piece and I call it a piece. The recording presented here is extracted from an approximately one-hour-long performance given in a concert that was coincident with the rollout of the then new Buchla 300 Electric Music Box. I sometimes think of the piano as if it was an orchestra, and in this rendition, the Buchla 300 provided a means of extending that orchestra.' --David Rosenboom

Artist:	ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER
Title:	For Lou Harrison
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80669CD

"Composed in 2003-2004, For Lou Harrison completes a trilogy of large-scale memorial works that also includes 'Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing' (1991-95) and 'In the White Silence' (1998). For Lou Harrison encompasses the most lush and active textures in my music to date, moving in four tempo layers (in the proportions 4/5/6/7) throughout. The work's two textures -- rising arpeggios over sustained harmonic clouds, and long solo lines over 'procession-like' material -- alternate in nine continuous sections, each of which is grounded in a different five-, six- or seven-tone harmony. The formal structures of the composition recur throughout the score, but the sound of the music is always changing. For Lou Harrison was not commissioned. I composed this work because I was compelled to do so in response to the death of one of the most important figures in my life. Amid the daunting realities of today's world, Lou Harrison and his joyful ecumenical life and music seem more vital and more pertinent than ever before." --John Luther Adams

Artist:	HOWARD, EARL
Title:	Clepton
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80670CD

"Earl Howard's Clepton (2006) is as complex, mysterious and poetic as the outer limits of science he finds inspiration in, and the imagery of particle physics is particularly appropriate for the extraordinary interaction that takes place between the composer and his three playing partners throughout Clepton's 38 minutes. For Gerry Hemingway, 'these are models that might be referenced to help us focus our approach to a given section -- a basic understanding of scientific principles and concepts is useful as they often have terminology that better articulates the intent of a player's actions rather than, say, feelings which are more vague and open to interpretation.' 'Rosebud,'[ a Howard/Hemingway duo recorded during a tour of upstate New York back in 1989, is as fresh and challenging as if it had been recorded yesterday. What's particularly remarkable is the range of color and timbral sophistication of Howard's electronics. Milton Babbitt's famous line about nothing growing old faster than a new sound certainly applies to the world of electronic keyboards; tune in to your local Top 40 station and if you hear a mellotron, an ARP Odyssey, a Yamaha DX7 or a Korg M1, you have a pretty clear idea as to when the song was recorded. Very few musicians have taken the time to explore these instruments in depth and go beyond the standard patches that soon sound dated, even clichéd. Sun Ra was one, Thomas Lehn is another, and you can add Earl Howard's name to the short list. The sounds he conjures forth from his DX7, a Lexicon PCM 70 and what today would be considered a relatively primitive Akai sampler are extraordinarily subtle, and haven't aged in the slightest."

Artist:	LEAGUE OF AUTOMATIC MUSIC COMPOSERS, THE
Title:	The League of Automatic Music Composers 1978-1983
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80671CD

Featuring John Bischoff, Jim Horton, Tim Perkins, David Behrman, Paul DeMarinis & Rich Gold. "The League of Automatic Music Composers was a band/collective of electronic music experimentalists active in the San Francisco Bay area between 1977 and 1983. Widely regarded as the first musicians to incorporate the newly available microcomputers of the day into live musical performance, the League created networks of interacting computers and other electronic circuits with an eye to eliciting surprising and new 'musical artificial intelligences.' We approached the computer network as one large, interactive musical instrument made up of independently programmed automatic music machines, producing a music that was noisy, difficult, often unpredictable, and occasionally beautiful. The work of the League partook of the distinctive cultural atmosphere of the San Francisco Bay area in the 70s and 80s, a rich blend of communal ideologies, radical culture, technical innovation, intellectual ferment, and a hands-on attitude that has been a hallmark of California life since the pioneer days. In the air then there was a sense of new possibilities, and the feeling of the need to build a culture from the ground up. For music, specifically, this meant redefining everything about how it's done, from the instruments and tuning systems to the musical forms, venues, and social relations among players and audiences." --Tim Perkis and John Bischoff

Artist:	HORVITZ, WAYNE
Title:	Joe Hill: 16 Actions for Orchestra, Voices, and Soloist
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80672CD

"Perhaps the best way to characterize Wayne Horvitz's (b. 1955) Joe Hill: 16 Actions for Orchestra, Voices, and Soloist (2004) -- based on the life and times of the legendary labor activist and organizer -- is as a radio play that tells the story of a man's life in words, instrumental music and songs. Like a song cycle, Joe Hill incorporates much previously written material (nearly all of it re-harmonized). There are songs by Hill himself, such as 'The Rebel Girl' and 'There is Power in the Union,' but also by others, including the folk poem 'The Lumberjack's Prayer,' Mississippi John Hurt's 'Spike Driver's Blues,' and an old English street cry, 'Chairs to Mend.' It also employs spoken word, including Joe Hill's famous 'Last Will and Testament,' plus words used as narration and dramatic dialogue. But 'song cycles' don't usually include ravishingly beautiful stretches of chamber music, much less a completely open line in the score for an improvising guitarist -- in this case, the most influential one of our time, Bill Frisell. This Rubik's cube of jazz, folk, classical and popular music is strikingly elegiac and autumnal in tone, more requiem and lament than celebration or call to 'action.' This is appropriate to its theme of martyrdom, though there are also many exhilarating, jaunty, and humorous sections. Apart from classical music and the blues, its other major influences are what has come to be called Americana -- to be more specific, Appalachian music's nasal vocals, affection for open fifths, ambiguity between major and minor thirds, and the jazzy Broadway writing of Leonard Bernstein, particularly his penchant for rapid time-signature changes. Horvitz has chosen to tell Hill's story in music that is both complex and direct, ironic and sentimental, dissonant and gorgeous, popular and artful, and that relishes a well-wrought song as much as long-form development."

Artist:	RICHARDS, ERIC
Title:	The Bells Themselves
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80673CD

Alan Zimmerman: cowbells; Kay Stonefelt (gyils, vibraphones and tingsha); David Keck (bass-baritone); Paul Schiavo (oboe); Greg Purnhagen (baritone); Paul Marquardt (piano); Molly Paccione (clarinet); Eric Richards (whistler). "Few composers today explore so poetic and visionary a musical landscape as Eric Richards (born 1935). Richards has been composing, in his own unassuming way, for more than forty years. The works included on this recording span the latter half of that time period (roughly 1983-2003). These mysterious and magical works spring from a personal aesthetic that is completely American. Richards creates his sound world from a collage of musical fragments, saturating the musical time canvas with various nuances and shades of instrumental color. Through the juxtaposition and superimposition of different facets of the same instrumental material (in different tempi, played backwards, in different patterns of repetition, and at various levels of transposition), he creates a multilayered composite sonority-one single enlarged and magnified instrumental entity. His approach is not unlike the technique of assemblage practiced by the surrealist painters. In his willingness to experiment with sound for its own sake, without constraint by accepted formal or technical procedures, and in his invention of new rhythmic and textural effects as well as his innovations in musical notation, which parallel the originality of his musical ideas, Eric Richards is an important extension of the American Experimentalist tradition -- one that includes composers Henry Cowell, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and James Tenney. The majority of compositions on this compact disc recording exhibit timbral saturation and, as such, emanate from a single instrumental sound source (11 oboes, 72 clarinets, 5 voices, 3 pianos). A single performer using multi-track recording techniques is featured on each of the individual compositions. Many of these compositions depict different perspectives, facets and planes of instrumental sound as they simultaneously evolve in different time planes. This is manifested in the simultaneous layering of contrasting and often unrelated dimensions of time and memory within a single composition. When listening to Richards' music, one often has the sense of being dislocated in time."

Artist:	NA, HYO-SHIN
Title:	All The Noises
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80674CD

"Hyo-shin Na (b. 1959) has written for Western instruments, for traditional Korean instruments and has written music that combines Western and Asian (Korean and Japanese) instruments and ways of playing. Her music for traditional Korean instruments is recognized by both composers and performers in Korea (particularly by the younger generation) as being uniquely innovative. Her writing for combinations of Western and Eastern instruments is unusual in its refusal to compromise the integrity of differing sounds and ideas; she prefers to let them interact, coexist and conflict in the music. 'Ocean/Shore 2' (2003) is one of a series that studies the use of diverse materials and the coexistence, within a piece of music, of various instruments. As in the meeting and interaction of water and land, these instruments can have fundamentally very different characters (piri and violin, or clarinet and cello), yet shouldn't lose their basic nature in the interest of harmony, or even beauty. On first hearing, one might consider 'All the Noises in the World' (2006) to be a piece of traditional Korean music, in which traditionally skilled performers do what they have always done. The musicians produce sounds/noises on something other than their own instrument. Thus, what appears to be a purely Korean piece turns out to be a very complex concept with elements and sensibilities from different cultures. The inspiration and basic musical materials of 'Walking, Walking' (2004) have their origin in a song by the Chilean musician Victor Jara, a central figure in that country's 'new song' movement. 'Walking, Walking' explores aspects and qualities of the act of walking, the rhythm and pace of walking and thinking, the balance of working and idling, and the, at times, meandering, light-hearted quality of walking. 'Ten Thousand Ugly Ink Blots' (2006) is one of the composer's most experimental with regard to the method of composition.'"

Artist:	MUSICA ELETTRONICA VIVA
Title:	MEV 40 (1967-2007)
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	4CD
Price:	$60.00
Catalog #:	NW 80675CD

A fourty-year overview on 4 sprawling CDs. MEV were and still are: Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, Karl Berger, Allan Bryant, Steve Lacy, George Lewis, Garrett List, Carol Plantamura, Gregory Reeve, Ivan Vandor. "Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) was begun one evening in the spring of 1966 by Allan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace, Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzweski, Richard Teitelbaum and Ivan Vandor in a room in Rome overlooking the Pantheon. MEV's music right from the start was also totally open, allowing all and everything to come in and seeking in every way to get out beyond the heartless conventions of contemporary music. Taking its cue from Tudor and Cage, MEV began sticking contact mics to anything that sounded and amplified their raw sounds: bed springs, sheets of glass, tin cans, rubber bands, toy pianos, sex vibrators, and assorted metal junk; a crushed old trumpet, cello and tenor sax kept us within musical credibility, while a home-made synthesizer of some 48 oscillators along with the first Moog synthesizer in Europe gave our otherwise neo-primitive sound an inimitable edge. In the name of the collectivity, the group abandoned both written scores and leadership and replaced them with improvisation and critical listening. Rehearsals and concerts were begun at the appropriate time by a kind of spontaneous combustion and continued until total exhaustion set in. It mattered little who played what when or how, but the fragile bond of human trust that linked us all in every moment remained unbroken. The music could go anywhere, gliding into self-regenerating unity or lurching into irrevocable chaos -- both were valuable goals. In the general euphoria of the times, MEV thought it had re-invented music; in any case it had certainly rediscovered it." --Alvin Curran. "This 4CD set, covering the years 1967-2007, comprises the best surviving recorded documents from four decades of performances, personally curated by its three core members -- Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum. As such, it is an invaluable historical anthology of one of the pioneering and truly legendary exponents of live-electronic music." Features: "SpaceCraft" (1967), "Stop The War" (1972), "Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Pts. 1 & 2" (1982), "Kunstmuseum, Bern" (1990), "New Music America Festival" (1989), "Ferrara, Italy" (2002), "Mass. Pike" (2007).

Artist:	GOLDSTEIN, MALCOLM
Title:	A Sounding of Sources
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80676CD

Malcolm Goldstein (solo violin); Radu Malfatti (trombone); Philippe Micol (bass clarinet); Philippe Racine (flute); Beat Schneider (violoncello). "As a composer/violinist/improviser, Malcolm Goldstein (b. 1936) has been active in the presentation of new music and dance since the early 1960s in New York City as a co-founder with James Tenney and Philip Corner of the Tone Roads Ensemble and as a participant in the Judson Dance Theater, the New York Festival of the Avant-Garde, and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. 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. Since the mid-1960s, he has integrated structured improvisation aspects into his compositions, exploring the rich sound-textures of new performance techniques within a variety of instrumental and vocal frameworks. Goldstein has been labeled an 'improviser' and a 'composer-violinist' (or merely a violinist). What this CD once and for all shows is that he is indeed those things, but encompassing them all is the fact that, profoundly, he is a composer. As he points out, 'at the core of baroque music was the integration of composition and improvisation,' and Goldstein brings the perspective and focus of a seasoned performer to this undertaking. In this way, his music represents a further evolution of that compositional-improvisational dialog begun in the early 1950s in the aleatoric, 'chance' pieces of composers like John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and Morton Feldman." "Configurations in Darkness" (1995) (solo violin); "Configurations in Darkness" (1995) (chamber ensemble) [Swiss Radio DRS]; "Ishi/timechangingspaces" (1988) (acoustic art/radio work) [WDR Köln, broadcast in 1988]; "Ishi/'man waxati' Soundings" (1988) (solo violin, voice).

Artist:	BEYER, JOHANNA
Title:	Sticky Melodies
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80678CD

"Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888-1944) was born in Leipzig and moved to the United States sometime around 1924. After studying at various schools in New York, and with composers including Dane Rudhyar, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford, she began a highly-productive and interesting period of composition which lasted from around 1932 to almost 1940. Beyer's music received very few performances and her work was almost completely overlooked during her life and for about 50 years after her death. Even with the tremendous renaissance of interest in the works of historical women composers in the United States, Beyer's work has, until now, been (in her own words) in 'total eclipse.' Beyer is one of the pioneering figures of the experimental strain in contemporary American music. Her work has long lain undiscovered and unperformed because of the lack of adequate performing editions. However, many of her works are now available in authoritative performing editions, making it possible for her music to finally be introduced to the public more than a half-century after they were composed. This 2CD set, featuring world premiere recordings of all the works, is the first-ever devoted entirely to Beyer's music."

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."

Artist:	IVES, CHARLES
Title:	The Light That Is Felt: Songs Of Charles Ives
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80680CD

"Charles Ives composed nearly 200 songs throughout his life. Wiley Hitchcock, in the thorough introduction to his 2004 critical edition 129 Songs, described the Ives song canon as 'the contents of a kind of scrapbook or commonplace book or chapbook, or even a desk drawer. Into such a receptacle Ives tossed irregularly, if not casually, his reactions -- in the form of songs -- to memories, personalities, places, events, discoveries, ideas, visions, and fantasies in his life.' Whether popular tale or personal reflection, this concept of the songs as memorabilia is realized in a most powerful way: the songs emotionally and viscerally evoke memory. Captured memories -- real or idealized, distant or near -- are the materials for the music. From cosmopolitan incident ('Ann Street') to pastoral stroll ('The Housatonic at Stockbridge') Ives's songs describe a range of experience: a child's playtime, a commuter's observations, a courter's hope. His songs exhibit reverence for the populace and pop culture, daring adventure, and family devotion; life and death. This new recording of 27 songs features superlative performances by soprano Susan Narucki, renowned for her authoritative interpretations of contemporary American music, and Donald Berman, whose recordings of Ives's piano music have been critically acclaimed."

Artist:	SHAPEY, RALPH
Title:	Radical Traditionalism
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80681CD

"Radical Traditionalist is what I've been called. My music combines two fundamentally contradictory impulses -- radical language and romantic sensibility. The melodies are disjunct and dissonant; they contain atonal harmonies and extremes in register, dynamics and textural contrast. Yet the musical structures are grandly formed and run the gamut of dramatic gestures. Like the Romantics, I conceive of art in a deeply spiritual way. A great work of art transcends the immediate moment into a world of infinity." --Ralph Shapey "This collection -- drawn from the original CRI LPs -- provides a glimpse into a critical point in Ralph Shapey's (1921-2002) artistic development and comprises several of his most important compositions. It covers a period from 1963 to 1979, when he moved from an astringent, visionary modernism, to a version of the same that was tempered by a more 'classical' character. This is a major restoration to the discography of contemporary American music of the work of one of its most uncompromising and largely misunderstood figures." Featured pieces: "21 Variations for Piano" (1978), "String Quartet No. 6" (1963), "String Quartet No. 7" (1972), "Fromm Variations (31 Variations for Piano)" (1966; 1972-73), "Three for Six" (1979).

Artist:	POLANSKY, LARRY
Title:	The Theory Of Impossible Melody
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80684CD

Performed by Jody Diamond, Chris Mann (voice); Phil Burk and Larry Polansky (live computers, fretless electric guitars); Robin Hayward (tubas). "Among the lineages of knowledge that Larry Polansky (b. 1954) has woven together in his creative work, as both a composer and theorist, have been mathematics, intonation theory, cybernetics, systems theory, artificial intelligence, musicology (both Western and non-Western), American Sign Language, and Jewish mysticism. He has combined these and many other fields of study together into some of the most important music written by anyone of his generation while retaining status as the composer who is most worthy of being called a true theorist. In many ways, his compositions are themselves injunctive demonstrations of his theoretical insights that stand as critiques of the theoreticism that is now endemic to the art world. This intellectual integrity and facility has also been responsible for one of the most interesting characteristics of Polansky's compositional output. His music is one of the most successful, and rare, examples of a confluence between two, generally conflicting, 20th century musical streams. Like his mentor, James Tenney -- and many other late 20th century experimental masters who were inspired by the aesthetic innovations of Cage -- Polansky creates musical expositions of phenomenal reality. Sometimes these are based in psychoacoustic science, and sometimes they are grounded in mathematical formalisms. Sometimes they explore both at once. What he also manages to do -- and this is where he succeeds at the above-mentioned confluence -- is so often reveal these concepts within an expressive musical frame that is strongly linked to more traditional musical values."

Artist:	MUMMA, GORDON
Title:	Music For Solo Piano (1960-2001)
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80686CD

Performed by Daan Vandewalle, piano. "Gordon Mumma (b. 1935) is best known for his pioneering role in the development and evolution of electronic and live-electronic music. The piano has played a significant if underestimated role in his career. With a few notable exceptions, this collection by pianist Daan Vandewalle marks the first commercial recordings of Mumma's music for solo piano composed over more than forty years. It provides an important new perspective on his work as a composer. The spare textures, irregular rhythms, and pungent dissonances of Bartók's Mikrokosmos echo in Mumma's piano music. The keyboard music of Bach and Haydn, of Schoenberg, Webern, Ives, Ernst Krenek, Carl Ruggles, and Ruth Crawford also shaped his early piano ideal, as did the experience of superb recitalists in Detroit and Ann Arbor, including Walter Gieseking, Dame Myra Hess, and Glenn Gould. The works of the early 1960s were written for the concert hall, but much of the later piano music is more personal -- the solitary dreams of a long musical life. And like dreams it filters memories -- of music of the distant and recent past, of artistic friendships and loved ones living or dead -- to create a uniquely contemporary approach to the piano. In contrast to Mumma's epic electronic works, his keyboard music is predominantly poetic in its brevity, concentration, and psychological depth. It is music of high specific gravity, each piece a microcosm of finely etched ideas that unfold without literal repetition. For Daan Vandewalle, it is also 'music of dialogue' that communicates -- both with the listener and within itself -- through its deep concern with sound, phrasing, color, dynamic range, and rhetorical nuance."

Artist:	DREW, JAMES MULCRO
Title:	Animating Degree Zero
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80687CD

"I aspire to incorporate spiritual immensities in my music through masses of sound which intensifies by the process of refraction or blurring, while allowing submerged melodic lines to appear and disappear. It's like painting with a very large brush. Like those old fresco guys -- or like Asian calligraphy on a massive scale -- even with one tone. You know, like a big swipe with a very loaded brush." -- James Drew. "Nicolas Slonimsky has described James Mulcro Drew (b. 1929) as an 'authentic member of the American experimental tradition.' Thinking about what Slonimsky might have meant by his statement, one thinks of another member of that tradition -- Harry Partch. Drew, like Partch, has always been a loner -- not a member of any school or movement, he has remained largely outside the US university patronage system and has remained 'on the move' rather than settling in one environment. Like Partch, James Drew has made his own brand of theater as well as being a composer, and he has no hesitation to run against the fashion or canon of our time. He is a composer who is fascinated by all kinds of music, and as a result his own musical surfaces may be more highly varied -- for instance, 'Bonaroo Breaks' vs. '12 Centers Breathing' vs. 'The Lute in the Attic' -- than those of other composers. This composer portrait, spanning the length of his career, is the first recording devoted entirely to Drew's music and is an excellent introduction to his idiosyncratic sound world. It features several of his important chamber pieces, ranging from a key early work, 'The Lute In The Attic' (included in the score anthology, Notations, assembled by John Cage in the mid-1960s, a collection that illustrated the breadth of notational approaches being employed by composers at that point in musical history) to a recent large-ensemble work, Animating Degree Zero. These are all world-premiere recordings."

Artist:	MALABY, TONY
Title:	Paloma Recio
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80688CD

Tony Malaby, tenor saxophone; Ben Monder, electric guitar; Eivind Opsvik, bass; Nasheet Waits, drums. "Tony Malaby (b. 1964) is a highly respected figure in the downtown New York contemporary jazz scene. He is well known for his versatility, having worked with such groups as Charlie Haden's Liberation Orchestra and the Paul Motian Electric Bebop Band. One of the many groups led by this powerful tenor saxophonist, Paloma Recio can be described as a progressive ensemble with a Spanish tinge. Malaby describes Paloma Recio as 'new music dedicated to an angel flying over the Iberian Peninsula by a new quartet of omni-directionally improvising masters of ecstatic lyrical elasticity.' The nexus of composition and improvisation has been the subject of much conjecture in recent history, regardless of musical genre. In its broad-ranging sonic expression and flowing improvisational nature, this recording is one response to that discussion. Malaby's vivid compositions artfully blend improvisation and composition and Paloma Recio is further affirmation of his growing stature as a composer."

Artist:	ROSENBOOM, DAVID
Title:	How Much Better If Plymouth Rock Had Landed On The Pilgrims
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80689CD

"David Rosenboom (b. 1947) has been widely acclaimed as an innovator in American experimental music since the 1960s. Although much of his work has been collaborative, virtually none of his large-scale collaborative works has hitherto been documented on record. How Much Better If Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the Pilgrims (1969-71) is considered to be one of the most important, prompting the following Washington Post review after a 1970 performance: 'If there were a device whereby one could plug into the deepest levels of human consciousness, and then translate this input into sound, what we would hear would probably resemble How Much Better if Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the Pilgrims, the radical composition by David Rosenboom... The elemental pulsations of the piece seem to echo not only our fundamental biological cycles, but those innate psychical tides that govern the flux of human thought and feeling... The listener becomes receptive to fantasy and hallucination and instants seem stretched to eternities... Rosenboom's idiom poses a new esthetic... Against the ascetic, disciplined, puritanical streak that one associates in this country with the Pilgrims, this new music hurls a rejuvenated sensuality and mysticism.' This is the world-premiere recording of the complete work."

Artist:	SMITH, STUART SAUNDERS
Title:	The Links Series Of Vibraphone Essays
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80690CD

"Stuart Saunders Smith (b. 1948) has created a diverse and unusual body of musical and literary compositions. His music is usually chromatic, atonal, and rhythmically complex, with his pitch material selected in an intuitive manner rather than via the twelve-tone technique. Many of his works are theatrical, asking the performers to speak, sing, act, and perform pantomime in addition to playing their instruments. His works often feature improvisation. Approximately half of his more than 130 works involve percussion, and his works are particularly popular among percussionists. This is the first complete recording of the Links series. 'The Links Series of Vibraphone Essays is scored for vibraphone in various settings, from unaccompanied solos to duos with flute, piano and off-stage orchestra bells. This series was composed between 1975 and 1995. There are eleven individual Links pieces. The title refers to the entire structure of the work, in that the end of one composition elides to the beginning of the next - a link in a delicate necklace. Also, 'links' in German means 'left' in English. The Links Series remains left of the center of the past and current musical languages in which composers have composed and are composing. It is the most physically, melodically, rhythmically, and conceptually demanding vibraphone music yet composed. The Links are performed all over the world and are part of important percussion curriculums from Yale to UC-San Diego, to mention a few.' - Stuart Saunders Smith"

Artist:	TENNEY, JAMES
Title:	Spectrum Pieces
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	2CD
Price:	$30.00
Catalog #:	NW 80692CD

"James Tenney (1934-2006) was one of the most versatile figures in contemporary American music. Apart from creating a large, wide-ranging, and fascinating body of compositions, more than a hundred of them, he was one of the key music theorists of the late twentieth century. This CD set offers complete recordings of one of the most important of Tenney's later sets of pieces -- Spectrum Pieces 1-8, the first five of which were written in Toronto in 1995 and the last three in 2001, after he moved to Valencia, California, to teach at the California Institute of the Arts. They offer a summation of much of Tenney's compositional practice and at the same time break open new and fertile territory that he had regrettably little time to explore in subsequent compositions. The eight works were not intended to be listened to sequentially or as a whole set, nor need they be; Tenney thought of them as a 'family' of pieces, with certain shared features, not as a cycle. Collectively they form a body of work in which many of Tenney's musical and theoretical preoccupations converge, interact, and yield music of deep fascination and strange beauty."

Artist:	HILLER, LEJAREN
Title:	A Total Matrix of Possibilities
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80694CD

"Lejaren Hiller (1924-1994) was a musically eclectic composer, often combining several different types of techniques in the same piece. In the mid-'60s, he asserted that his 'objective in composing music by means of computer programming is not the immediate realization of an aesthetic unity, but the providing and evaluating of techniques whereby this goal can eventually be realized.' In this sense, Hiller was a forward-looking composer, in that each piece was an experiment that lead toward the next piece. The three works contained in this collection -'Computer Cantata' (1963), 'Quartet No. 6 for Strings' (1973), 'A Portfolio for Diverse Performers and Tape' (1974) -- demonstrate his love of musical diversity and eclecticism. These works also exhibit other trends that are common in Hiller's music, including collaboration, an interest in microtonality, symmetrical and arch forms, and indeterminate instrumentation. The works span a little more than a decade, from 1963 to 1974, which were amongst his greatest years as a composer. The works also use a variety of instrumentations, from purely acoustic to electronic, and computer music with live ensemble. Reissue from the CRI LP back-catalog."

Artist:	FIELDS, SCOTT
Title:	Samuel
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80695CD

"Scott Fields's (b. 1955) Samuel, the second album of compositions based on Beckett's plays, follows 2007's highly acclaimed Beckett. One could argue though that Fields's compositions are in fact closer to the original texts than most other Beckett-inspired musical works, for the simple reason that the Chicago-born guitarist and composer actually derives his music directly from them, not only by assigning precise pitches, chords, time values and rhythms to particular words and phrases in the text and transforming Beckett's wordplay into clearly delineated melodic lines and harmonic fields, but also by associating his meticulous stage and lighting directions with particular sounds and gestures. It's no coincidence that Scott Fields has so far chosen to work with Beckett's plays, rather than his prose or poetry, since a sense of character and identity -- or loss thereof -- is as central to his music as it is to Beckett's dramaturgy."

Artist:	BYRNE, ANDREW
Title:	White Bone Country
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80696CD

Performed by Stephen Gosling (piano) and David Shively, (percussion). "Andrew Byrne (b. 1966) has lived and worked mostly in New York since the early 1990s. This tripartite CD has a mobile-like character, working entirely with a fabric of piano and metal percussion in changing manners and images, all of them remote from the duo relationship of conventional chamber music. The central work 'Tracks' is also the earliest one (composed 1998, revised 2006), and presents the solo piano in its most 'normal' sound and interaction with the player -- a kind of journey, as the title suggests, within a dense and accumulating polyrhythmic expression. The two surrounding groups of pieces extend from this in two different directions -- the opening 'White Bone Country' (2006) towards reduced sound-reveries in processed piano and small metal percussion, the succeeding 'Mirages' (2007) into pure sonic fantasies made from sampled sounds of prepared piano. Byrne relates these pieces to 'the other American experimental tradition of Cowell, Harrison, Peter Garland, John Luther Adams, rather than the New York minimalists/post-minimalists -- to their concerns with polyrhythms in a reduced meditative sound world, suggestions of strange folk musics, depiction of landscape...' Fundamental to the language of all Byrne's pieces are pulsations, from which varied melodic motives and overlaid rhythmic meters can be drawn. In this respect his approach differs from other landscape-orientated music based on drones and evolving fields of sound, along with their opposite, flurries of irregular disjunct rhythms."

Artist:	TENZER, MICHAEL
Title:	Let Others Name You
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80697CD

"This collection of five pieces firmly situates composer and ethnomusicologist Michael Tenzer (b. 1957) in the forefront of a group of contemporary composers creating cross-cultural musical and social fusions, while dealing openly with issues of cultural power and hegemony, and simply luxuriating in the sheer sounds of musics that are neither here nor there, but are from an altogether different place. The three large-scale works using gamelan instruments were conceived as a triptych. They are related structurally by their adaptation of the three-sectional form often found in large-scale Balinese compositions, collectively called lelambatan ('slow music') that is generally performed at temples during religious festivals. The gamelan as well as the two piano pieces are also related rhythmically by their use of the complex rhythmic play of the tani avarthanam, a long drum solo characteristic of South Indian classical music. Thus, all of the pieces in this collection use the aesthetic sensibilities, musical structures, and compositional resources of Balinese and South Indian traditions, as well as Western art musics in varying combinations, each creating a beautifully integrated whole. The music also makes nuanced and carefully differentiated statements about the possibilities of cross-cultural communication and tolerance. Somewhat unresolved and exploratory in nature, yet ultimately hopeful in vision, together they explore musical and social arrangements that question basic assumptions about difference, tolerance, and about our ability to get along in a world largely defined today by tension and conflict."

Artist:	DIAMOND, JODY
Title:	In That Bright World: Music For Javanese Gamelan
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80698CD

Musicians from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Surakarta, Central Java, Indonesia with Jody Diamond, voice. "This CD is both a tribute to the profound musical influences that Javanese gamelan traditions have had on Jody Diamond (b. 1953) as a musician as well as an exploration of their impact on her compositional creativity. What she has done is not so much to create a hybrid tradition, but rather to do the work of translation. The aim of the translator is not to be original, but to make transparent to an outsider what was formerly opaque. The translator approaches his/her job with humility, and must be steeped in the original language. The translator reveres the original, it gives her joy and moves her to the point of wanting to share her joy with others. Some non-Indonesian composers of gamelan music have been accused of the musical equivalent of colonialism, appropriating a musical style from elsewhere into their own particular style. Diamond, on the contrary, and on this recording in particular, has allowed her native musical tradition to be appropriated by Javanese music. Although the first performances were in the United States, these recordings were made in Java, with Javanese musicians playing all the parts (except for Diamond herself, who is the female singer). Her 'American' pieces are elaborated upon with gusto by Javanese musicians, in Javanese idioms. What does it mean when a translation is returned to its homeland and then elaborated upon in the idiom of the original? This is globalism gone wild in joyful, enthusiastically realized performances of Diamond's pieces by Javanese musicians." Includes 32-page booklet with detailed notes about each composition.

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	Long Piano
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80699CD

"Doleful melodies and melancholy wistfulness are the characteristics of Dakota Suite's singer/songwriter Chris Hooson. They also constituted the main inspiration for the most recent album, The End Of Trying, which was released on Karaoke Kalk in early 2009. The melodic and, in the case of the solo piano music, timbral materials from which Christian Wolff's (b. 1934) music is made are rarely unusual; these are ordinary, everyday things. However, Wolff's rhythmic invention is of great range and variety: complex polyrhythms, speech-like-rhythms, the music flowing at a freely fluctuating rate or proceeding in a plain, straightforward manner, silences. This mix of unusual and ordinary results in a music unlike any other. And, in a piece of such length as Long Piano, the ongoing appearance and accumulation of a great number and variety of short passages results in the constant renewing and refreshing of the listener's perception. This is the world-premiere recording of the composer's largest solo keyboard work to date."
"[Long Piano] seems to me like a kind of geological agglomeration. My hope is that it forms a possible landscape on one extended canvas. At first I just started writing and kept going. My tendency is to work in smaller patches. After the piece was finished I saw Jennifer Bartlett's wonderfully engaging and cheerful work Rhapsody, first shown in 1976. It's a 154-foot sequence of an arrangement of 988 one-foot-square silk-screened and painted enamel plates running around at least three walls of a gallery space. An extreme instance of what I've got in mind. I had decided not to use the commonest procedure for long keyboard pieces, variations (e.g., Frescobaldi, Bach, Beethoven, Rzewski), but sometimes there are series of patches that use tunes (for instance, the very old standby 'L'homme armé' and the round 'Dona nobis pacem') for material. The piece has 94 numbered patches, a few of which are blank (silence) (in Bartlett's piece there are the occasional blank squares). The 57th to 67th patches refer to eleven larger sections of a square-root rhythmic structure, each of which has eleven subdivisions whose time proportions are the same as those of the larger sections. The piece also incorporates partial versions (more or less 'parodies' in the old music sense) of Schumann (the Toccata and one of the Kinderszenen) and Ives's Three-Page Sonata." -- Christian Wolff

Artist:	MARSHALL, INGRAM
Title:	September Canons
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80704CD

"The pieces on this compact disk span almost three decades and represent the principal threads that have run through Ingram Marshall's (b. 1942) work: his remarkable skill in using electronics to create expressive and voluptuously beautiful pieces; the influence of Indonesian music, particularly in the slowed-down sense of time and melodic repetition; a thorough knowledge of some of the most stirring and poignant compositions of the Western tradition, especially Sibelius and Bach; and the hovering presence of Charles Ives, particularly his use of quotation and juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated elements. The works on this CD can be thought of as an archaeological dig, flowing in reverse chronological order from a recent work to one of the composer's earliest. They range from the dramatic and gripping 2002 work relating to a horrible event in New York City to a timeless ethereal 1976 piece relating to an idyllic period in Indonesia. Along with these dynamic contrasts, there's surprising consistency: Marshall's lifelong efforts to combine electronics with instruments and to render them with warmth and expressivity; but moreover, his extraordinary ability to capture profound human feeling and create works of poignancy and depth."

Artist:	JOHNSON, TOM
Title:	Rational Melodies
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80705CD

Dedalus: Didier Aschour, guitar; Amélie Berson, flute; Eric Chalan, bass; Denis Chouillet, piano; Thierry Madiot, trombone; Pierre-Stéphane Meugé, saxophone; Silvia Tarozzi, violin; Fabrice Villard, clarinet; Deborah Walker, violoncello.
'I am particularly pleased, because the result is so different from the solo flute recording of Eberhard Blum and the solo clarinet recording of Roger Heaton. It is not just another interpretation, but a case where interpreters have added so much insight to the music that the music itself has grown. When I was composing this music around 1982, I really thought I was simply writing melodies, but now these little pieces, though remaining melodies, have become something much more, something I would never have imagined. They have become what you hear on this CD.' -- Tom Johnson
"Tom Johnson (b. 1939) belongs to a generation of American composers who founded musical minimalism. We know that this term was first applied to the visual arts, notably to Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and particularly Sol LeWitt, whom Johnson recognizes as an influence. However, it wasn't the repetition in itself that interested him, but rather the idea of music as a process. Steve Reich applied this idea brilliantly in his phase pieces. But after 1975, while the same Reich distanced himself from the radicalism of his first works, and younger American composers came out with music that was lusher, more expressive, even sentimental, Johnson insisted on the unrelenting rigor of formalized processes. The Rational Melodies, composed in 1982, may be regarded as the outcome of this research, first of all by their sheer quantity, but also by the fact that they summarize brilliantly and clearly procedures from the past, present, and future, which together characterize his work: combinations of cycles of different lengths (I, IV, XI, XVII, XVIII), permutations (VII, X), the paper-folding or 'dragon' formula (II, XIX), other automata (XVI, XX), or self-similar structures (XIV, XV)."

Artist:	PACCIONE, PAUL
Title:	Our Beauties Are Not Ours: Works For Voices And Insturments
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80706CD

"Paul Paccione's (b. 1952) compositions balance a love of 'abstract' sound combinations with a vivid sense of lyricism. His teachers have included Harley Gaber, Kenneth Gaburo, William Hibbard, and Eric Richards. His music reflects an interest in tonal color, exact pitch placement, and a reverence for the mystery of unhurried long durations. The first two characteristics are found in the work of Anton Webern and all three characteristics can be found in the work of the late American composer Morton Feldman. The music of these two composers has been studied in depth by Paccione and has had a strong impact on his own compositional thought. These are all world-premiere recordings."

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