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CD
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R 094CD
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Omaggio a Giuseppe Ungaretti, the second Recital album of composer Loren Rush (b. 1935), contrasts the orchestral grandeur of 2021's LP Dans le Sable (R 089CD/LP) with plaintive just intonation piano improvisations. Loren Rush has been active in the Bay Area new music scene since the late 1950s alongside composers such as Terry Riley, Robert Erickson, and Pauline Oliveros, and also co-founded Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in 1975. His music has been performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Though few of Rush's compositions have been published, he has garnered deep respect from his peers and colleagues over the decades. The album is directly inspired by poems from L'allegria (The Joy, 1914-1919), the collection of poetry by Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888, Egypt -1970, Italy) written in the trenches of World War I. During these brutal years Ungaretti struggled to maintain his humanity by creating the most beautiful images he could imagine and by recalling experiences of his earlier life in Alexandria and Paris. By this, he both revolutionized Italian poetry and demonstrated that the creation of beauty is a most effective life preserver and political statement. Veglia (Night Watch): "An entire night cast beside a comrade massacred, his snarling mouth turned to the full moon. In my silence I have written letters full of love. Never have I held so fast to life." Rush's melancholy preludes are treated with "The Enhanced Piano in Just Intonation", developed at Good Sound Foundation by the composer and Alfred Owens. The process electronically enhances and increases perceived resonance, sustaining, coloristic and expressive capabilities. Just intonation describes a system of tuning in which the greatest level of consonance and resonance is achieved by adjusting intervals to the whole-number ratios of the harmonic series, the natural mode of vibration. The suite concludes with the silken chamber piece "Mattina" (Morning), reflecting Ungaretti's stark words, "I illumine me, with immensity." The addition of violin and cello suspends the listener in a prolonged space of dread and beauty. Includes booklet of poems by Ungaretti; glass-mastered CD; Edition of 200.
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CD
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R 089CD
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Dans le Sable is the first new album in over 40 years by composer, pianist, and digital audio pioneer Loren Rush (b. 1935). Active in the Bay Area new music scene since the late 1950s alongside composers such as Robert Erickson and Pauline Oliveros, he also co-founded the Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in 1975. His music has been performed by the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra amongst others.
The title piece "Dans le Sable" (1967-68, 70) covers the first side of the record, of which Charles Shere in the Oakland Tribune (1972) writes: "A surreal opera scene. A narrator dwells on the significance of passing time. A soprano sings Barbarina's cabaletta from Figaro, which describes her distraught search in the sand for a lost pin. The chamber orchestra -- mostly solo instruments -- plays soft, half-forgotten tunes reminiscent of the Parisian music hall. If Marcel Duchamp wanted to put painting once more at the service of the mind, so did Rush seem to want to make a composition that speaks directly to that thing behind the mind -- the point where it connects with the soul. And he succeeded. But only because the work is so brilliantly constructed, so careful in its structure and the timing of its phrases, so well balanced in the disposition of its parts that it quite overcomes the audience."
The second piece on the album "Song and Dance" begins with the watery held tones of "Song". Melancholy phrases are deconstructed and stretched in different retellings, invoking a harmonic fog. We are then thrust into "Dance", one of the first orchestral pieces to employ computer-generated digital synthesis. A hypnotic and percussive march is propelled into a storm of early computer-processed cannonades. Recital now illuminate the overlooked composer Loren Rush, whose meticulous attention to detail has perhaps kept his toiled-upon works in the shadows these past decades. CD version includes eight-page insert; edition of 250.
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LP
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R 089LP
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LP version. Includes double-sided insert; edition of 500. Dans le Sable is the first new album in over 40 years by composer, pianist, and digital audio pioneer Loren Rush (b. 1935). Active in the Bay Area new music scene since the late 1950s alongside composers such as Robert Erickson and Pauline Oliveros, he also co-founded the Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in 1975. His music has been performed by the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra amongst others.
The title piece "Dans le Sable" (1967-68, 70) covers the first side of the record, of which Charles Shere in the Oakland Tribune (1972) writes: "A surreal opera scene. A narrator dwells on the significance of passing time. A soprano sings Barbarina's cabaletta from Figaro, which describes her distraught search in the sand for a lost pin. The chamber orchestra -- mostly solo instruments -- plays soft, half-forgotten tunes reminiscent of the Parisian music hall. If Marcel Duchamp wanted to put painting once more at the service of the mind, so did Rush seem to want to make a composition that speaks directly to that thing behind the mind -- the point where it connects with the soul. And he succeeded. But only because the work is so brilliantly constructed, so careful in its structure and the timing of its phrases, so well balanced in the disposition of its parts that it quite overcomes the audience."
The second piece on the album "Song and Dance" begins with the watery held tones of "Song". Melancholy phrases are deconstructed and stretched in different retellings, invoking a harmonic fog. We are then thrust into "Dance", one of the first orchestral pieces to employ computer-generated digital synthesis. A hypnotic and percussive march is propelled into a storm of early computer-processed cannonades. Recital now illuminate the overlooked composer Loren Rush, whose meticulous attention to detail has perhaps kept his toiled-upon works in the shadows these past decades.
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