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DLC 018CD
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"Light is the vehicle of the community -- of the universe. All that is visible clings to the invisible. That which can be heard to that which cannot -- that which can be felt to that which cannot. Perhaps the thinkable to the unthinkable. Like ourselves, the stars float between illumination and darkening in turn -- but even in the state of darkness we are granted, as they are, a consoling, hopeful glimmer of companion stars that are luminous and illuminated." --Novalis, Traktat vom Licht
Amir Farid returns to De la Catessen Records with the premiere recordings of Traktat vom Licht/Variations on a Minuet by Mozart -- the second volume in an ongoing survey of endearingly quixotic piano music by Adelaidean composer Raymond Chapman Smith. In this new collection, following on from 2023's Nachschriften/Ländler (DLC 013CD), pianist Amir Farid sheds further light on a fruitful period of Chapman Smith's work, in which he utters in a uniquely mellifluous voice a beautiful old language recognized by so many but spoken by so few. Chapman Smith's musical journey, through Sydney's experimental scene of the early '70s, to his study with Australian modernist doyen Richard Meale, and his leadership of the notorious ACME New Music through the '90s, has led him to -- of all places -- the green pastures of nineteenth century German romanticism, where he invites listeners to join him in thoughtful spiritual contentedness through the current phase of his craft. The title of Chapman Smith's 26-part Traktat vom Licht is borrowed from a cycle of 26 poetic-scientific-metaphysical fragments by Novalis, a crucial voice in the formulation of the first phase of German Romanticism. Written in 2006 as an acknowledgement of the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, Variations on a Minuet by Mozart takes the theme from the first piece in Mozart's catalogue -- his K1, written when he was five years old -- and turns it through a set of twelve variations.
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CD
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DLC 013CD
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As co-director of new music organization The Firm, Raymond Chapman Smith has quietly presented over 130 concerts of new music. But his uncomplicated disinterest in recognition or recording means his music is rarely heard beyond the walls of Adelaide's Elder Hall, where The Firm's annual concert series is presented to a regular audience of 50-100 initiates. This is the first album of his work, played by US born Australian-Iranian pianist Amir Farid. As a teenager in the 1970s, Chapman Smith began performing in AZ Music in Sydney with the recently returned Australian assistant to Cardew and Stockhausen, David Ahern, feeding new ideas into the local music scene, and fielding phoned-in performance instructions from La Monte Young for their improvisations at Brett Whiteley's gallery. After moving to Adelaide to study with Richard Meale, through the '80s and '90s Chapman Smith founded and co-helmed loosely Cageian composer-performer collectives. Since 1996 he has co-directed new music organization The Firm, reveling in the poetic aesthetic of 19th Century German romanticism. On Ländler from 2002, Chapman Smith says: "The references, the paying of homage to Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Wolf, and Zemlinsky are so obvious as to hardly need comment. They are heard through lenses polished by a later, more reductive aesthetic and a somewhat fortuitous arrival at a kind of diatonic serialism." Of 2003's Nachschriften: "Some of my thoughts while making this music revolved around a passage from a speech which Paul Celan gave in 1958. Celan, of course, was speaking of lyric poetry but I would respectfully paraphrase his words as follows ... 'Music is not timeless. Certainly, it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time -- through it, not above or beyond it. Music, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the -- not always greatly hopeful -- belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Music in this sense too is underway: it is a making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps towards an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.'"
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