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NW 80833CD
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$15.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 6/9/2023
"Chemistry for Gamelan and String Quartet is the culmination of a long-term collaboration between the JACK Quartet and composer and instrument builder Brian Baumbusch (b. 1987). Over the past ten years, Baumbusch has designed and built two separate sets of 'American gamelan' instruments. Based on various instruments from the Balinese gamelan tradition, these instruments depart in innovative ways from Indonesian traditions based on their unique tuning, inspired in part by the tuning theories published by musicologist William Sethares, as well as their design and performance techniques, which draw inspiration from instruments built by Lou Harrison and Harry Partch. Hydrogen(2)Oxygen (2015) uses a unique compositional technique called 'polytempo,' pioneered by composer Conlon Nancarrow and further developed by Baumbusch in his works for large ensemble. Hydrogen(2)Oxygen explores the unique tuning landscape that is created by combining Baumbusch's Lightbulb instruments with string quartet. This work in particular uses performance practices native to Bali and advanced instrumental techniques that are derived from the virtuosic tradition cultivated by the artistry of Balinese musicians. Therefore, to produce the recordings on this album, Baumbusch returned to Bali with his instruments to work with Nata Swara. This is the first instance of Balinese musicians performing on 'American gamelan' instruments within Indonesia. Three Elements for String Quartet (2016) is one of Baumbusch's earliest endeavors in composing with polytempo structures. The format of the three movements requires that the performers use individual click tracks in the first and third movements in order to execute the polytempo relationships in the music, and in the middle movement the ensemble is free from 'clock time' and can interpret the rhythms communally. Prisms for Gene Davis (2018-2021) involves a separate set of gamelan instruments from those used in Hydrogen(2)Oxygen. It is an exploration of Balinese compositional heterophony, though structured to contain irregular and compound meters that are less common in Balinese music. Prisms can be thought of as a refraction of Baumbusch's relationship to both American Minimalism and Balinese music. This album is the work of a diligent composer who has travelled deep down many rabbit holes (instrument building, tuning, spectral analysis, tempo technology, Balinese compositional techniques, and even microphone building) to learn the technical information needed to engage with these complex compositional worlds. He has resurfaced from these explorations with a sensitive and refined fusion that can be heard here."
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NW 80839CD
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$15.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 5/12/2023
"James Moore (b. 1979) is a composer with an eye toward the world of games and experimental theater. He's an electric guitarist who's willing and eager to treat his instrument as a playground, not a reverent, static tradition. He's a tinkerer, a charmer, and a fella who's always up for another round at the bar of wacky ideas and intellectual questioning. He's excited for new and unexpected opportunities for collaboration, but always maintains a voice that seems to stay recognizably his own throughout the myriad projects he takes on as his life's work. The beautiful pieces on this album -- Lowlands (2017) for accordion and voices; Clair-Obscur (2018) for triple harp; Desolation Pops (2016-18) for piano and string quartet -- reflect those playful and curious penchants of this music-maker extraordinaire. You'll hear comforting clarity, choreographed awkwardness, sudden synchronies, and inexplicable noises on this record. Put on your coziest vintage sweater, grab a classy cocktail in a quirky heirloom glass and get ready to give your ears a treat as you tour the stringed and unstringed sounds of Desolation Pops." --Lainie Fefferman (from the liner notes)
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NW 80827CD
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"Unsettled in more senses than one, these fourteen choral works, reaching across the central third of the 20th century, represent some special moments in the story of music for voices, and within the creative musings of their composers. Generations later, they remain as outliers, but also as bearers of central truths about musical materials of their times, evading common categorizations -- radical or moderate, experimental or formalist, Stravinsky or Schoenberg. The eight composers are eminent figures -- each represented in other productions of New World Records. Their pieces here, however, have found no settled place in the choral culture, let alone in recordings -- excepting Pauline Oliveros's Tuning Meditation and Ernst Toch's Geographical Fugue. Yet there could be something special about these choral cases. In their individuality and diversity -- a small cauldron of mid-20th-century energies -- they might raise questions still not settled in our 21st century. At the least, they seem to offer fresh experiences among the more conventional tonalities of recent choral creation, and the more uniform notions of what constitutes good choral sound. Since the earliest chant, choral singing has been poised between two poles of expression, both of great interest to modern composers: a meditative state of pure sonority -- humming, melismas on vowels, drones -- and a discursive state of phonetic movement -- words projected through collective utterance. Through our fourteen choruses, emanations from the poles of humming and phonetics lead to a sense of musical 'language' itself in a state of re-thinking, not by notions of post-tonal styles replacing 19th-century harmonic grammar, but more by combinations of different sonic materials available on the terrain -- chromatic, 12-tone, modal, neo-classic, noise, drone, sound poetry. This is choral music 'unsettled' by its own times and embracing the situation with creative enthusiasm." --John McCaughey (from liner notes)
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NW 80838CD
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"The inspiration and theme for these six new compositions is 'Artistry and Motherhood.' The perennial question of whether a woman can be both an artist and a mother has been on my mind for a few years, having started a family myself in 2016. Important as it is, this topic is not often discussed in modern society, especially not in the frenetic environment of New York City. How did this life-changing experience influence our artistic vision and creativity? How do we fit into a society that still believes women must choose between family and art? The women collaborating with me on this project have committed to be dedicated mothers while still pursuing their goals and dreams in music and art. The music stands alone on its own merits but invites listeners to examine the practical realities and societal position of the artist-mother. This project highlights the rich and diverse talent of each artist while giving us a platform to discuss how the challenges and benefits of motherhood shape our artistic endeavors." --Olivia De Prato
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NW 80832CD
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"Alvin Singleton's (b. 1940) approach to music-making has all along been involved in an interplay with listeners and their psychology. While this does not mean he has been centered on simply pleasing his audiences, his work seems to constantly draw his audience into confronting challenges of listening, and they tend to end up pleased. Therefore, with so many of his pieces, they might be extremely complex and masterfully crafted, but seldom do you feel he presents the listener with something they cannot understand on at least a basic level. When asked recently about why ordinary listeners seem to 'get' his music, he answered: 'Perhaps because it's structurally filled with surprises, a lot of silences, and spaces in my compositions...' Contrasts both big and small, long and short, vigorous and subdued, loud and quiet, are important to his music. Maybe a passage is presented that happens loudly over and over again followed by sudden silence. Suddenly the listener notices how loud that silence seems. In a way, it is the relationship with the listener that he regards as making serious music a serious matter. And his pieces are more than what is normally thought of as just pieces of music. One finds them that, yes, but as much as anything, they are experiences -- almost 'theatrical' experiences you can hear. Singleton's string quartets span the arc of his career -- the first (untitled) written in 1967, the fourth in 2019 -- and trace his stylistic evolution as a composer. Suggestively and somewhat enigmatically titled -- No. 2 (1988) is Secret Desire to Be Black; No. 3 (1994) is Somehow We Can; No. 4 is Hallelujah Anyhow -- they serve as an excellent introduction to his work and constitute a substantial contribution to the string quartet repertoire by one of this country's most distinguished African-American composers. Three of the four quartets are world-premiere recordings."
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NW 80837CD
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"At the onset, we hear a single, heavily distorted power chord. The chord fades, and then we hear three more iterations of the chord in regular, pulsed attacks. To some, especially fans of metal and its many subgenres, this sound is welcoming and familiar. To others, this sound is surprising, perhaps arresting -- an unexpected opening from a composer known for music of quiet, prolonged stillness. This chord and its four attacks signal the opening of The Complexity of Distance, a 58-minute collaboration between composer James Romig (b. 1971, 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist) and guitarist Mike Scheidt (founder/guitarist/vocalist of the doom metal band YOB). For Romig, the chord came to symbolize his 'self' and his ' place' in the process; as the composition of the piece evolved and developed, it became the chord to which he could relate. For Scheidt, the chord takes on several meanings: the physical (a moment of rest); the spiritual (like the OM syllable in a Buddhist mantra); the psychological (its cyclic recurrence becoming hypnotic); a defiant 'assertion of intention.' These four attacks also set the piece's formal and harmonic structure into motion. The Complexity of Distance is completely built upon a 13:14:15 ratio, which Romig describes in the program notes: 'The work's formal structure comprises three simultaneously unfolding strands of evenly spaced rhythmic pulses, each articulating a unique pair of foundational chords that mutate and combine only when heard coincidentally with, or in close proximity to, others. The first rhythmic strand alternates, at a time-interval of 13 beats, between chords with roots written E and G (sounding A and C in A-standard tuning). The second strand alternates every 14 beats between chords with roots written C and D (F/G). The third strand alternates every 15 beats between chords of B and A (E/D). Beginning and ending with a unison pulse in all three strands, the 13:14:15 ratio takes 2,730 beats to resolve. At a metronome tempo of 48, the cyclic process lasts nearly an hour.' Similar to how a percussionist will choose specific instruments and mallets in order to achieve the particular timbral quality of a particular piece, Scheidt took great care and precision in choosing the materials to express Romig's score. In collaboration with engineer Billy Barnett of Gung Ho Studio and the Hult Performing Arts Center in Eugene, Oregon, Scheidt assembled a wide-ranging arsenal of equipment to craft the sound of this recording."
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NW 80836CD
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"Though richly varied, Michael Pisaro-Liu's (b. 1961) works are linked through their philosophical and ethical concern for the interaction between music and its sounding environment, their openness to the creative contributions of performers, and their capacity for making felt our belonging to and participation in a world of continuous and often surprising variation. Radiolorians (2018) finds Pisaro-Liu drawing inspiration from another gifted observer of this world in variation, the German zoologist, naturalist, and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), who promoted and popularized evolutionary thought via extensive monographs and artful renderings of insects, animals, sea creatures, and embryos. For Radiolarians, Pisaro-Liu creates what he terms 'transcriptions' of individual radiolaria species depicted in Haeckel's drawings. Radiolarians comprises fourteen compact pieces, each derived from a specific species of radiolaria and ranging in duration from one to nine minutes. Each piece features a mixture of harmonic, melodic, and noise elements corresponding roughly to the structures of each radiolaria, where pitched elements serve as tonal spines unfolding in time as well as spatially within the ensemble, and noise elements capture the twitches and undulations of the protozoic bodies contained therein. Pisaro-Liu's inventive transcriptions are brought to life in this sensitively performed and masterfully recorded actualization by the Muzzix ensemble, whose balance of technological and acoustic elements reincarnate the fragile balance of the crystalline and amoebic in audible form. Across a spacious fifty-three minute performance, the radiolarians appear more or less serially as in Haeckel's illustrations, providing the listener opportunity to experience in musical time the heterochronic reverberations and anticipations of recurring organizing forces, such as the stringing together of notes in languid melodies or the surge and retreat of waves. The ensemble's heterogeneity and seamless blending of technological and traditional elements recapitulate anew the sense of enmeshed temporalities and a cross-cutting of the natural, cultural, and mechanical in Haeckel's monographs."
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NW 80826CD
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"Through her novel approaches to texture and melody, German-American composer Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888-1944) became one of the most distinctive modernist voices of the mid-20th century. Beyer was the first woman known to have composed for electric instruments (Music of the Spheres, 1938). Her compositions anticipate elements of minimalism, a movement that would manifest two decades after her passing. Beyer was long omitted from the written history of ultra-modernism, but her activities as a composer and pianist in 1930s New York City placed her within the orbits of many important artists. Her mentors, friends, and collaborators included Ruth Crawford, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Otto and Ethel Luening, Marion Bauer, Dane Rudhyar, Percy Grainger, and choreographer Doris Humphrey. At last, in the 21st century, Beyer's name is now invoked alongside these others, as the significance of her music is becoming more widely recognized. Although her works for percussion ensemble, piano, and strings have garnered the most attention, Beyer composed a substantial amount of music for woodwinds. Thirteen solo and chamber works, all written between 1932 and 1943, represent an exceptional contribution to the wind repertoire. Only five pieces involving clarinet and flute have previously been recorded. This album brings to light the rest of Beyer's known chamber music for winds, allowing for a more complete assessment of her achievements. Beyer wrote to Cowell in 1940, 'I am not a set piece of so many molecules. I am an ever changing something.' Nothing truer could be said of Beyer's woodwind music, which reveals a composer in constant search of new approaches and instrumental colors. In little more than a decade of intense creativity, she produced inventive pieces in an ever-unfolding ultra-modernist style. These works, now accessible for performance and study, confirm Johanna Beyer's importance in the canon of 20th-century wind chamber music."
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2CD
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NW 80835CD
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"music for bowed string instruments consists mostly of music composed by Malcolm Goldstein (b. 1936) between 2018 and 2019 while living in Montréal, Québec. The impulse to compose this series came from Goldstein's experience as a teacher and performer of Béla Bartók's 44 Duos for Two Violins (1931). Whereas Bartók's series features a clear progression to the pieces, gradually increasing in technical and musical complexity from beginning to end, music for bowed string instruments has no such sequence. The compositions do not build toward a particular way of playing or specific kind of technical virtuosity. Even so, Goldstein envisions these pieces to be used as both teaching material for improvisation as well as concert pieces. Each of the eleven pieces defines a narrow set of parameters -- musical, physical, conceptual, etc. -- to explore the sounding possibilities of stringed instruments. Goldstein uses the term structured improvisation composition to describe this kind of piece. He explains that concept as 'improvisation as a process of discovery enacted within the structures of the particular performance activities specified for each piece.' In other words, the musicians are not free to play anything at all, but they are free to explore everything within the constraints laid out in the score. Goldstein's aim is not for the musicians to produce the same music each time, nor to try and play a piece the way he would do it. Rather the philosophy is centered on the process of 'each individual unfolding, the breath expanding in gestures of becoming sound.' Goldstein relishes the possibilities inherent to improvisation: 'Anything can happen starting from nothing ? so that music is a process of discovery filled with surprises.' All of the musicians on this recording are part of the Montréal improvisation scene and there is a deep mutual trust between composer and performers developed over many years. A keen ear will recognize both the unique constraints of each piece's structure and the subtle, individualized ways the different musicians improvise the material."
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NW 80834CD
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"Jerome Kitzke (b. 1955) has described himself as being as much a storyteller as a composer, and that description makes sense. Throughout his music there is a strong dramatic, narrative, theatrical component. Performers shout, sing, move and dance, often as though possessed by the music. An obvious ancestor here is Harry Partch, and though Kitzke's music does not use just intonation, it projects that 'corporeal' quality that this predecessor valued as essential. The pieces on this disc make for intersecting pairings. There are two works for a pianist who vocalizes and produces sound beyond the keyboard (Bringing Roses With Her Words [2009] and There Is a Field [2008]). There are two works that are portraits of individuals. There are two ensemble pieces that are idiosyncratically theatrical (For Pte Tokahewin Ska [2015] and The Redness of Blood [1994?95]). Listening to them in sequence, they begin to feel like a multi-movement work about life that culminates in The Redness of Blood, the longest and most substantial piece of the program. On a first hearing, for some more accustomed to the complexities of modernist practice, Kitzke's music may sound somewhat simple. Conversely, those more used to the open spaces of minimalism, or the grand gestures of neoromanticism, may find the music too mutable as it morphs, quicksilver-like, through an invigorating stream of consciousness. The fact that this music does not fall easily into any '-ism' is a tribute to its individuality, and its strength. Ultimately, the music has the quality of a crazy kaleidoscope, tumbling from one moment to another, the sonic palette constantly refreshed."
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NW 80830CD
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"Starting with his music of the 1960s and early 1970s, with works such as For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964), the Prose Collection (1968-71), and Changing the System (1974), Christian Wolff (b. 1934) quietly re-invented chamber music. He created music in which the activities of the performers -- timing, cueing, assembling and selecting materials -- were foregrounded. Although to some extent these activities were always a part of classical music, Wolff opened them up for creative decision-making by the musicians themselves. Charles Ives began to develop a different conception with (among other works) his String Quartet No. 2 (1913). It portrays four individuals who come together to have a discussion that turns into an argument (presumably over politics) and then its transcendental resolution in the mountains. With Ives and then others from the American Experimental Tradition (including John Cage), chamber music starts to become a place where differences are unleashed. Given his exploration of the ontology of people making music together, the string quartet, laden as it is with the tradition of unity, might not at first seem to be an obvious fit to Wolff's sensibilities. But his quartet music stems as much from Ives and Cage as from the European art music tradition. The four characters of Ives become four people playing music. In one piece he simply calls them '2 violinists, violist and cellist.' Sometimes they are asked to coordinate like a traditional quartet. But at other times (often in the same piece), they are pushed to the point of dissolution. Here we find a music that allows for the spontaneous expression of four musicians who are bound together by something more than the rule of the bar line. These are all world-premiere recordings."
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NW 80831CD
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"Tom Johnson (b. 1939) is a key figure in the contemporary music scene whose voice as a composer is instantly recognizable. A major champion of minimalism in the 1970s as a writer, he remains one of its most important adherents as a composer, although the word 'minimalist' does not cover everything that his music does. The characteristic elements of repetition and sparse material are there, but his extensive use of mathematics and, especially, counting, makes him unique. Johnson relies on more than counting, using algorithms, combinatorics, juggling, and tiling techniques, among other things. Johnson is as radical as Eliane Radigue or Phill Niblock, but he is also interested in sounds that can be enjoyed in the moment, and in this sense, he is a true heir of Feldman, who was one of his teachers. Counting to Seven (2014) is a set of short pieces lasting about 80 minutes, of which eighteen pieces are presented here. Although obviously vocal because they are text-based, some of the pieces include percussion. They can be performed by almost any group of at least seven people and are not written for trained singers or actors. It was around 1980 that Johnson developed a series of twelve solos in twelve languages called Counting Languages, under the inspiration of sound poets such as Charlie Morrow and Jerome Rothenberg in the United States and Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing, and Bernard Heidsieck in Europe. He then wrote Counting Duets, (also called Counting Music), a set of five counting sequences for two performers speaking in one language. Some years later, after a performance by Vincent Bouchot from the ensemble Dedalus, Johnson 'reworked everything for seven voices. I changed the title to Counting to Seven, added about 30 languages, well-known, little known, living and dead, and put together an 80-minute version, which we began performing in 2014.' Johnson explores the tonalities and rhythms that come from repeating numbers sonorously in different languages. Every piece is different, with 1-7 as the connecting thread, like a set of short stories that forms a novel through a connecting character. The languages Johnson chose include major ones spoken in large swathes of the world -- French, Japanese, Hebrew, German. Some are more national -- Turkish, Hungarian, Gaelic, Georgian. Some are specific to certain places: Muruwari is spoken by Aboriginal people in northern Australia; Tajik is a variety of Persian spoken in Uzbekistan; Maninke is spoken in Guinea, Mali, Liberia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Ivory Coast."
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NW 80828CD
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"If you ask a random group of people familiar with contemporary classical music to categorize the style or type of music that Daniel Goode (b. 1936) creates, you would probably receive as many answers as the number of people in that grouping: minimalist, gamelan, process, improvised, folk-based, solo, chamber, orchestral, spoken word, electro-acoustic, intermedia, graphic, and more. This CD features two types of instrumental music: solo/small ensemble music and orchestral (or, to be more precise, music for Flexible Orchestra). Of AnnCela Express, written for the latter, Goode notes, 'I was going to make the whole of AnnCela Express out of a traditional Serbian tune I heard on a movie soundtrack, called in English, roughly, 'Don't ride the horse, young man, with your head down,' but it didn't turn out that way, exactly. This tune does appear a few minutes into my piece played by the clarinet, but exits pretty soon, leaving a glow, a trace that becomes the armature on which the final slow dance rotates.' Piano Sonata #2 (2015) is subtitled 'Memories of Pre-Minimalism, 1959 and Now.' It uses material from a very early piano suite composed in 1959. It is deceptively simple, and yet is complex, presenting challenges for the pianist. Clarinet Quintet (2015), which is in one movement and is inspired by Brahms's great Clarinet Quintet, opus 115, uses two short quotes from it. The piece is engrossing with its subtle changes juxtaposed with sudden outbursts. Sonata for Violin and Piano (2014) takes you for a romp, with at times a flurry of notes, but then ends wistfully, floating off like a balloon into the ether at the end. Although all of the pieces on this CD were written in the 2000s, they seem to cover a much wider span of time by the use of self-referential techniques used throughout his compositional career. There are memorable melodies that evoke a nostalgia for the past, be it the lushness of Mahler and Bruckner or the use of folk melodies, be they real or imagined. There are the sudden changes in mood, from stillness to busyness, slow to fast. Even though the pieces on this CD are through-written, they maintain the kind of spontaneity heard in his more experimental pieces for open instrumentation and structured improvisation. And overall, they have a sense of joyous movement apparent in all of his work."
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NW 80825CD
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Reprinted. "In response to the arguably self-righteous pronouncements made in the 1990s as to what jazz is and isn't, Julius Hemphill (1938-1995) spoke up as he had done throughout his career. 'Well, you often hear people nowadays talking about the tradition, tradition, tradition. But they have tunnel vision in this tradition. Because tradition in African- American music is wide as all outdoors.' This collection of music, this celebration of artistic collaborations that engaged Julius Hemphill throughout his life, adds much to what we know of his creativity in exploring the implications in that wide space. His work, done in what was not much more than twenty-five years, illuminated so many byways of that protean tradition, created in America against the direst of odds. Equally vital, Julius claimed, with great passion, his space to be expressive. He worked inward as much as he looked outward, in his artistic creativity and cultural engagements. This box set contains musical compositions and performances that have come to light from the Julius Hemphill Archive at the Fales Library of New York University. These performances present thirty-five Hemphill compositions culled from close to 180 audio and visual documents of his work. Twenty-five of these works did not receive a commercial recording in his lifetime. Also represented in this box set are ensemble contexts Julius formed which did not receive substantial, or in some cases, any public documentation. These performances put Julius's improvisational work as a saxophonist and flutist to the fore, from solo to quintet contexts. (The one exception being Disc 4, where we hear pieces Julius wrote for others to interpret.) Equally important, these performances deepen our experience of Julius's long associations in artistic collaboration." --Marty Ehrlich (from the liner notes)
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NW 80824CD
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"In modern experimental music, and especially among a number of musician-composers emerging in America during the Sixties, a fixation on process and awareness became a structural hallmark, exploring the gradual change of sonic materials, built environments, and the human body. Though much maligned as a term by its practitioners, figures like Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley were among these 'minimal' composers; askew of them were electroacoustic explorers like Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, and David Behrman. In recent years, composer Sarah Hennies (b. 1979) is forging new paths of reduction and expansion. Spectral Malsconcities (2018) consists of six linked and varied sections; it is constructed in a way that ensures the musicians are never completely in sync, and in fact they generate sounds that continually destabilize the standard ensemble goal of togetherness. As Hennies put it recently, 'this piece is an example of performers elevating something beyond what I thought it could be. I wrote a piece that I thought would intentionally create mistakes. You ask somebody to repeat a very different polyrhythmic contrapuntal page of music 25 times, and it is going to fall apart at some point and then come back together. However, the musicians are so good that they played it exactly as it was written, which is better than what I thought it would have been if they were messing up...' Taking its cue from a two or three player-one vibraphone piece called Settle, which was composed by Hennies in 2012, Unsettle (2017) is a spare and summarily weighty composition that finds space monolithic and driving. The score is economic, taking all of two pages to spin out 33 minutes of music. It begins with una corda fluttering, the passing of time held in single E notes bent at the edges and limned by vibraphone haze, gradually augmented by rumbling clusters and brassy, clanging bells. The inflection and increase in density among otherwise apposite events create an extremely intense landscape of tension without release, though powerful as well -- the closing minutes of pedal movement, muted piano strings, and bell clatter (Ã la Iannis Xenakis' Bohor I) lead into prepared twang and supple metallic accents. Ditto the shock of vibraphone and muted clamor at minute twenty, carrying enough distorted overtones to defuse one's skull. Sublime and utterly physical, explosive and statuesque, Spectral Malsconcities and Unsettle are complementary works that display another rich stage of Sarah Hennies' practice. Her world of creativity is welcoming, but like all art of significance, you have to do the work in order to share in the experience. At the end, and wherever that end is, the rewards will be great."
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NW 80823CD
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"We want to fabricate a new music. We imagine a situation in which the sounding together of tones is never taken for granted, is continually renewed and reinvented. We know that the effect of any set of simultaneous tones, by means of the multiplication implicit in the harmonic series, totals much more than the number of notes played. A room can be made to vibrate with hundreds of frequencies by a single chord. We want to enter into a universe of harmony in which it becomes possible to hear into the interstices of what does not sound by means of what does sound. We will use harmony to probe one world, and when that world is known, move from it to another and another beyond that. It is with this state of mind that I listen to the music by Jordan Dykstra (b. 1985). It reawakens in me a primal fascination with the simultaneity of sound. Because of the inventiveness of its compositional strategies, the music inspires a sense of open possibility, of something yet to come, of something yet not quite with us. Dykstra has a creative impulse, shared with many experimental composers, of not wanting to repeat in one piece what he has done in another. Each work seems to begin with a moment in an empty space. When I listen carefully before each piece on this disc starts, I have a keen sense of that space. It must contain an echo of the moment just before Dykstra started writing the piece: that moment when anything can happen." --Michael Pisaro (from liner notes)
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NW 80821CD
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"Wrestling with the notion of balancing both formal construction and creative spontaneity has allowed Scott Fields (b. 1952) to compose a powerful body of work with ties to extramusical concerns from the realms of literature, philosophy, and science. Seven Deserts (2019), rather than operating from a fixed narrative structure with predetermined events, lays out the ground rules for a manifestation that is absolutely identical in every performance in its operations and sonic vocabulary, but with each realization completely unique in internal detail and musical interaction. Improvisation fleshes out the structure yet also embeds itself in the musical foundation to help determine the overall shape. The conductor is improvising to the same extent that the individual players are and may set forces in motion, allow them to work, and then, based on the results, initiate the next iteration. In Seven Deserts, Fields has created a work that has a sense of loss and unnamable dread coexisting with an objectivist appreciation of aesthetic beauty and balance. He shifts the focus between foreground and background, hyperactivity versus the static, saturated sound and quietude. By recording Seven Deserts in the performance hall in Cologne, both with and without an audience, Fields was able to have the best of both worlds. Listening through the set, one hears deserts in full bloom: vivacious, juicy, and ripe with the players' interactions, virtuosic solo outings, and varied sonic environments. There are elegiac clouds that suddenly are scattered with Euro-jazz disruptions. Baroque-sounding flute harmonies splinter into jazzy riffs that never settle into unisons but spiral outward. A tense groove reminiscent of Miles Davis's On the Corner period shatters into shards of noise and floating tones. We hear roiling saxophones and vibraphone kicked over the edge by electric guitar punctuations and roaring tenor sax expletives. The final movement reveals an impression of Debussy as orchestrated by Webern, which opens into fractured solo guitar vs the ensemble and then resolving into strange attractors -- pools of repeated activities without repetition and a sudden end. Fields has chosen his players wisely, an orchestra of virtuosic soloists, including members of Ensemble Musikfabrik and other new music groups from Cologne, as well as freelancers drawn both from the region and other corners of the world."
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NW 80819CD
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"The title of this recording has multiple meanings for its composer, Larry Polansky (b. 1954). These are the generations... is a translation of the Hebrew title for the second work on the program, Eleh Tol'd'ot, the first words of the thirty-fifth verse of the first book (B'rey'sheet) of the Torah. Beyond referencing Polansky's Jewish heritage, the phrase reflects this particular collection of works on several levels. The compositions included stem from different generations of Polansky's musical output: Some were composed in the 1980s while he was teaching at Mills College in Oakland, California (Eleh Tol'd'ot, Sacco, Vanzetti); some while living in New Hampshire when he was a Professor of Music at Dartmouth College (Glockentood II, 22 Sounds-); and others are recent compositions completed in Santa Cruz, California, around the time of Polansky's retirement from the University of California, Santa Cruz (five songs for kate and vanessa, kaddish (ladder) canon). The performers on the recording are similarly of different generations. Some have known and worked with Polansky since the 1980s or earlier; others are much younger and began working with him as graduate students within the last few years. Moreover, some of these works use some form of algorithmic composition while others use more conventional approaches to composing music. In some pieces, the musicians themselves must enact some kind of procedure to generate the sounds or structures they are to play. Finally, the works presented here demonstrate Polansky's deep understanding of the history and techniques of experimental music in the United States. Within these compositions one can find compositional approaches that span styles from the ultramodernists in the early twentieth century to advanced computational algorithms not yet possible in that era. Through these works Polansky somehow manages to integrate older and newer styles of experimental composition into a cohesive voice that despite, or perhaps because of, its eclecticism and diversity is unmistakably the music of Larry Polansky."
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2CD
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NW 80816CD
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"John J. Becker (1886-1961) is the least known of a group of composers who, by reputation, became known as 'the American Five,' analogous to the better-known 'Russian Five' or 'French Six.' Becker's cohorts consisted of Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, Wallingford Riegger, and Charles Ives. Ives, born 1874, was the oldest of the group and Cowell, born 1897, was the youngest, and in the 1920s and '30s they were known as the most radical and dissonant of American composers. Becker could be briefly summarized as a confluence of dissonance and Catholicism. He became known as one of the leading proponents of a style invented by musicologist/composer Charles Seeger (1886-1979), who had been one of Cowell's mentors, known as dissonant counterpoint, an idiom in which the traditional rules of counterpoint were reversed to produce maximum dissonance rather than consonance. In his own writings about Becker, Cowell emphasized his ties to Renaissance church polyphony, calling him 'a Sixteenth-Century modern.' For a promotional pamphlet Becker produced, Cowell wrote that Becker 'bases his style on the art of the great vocal polyphonists, de Lassus, Palestrina, Victoria, etc. Using their breadth and religious feeling, he has poured his own modern materials into the old polyphonic forms.' Elsewhere Becker can fall into a kind of modernist simulacrum of Classical-era style, in conventional four-part textures differentiated by the harshness of dissonant intervals between moving lines. He picked up Cowell's passion for tone clusters, often pitting black keys on the piano against white (in common with some other early moderns like Stravinsky and Ornstein), and he made a notational fetish of large sharps and flats that were intended to apply to an entire chord. In his music, he said, there was no dissonance, because 'dissonance replaced consonance as the norm.' Along with the Symphonia Brevis, the Concerto Arabesque, and a motoric percussion ensemble piece called The Abongo (which the percussion-loving Cage expressed admiration for), Becker's seven chamber works abstractly called Soundpieces have proved the most public part of his output. This is the first recording to bring them all together, and indeed the first commercial recording of several of them. That John Becker will remain the least-celebrated member of the American Five is probably inevitable. But at his best he achieves considerable eloquence in the then-new idiom of dissonant counterpoint, and a textural momentum and energy that seem all his own."
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NW 80807CD
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"Intercultural composition is no longer a novelty. It has become a familiar, even commonplace, phenomenon. With this recording, Shih-Hui Chen (b. 1962) breathes fresh air into this important genre. In more ways than one, her transcultural work has blurred the lines between individual cultures and represents our rich musical horizon today. Her earlier work is characterized by intense modernist sonorities, polyphonic layers, yearning angular melodies, and firm control of orchestral timbre and structure. It is the profound balance between her earlier modernist sensibility, with its rigorous control of polyphonic layers and structural design on the one hand, and her search for the inner self with materials distinctly different from Western tradition, that marks her accomplishment as a 21st-century composer. In the five works collected here, Chen broadens her reach into several branches of vernacular music -- Nanguan music and Taiwanese opera -- and the Chinese zither of traditional literati. Two use traditional Chinese instruments as soloists with a Western orchestra, one is written for both solo Chinese instrument and Chinese orchestra, and the two remaining works are scored for Western orchestra. Yet it is the source of inspiration that really sets them apart. The earliest work, Concerto for Pipa and Chamber Orchestra (2002), is abstract in conception, with prominent pipa gestures that infuse the composition with distinctive sonorities and melodic tropes. This is followed by three works, each of which uses a melodic source from traditional Chinese genres. Fantasia on the Theme of Guanglingsan for Zheng and Chinese Orchestra (2014) is based on a well-known masterwork, which is full of drama and contrast. It shares certain sonic similarities with the pipa concerto. As a pair they differ significantly from the two following works, centered around Taiwanese Nanguan music. Fantasia on the Theme of Plum Blossoms for String Orchestra (2012) uses as its basis a famous tune from the Nanguan repertoire, while A Plea to Lady Chang'e for Nanguan Pipa and Chamber Orchestra (2013) is essentially a setting of a traditional Nanguan song in the modernist sonic fabric. Finally, Silvergrass, for Cello and Chamber Orchestra (2016) represents a step further in that direction, not only tracing the sonic aspect of another indigenous music genre -- Taiwanese opera -- but also delving deeply into the words, sensibility, and poetic expression of one of the island's literary legends, author Huang Chunming, who is known for his plain, richly colloquial voice."
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2CD
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NW 80817CD
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"Charles Amirkhanian (b. 1945) can be regarded as a central figure in American music, and on several fronts. As a composer, he's been pervasively innovative in two genres: text-sound pieces, in which he can draw engaging rhythmic processes from wacky word assemblages such as 'rainbow chug bandit' and 'church car rubber baby buggy bumper'; and natural-sound electronic pieces which go far beyond the usual confines of musique concrète to create long, poetic sound narratives poised between collage and sonic landscape. Amirkhanian's text-sound pieces often begin with a quasi-minimalist basis in repetition, but their processes are playful and even humorous rather than strict. His electronic landscapes (including all the ones here) occasionally include repetitive elements, but are more poetic, intuitive in their form and often impressionistic in their effect. Several of his earlier commercial recordings have showcased the text-sound pieces; the present two-disc set is a welcome compendium of his sound landscapes. We might characterize the whole as three tone poems preceded by a set of ten etudes. The set of ten pieces, Pianola (Pas de mains) (1997?2000) -- the subtitle is French for 'no hands' -- stems from Amirkhanian's long fascination with the player piano, or pianola -- the self-playing piano, and is a whimsical set of essays based on the sound and techniques of the player piano. The remaining three works [Im Frühling (1989?90), Son of Metropolis San Francisco (1997), Loudspeakers (for Morton Feldman) (1988?90)] might be characterized as extended love poems, so affectionately do they portray their respective subjects: spring, San Francisco, and the composer Morton Feldman. These pieces were composed using the Synclavier, an electronic sampling keyboard first developed at Dartmouth in the late 1970s, for which Amirkhanian has written many of the most ambitious works. What links all these pieces is a creative ambiguity of genre, a delight in shifting back and forth between elements whose sources can be recognized and those whose can't. The pacing, at least in the latter three works, is leisurely, and somewhere between ambient and symphonic: One can listen to them as atmosphere, yet a sense of overall dramatic shaping is not absent. Though we listen to them through loudspeakers, it seems problematic to pigeonhole Amirkhanian as an 'electronic' composer. The music, restful and noisy at once, is too playful for that, and too natural -- and elicits a listening mode that brings no other composer to mind."
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NW 80815CD
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"While certain recognizable fingerprints are found throughout the body of Daniel Lentz's (b. 1942) work, he has never been content to settle within one particular style or mode of music for long, moving ever forward in an evolutional continuum, an overriding arc that defines his growth as a composer -- beginning with traditional music, diverting into electronic music, moving into performance art pieces for his various touring groups, then sallying into minimalism, followed by work distinguished for its revolutionary use of live multi-track recording in performances in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally evolving into his own brand of modern romanticism. Perhaps the most important aspect of Lentz's compositions is that they immediately connect to the listener. This is because he started out as a performer, not as an academic, and from his first jazz band through years of touring his music with multiple groups, he never lost sight of whom he was writing for -- the listener. This simple intention permeates his music. Never pandering or soft-peddling his message, never compromising his artistic integrity, Lentz has gone straight for the listener all his life, and his music connects in ways that are simultaneously intellectual and emotional. Continental Divide (2003) (for string orchestra) is traveling music. And as the piece progresses the listener is swept along across this massive line of demarcation -- a line dividing perhaps more than just the west from the east, or one way of life from another. Lentz wrote the music as a testament to the many road trips he took across the American landscape, and it captures stark granite formations, the lushness of desolation, the beauty of sky and rock, and the exhilaration of giddy peaks traversed. Ending(s) (2018) (for tenor and double string quintet) is protest music at is best, music that champions life over those things that try to rip apart the fabric of the country, the society, the self."
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NW 80808CD
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"Born in Michigan but for most of his life a true Californian, Robert Erickson (1917-1997) had a reputation as a maverick. His musical path was never a straight line, nor, really, a line at all but a landscape, with ranges of features rather than mere points of interest. He was a profound and original musical thinker who embraced the expressive possibilities of all music, from the Western classics and moderns of his own early education to Indian and Balinese traditions and all manner of contemporary experimentation, as long as it served a musical purpose. When encountering his work, one doesn't need to know more than one hears: what's important are the sounds one encounters and the expressive journey they suggest for each listener. His works can be looked at in three periods. There was an early period where he worked out his relationship to mid-twentieth century expressionism and atonality, producing such enduring and engaging works as the Duo for Violin and Piano (1957) (included here), the Chamber Concerto (1960) and the Concerto for Piano and Seven Instruments (1963). A middle period followed where he became involved with technology and all sorts of experimental techniques. The tape-and-instrument pieces Pacific Sirens and Nine and a Half for Henry (and Wilbur and Orville) and the music-theater trombone extravaganza General Speech can be said to typify this period. The final period begins in the mid-70s, when technology is put aside (most likely because of his declining health) in favor of instrumental works for his friends and associates. These works reach their culmination in the works on this CD: Fives (1988), Trio (1986) and Quintet (1985), among others. In all three periods, what he never abandoned was a sense of taste, elegance and style -- and a curiosity about sound and its functioning."
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NW 80813CD
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"'An insatiable listener, learner, and reader, Stuart Saunders Smith (b. 1948) has taken into his mind and spirit myriad styles of musical performance spanning centuries, methods of compositional practice of all sorts, and innumerable close personal relationships with artists of all disciplines. He has absorbed this vast expanse of knowledge, art, and personal experience, and rather than mimicking anything he has encountered along the way, he has manifested a truly personal, honest voice that rings true to himself and to all of his inspirations. In four of the works presented here, specifically Thicket (2010), Family Portraits: Self (in 14 Stations) (1997), Palm Sunday (2012), and Among Us (2007), Smith calls upon the performer to provide the musical dynamics, articulations, and phrasing to the traditionally notated pitches and rhythmic structures he provides. This charge extends the performer's contribution well into the realm of composition. In making personal musical decisions regarding dynamics, articulations, and phrasing, given the contrapuntal density of the material Smith composed, it became important for me to remove the mental burden of choreographed performance from the process and make my choices from the listener's perspective. This process involved the making and reviewing of a series of self-recordings that gradually led to the versions of the pieces I present here. The recurring issue in preparing these pieces was negotiating the balance between larger dramatic gestures, illuminating formal clarity in longer works, and shaping local nuance to assist the listener in aurally parsing dense passages.' --Kyle Adam Blair"
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NW 80811CD
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"Max Giteck Duykers (b. 1972) stands out for his ongoing dedication to the sound worlds made possible by the Pierrot ensemble. Therefore it is fitting that the first recording devoted exclusively to Duykers's music should feature two of the four 'Pierrot sextets' he has composed this far, that the remaining four works on the disc are playable by P6/P6+ subsets, and that everything here (except for the one vocal work which adds guest soprano Zen Wu) is performed by members of Ensemble Ipse, the P6 ensemble he co-founded in 2016 and for which he continues to serve as co-Artistic Director. As such it is an excellent introduction to Duykers's compositional aesthetic. While he has composed a great deal of multimedia work as well as orchestral music, chamber music forms the core of his catalog. Duykers's music revels in hovering somewhere between graspable tonality and a chromatic tetrachordal harmonic vocabulary that is usually associated with atonal pitch organization, unisons between players as well as a kind of motivic heterophony where players play similarly contoured but different lines simultaneously, constant metric shifts that still somehow groove, trippy microtonal interludes that do not in any way seem theoretically systemic but serve a purpose that is much more than merely ornamental, cadential silences, and -- what for lack of a more readily comprehensible term could be described as -- 'temporary ostinatos': single notes or chords that repeat incessantly for a period of time but then unexpectedly veer off into something else. Most of Duykers's pieces also exhibit a high degree of playfulness and exuberant joy. It is telling that Duykers concludes the program notes for several of them with an admonition to the players to 'have fun' or 'enjoy'. Duykers's music combines intellectual rigor with sheer physical pleasure as well as metaphysical transcendence. It is music that is deeply conscious of all the music that has come before it, but is very clearly music of our time while also offering some intriguing suggestions about where the music of the future might beckon."
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