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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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7CD
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NW 80825CD
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"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 (à 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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NW 80809CD
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"Robert Palmer (1915-2010) produced more than ninety symphonic, choral, chamber, and solo works throughout his career, earning a reputation in the mid-twentieth century as one of the country's leading, most daring, and -- at the same time -- appealing modernists. Palmer's unique musical language combined a deeply emotional impulse with complex counterpoint and rhythmic structures, drawing comparisons to Hindemith, Bartók, Lou Harrison, even Brahms. Aaron Copland famously included Palmer on his 1948 list of seven composers whom he considered 'the best we have to offer among the new generation,' a list that included Lukas Foss, Leonard Bernstein, and John Cage. This recording, the first devoted solely to the work of this enigmatic and still-unsung hero of American composition, comprises the bulk of his landmark piano works. (All but three are premiere recordings.) A long-overdue and important addition to the canon of recorded modern American music, it serves as a timely portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of a lost generation of mid-century American composers, introducing contemporary listeners to music that sounds as audacious, rousing and emotionally raw today as it did half-a-century ago. Several important pianists have recognized Palmer's music for its haunting beauty and unique rhythmic tide, including John Kirkpatrick, William Kapell, Claudio Arrau, and Yvar Mikhashoff. Palmer's music, full of pathos and joy, illuminates for a whole new generation of musicians and listeners the possibilities of tonal writing. He is part of the chain of events that brought us to our contemporary environment of tonal freedom, and it's time to make amends and include him in that timeline. This album is a start." Performed by Adam Tendler.
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NW 80810CD
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"Changes: 64 Studies for 6 Harps (1985) is a large-scale work that combines and connects many of James Tenney's (1934-2006) most important theoretical and musical ideas, including gestalt segregation principles and complex intonation systems. Composed with the aid of a mainframe computer at York University, the piece also marks a return to computer-aided, algorithmic composition after a long hiatus. It was one of the first pieces Tenney composed with a computer after he left New York City in the late 1960s to teach at the California Institute of the Arts. After Changes, the majority of Tenney's works involved computer software and formal, algorithmic processes. Tenney was both a prolific composer and theorist but rarely wrote in detail about his own pieces even though his music consistently implemented his theoretical ideas. One exception is his article, 'About Changes,' originally published in the journal Perspectives of New Music. 'About Changes' is a detailed and exhaustive theoretical companion to and description of the piece that carefully documents his compositional procedures, many of which are highly technical and/or mathematical. At the beginning of the article, Tenney writes, 'My intentions in this work were both exploratory and didactic. That is, I wanted to investigate the new harmonic resources that have become available through the concept of 'harmonic space' much more thoroughly than I had in any earlier work. At the same time I wanted to explore these harmonic resources within a formal context that would clearly demonstrate certain theoretical ideas and compositional methods already developed in my computer music of the early 1960s, including the use of stochastic (or constrained-random) processes applied to several holarchical perceptual levels, both monophonically and polyphonically. The references to the I Ching, or Book of Changes, in the titles of the individual studies derive from correlations that were made partly for poetic/philosophical reasons but also -- and perhaps more importantly -- as a means of ensuring that all possible combination of parametric states would be included in the work as a whole. I must confess that I frequently thought of the twenty-four preludes and fugues of J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier as a kind of model for what I wanted to do with the work, although it seems highly unlikely that these studies themselves will ever betray that fact to the listener."
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NW 80812CD
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"The author of these notes has spent his life explaining radical music, and the music on this disc may be the most radical I've ever written about. Peter Thoegersen (b. 1967) is not yet a name known to the music world; not for any lack of connection to other famous musicians, but because he came to composition late, and because his artistic aims are so broad and complex that they have taken years to evolve. His aesthetic is well defined, and he is upfront about having a name for it: 'Polytempic Polymicrotonal Music.' That means he has musical layers simultaneously moving in different tempos, plus, even more radically, that he has different microtonal scales playing at the same time. Few composers have aimed at such fervent and heterogeneous multidimensionality. And yet, while Thoegersen's music can seem overwhelming at first, running through it is a level of charm and simplicity that belies the initial impression. In total, these three pieces emphasize a particular side of Thoegersen's output. The image his music creates of ornately mathematical structures filled with intuitively friendly melodies maps on to the personality of the man himself: outspoken and acerbically ruthless in his musical opinions, Thoegersen is also marked by a jolly sense of humor and an inexhaustible love of cats and other animals that make him ultimately less imposing and more personable than he might seem at first. The same can be said for his music. And by going further than anyone else has gone in terms of this particularly American concept of fusing the polytempic with the polymicrotonal -- extending and combining the conceptual worlds of Ives, Cowell, Nancarrow, Partch, Carter, even Frank Zappa, and many others -- he has created a special place for himself within American music. --Kyle Gann (from the liner notes)"
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NW 80806CD
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"This recording is an excellent introduction to the distinctive sound world of Catherine Lamb (b. 1982), who studied with James Tenney and Michael Pisaro, in that it documents a recent large-scale piece that epitomizes her compositional aesthetic, Prisma Interius IX (2018), and was recorded under the composer's supervision. 'I have been attempting to describe, in more elemental terms, the perceptual roles between musicians who are activating interactions in harmonic space. Overlays Transparent/Opaque (2013) was an initial attempt towards showing forms aside phenomenological clarities in which to enter from relational and therefore parallaxical points, in this case through shifting overlays. As though to place individual crystals, one by one, amongst the musicians, and to have them find their place of vibrancy or shadow due to the angle in which they are seeing the form. Rather than terms like loud/soft or foreground/background, opaque might suggest a tone that is filled, dense, and vibrant, whereas transparent might indicate a tone that is losing its fundamentality, becoming fused into the intensity of opacity; or that one might see through its sound, becoming atmospheric. The seven overlays are in constant flux, but the forms are synoptic, placed on their own and in their own space, as objects. Prisma Interius IX (2018), in contrast, would be one large crystal placed amongst the musicians, rotating with filtered light. So that each unfolding of the tonalities illuminates the form that is always present, allowing for a feeling of constant expansion. Prisma Interius IX is the culmination of a series of pieces written between late 2016 to summer 2018, examining particular (perhaps archaic) musical roles, and how they situate within the phenomenological/perceptual space my work has been growing into for the past 14 years. Elemental questions have been important in the series, like how is one tone a pivot between activating a total harmonic space as well as expanding a contour in time. There were many threads in the series, such as how to create structural changes through various conceptual shifts of a prism, the role of the voice, but the most obvious was the development of the secondary rainbow synthesizer, in collaboration with Bryan Eubanks since 2014, named after the faint shadow to the more brilliant primary visual. The instrument filters the adjacent environment to the listening space by literally fusing harmonically with chaotic atmospheric elements being picked up by the microphones outside. The role becomes a kind of highlighting continuo or tanpura to the more clearly articulating musical activity played by the ensemble, while also attempting a bridge for the listener towards an infinite, expanding space (in ideal terms).' --Catherine Lamb"
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2CD
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NW 80804CD
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"'Endangered Species states, restates, correlates, instigates, inflates and deflates, elevates, formulates, disintegrates, interrogates, percolates, granulates, germinates, Kiss Me Kates, Tom Waits, Norman Bates and W.B. Yeats, horripilates, adumbrates, prestidigitates, sophisticates, enumerates, integrates and contraindicates songs from the standard repertoire, Standards they were called. Old French, Frankish, estendard 'place of formation.' If you asked a jazz musician what he played, he'd probably say Standards and Originals. Standards being popular songs from Broadway or Hollywood, Originals being compositions written by the jazz players themselves. They became the catalysts for infinite extended play. . . . Alvin's standards rise from an uncodified potential of all the sounds in the world. Recognizable but reformed by what had been worked through the nameless sound fields into a strange new life, now audible here.' --Clark Coolidge (from the liner notes) '... The Yamaha Disklavier was the instrument I was waiting for . . . a grand piano which allowed me the luxury of playing not just its own hammers and strings but my entire archive of sound-files: a magic act where the whole world becomes audible directly from my fingertips -- an 80-proof blend of analogue and digital. The selection of songs on this recording is mostly ballads, slow and easy, leaving me time to think, exit into unverified neighborhoods, begin a piece from the end, enter a spontaneous museum of dysfunctional harmonies, sneak out the back door into the cocktail mists looking for traces of MEV street music in a heap of Pistoletto's rags.' --Alvin Curran"
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NW 80800CD
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"Rory Cowal is a distinctive pianist, one who draws liberally on classical chops, ample experience with improvisation, and a predilection for the new and uncharted. This makes him especially attractive to composers who wish to blur the boundaries between traditional styles and genres. A musical adventurer at heart, Cowal seems drawn to challenging and unusual projects. The eight pieces on this CD reflect this willingness to experiment, to not just play the same old (now canonic) warhorses of the American experimental tradition, but to expand our awareness of what that tradition might include over a large period of time, from Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888?1944) to Kris Davis (b. 1980), with their adventurous colleagues Muhal Richard Abrams (1930?2017), Daniel Goode (b. 1936), David Mahler (b. 1944), Thomas Peterson (1931?2006), and James Tenney (1934?2006) somewhere in between. The pieces recorded here span from 1931, a time characterized by "ultramodernism" and the theoretical exploration of dissonant counterpoint, to 2018, and the vast influences bombarding young composers in the twenty-first century's oversaturation of digital resources. None of the pieces included here has been previously recorded. Working therefore with no point of reference but the score, Cowal had the special challenge of envisioning them, and bringing them to life based solely on his own understanding of their possibilities."
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NW 80801CD
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"Kyle Gann, voice & electronics, sampling keyboard; Kenneth Patchen, voice; Martha Herr, voice. This recording features three works by Kyle Gann (b. 1955): Custer and Sitting Bull, Scenario, and So Many Little Dyings, from the decade 1994 to 2004. Those familiar with Gann's music will recognize a commitment to just intonation (alternate tunings), paired with a deployment of unexpected meters, often set to frequently shifting tempos. But here we also encounter another side of Gann, a composer preoccupied with texts, the inherent rhythms found within the spoken word, and the dramatic potential of these texts (including poems, interviews, stories, speeches, and even one psychic transmission). A musical reflection on the historic encounter between Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the Lakota leader Sitting Bull, Custer and Sitting Bull (1995-99), presented here in an updated version, is an example of a 'pocket opera,' a kind of one-person opera that blossomed in the unfunded spaces of downtown Manhattan. From 1999 to 2007 Gann performed it live himself, narrating the drama using various historical texts set to a MIDI keyboard accompaniment tuned to just intonation (ranging from 20 to 31-note-to-the-octave scales). While it takes the form of reimagined American history, Custer is perhaps most centrally about the value of sustained, repeated listening. Indeed, Gann's use of just intonation not only rewards but arguably requires many hearings to access certain subtleties. The title of So Many Little Dyings (1994) is taken from the Kenneth Patchen poem 'And What with the Blunders' (from First Will & Testament, 1939). The entire work originates from the pitch and rhythm of Patchen's spoken voice, which Gann sampled and transcribed from a recorded recitation of the poem. Listening to it, however, one might not perceive this borrowing immediately, as the work begins with the sound of a microtonal toy piano imitating the rhythms and contours of Patchen's voice. Very slowly, over the course of the 7-minute work, the piano's melody is taken over by a recording of Patchen's sampled voice. Scenario, for soprano and virtual orchestra, was written between 2003-2004 but wasn't performed live until 2012. The text is taken from a 1932 S. J. Perelman story of the same name, which consists of a non-stop, breathless collage of filmic clichés. On the page, Perelman's text continues for pages without paragraph break and includes dialogue excerpts, Hollywood rumors, and behind-the-scenes film directions. In Gann's setting of it, what he calls 'a surrealist collage opera, the musical analog of an animated cartoon, for theatrical soprano and virtual orchestra,' each collaged portion is set in a corresponding style and character, so the soprano must alternate rapidly between each affect and singing style throughout the 17-minute work."
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NW 80796CD
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"This recording is the first ever devoted to the orchestral music of Christian Wolff (b. 1934) and thus documents a little-known aspect of his wide-ranging work. John, David (1998) introduces in its second part a prominent role for solo percussionist, playing a wide range of pitched and non-pitched instruments, including marimba, glockenspiel, a variety of drums, wood and metal instruments and other sources, the exact choice left to the performer. Rhapsody (2009), in contrast, uses instruments of the traditional Western orchestra without percussion, divided into three separate ensembles and reordered into unusual combinations and relationships, both within and between the groups. In his essay On Charles Ives (1990) Wolff remarks that in the mid-1970s he had a sudden sense of his own work as 'an odd sort of mix of Ives and Satie.' He refers to Ives's 'readiness to draw upon whatever sources are useful'; the tendency to include altered versions of popular music and hymn tunes is a feature they have in common. The unlikely conjunction of Ives and Satie may provide a clue to such disparities as are evident in these orchestral pieces: Sections reminiscent of the density and complexity of Ives, of the simplicity and directness of Satie, and of the transparency of Webern, are juxtaposed without any need to mediate or explain how they are connected. The music is continually surprising, exhilarating, and challenging; it resists easy categorisation. Sometimes engagingly direct and transparent, at other times bewilderingly complex and profuse, it invites listeners to be alert to new kinds of musical experience, to suspend judgement based on more familiar models. There is a sense of immediacy that deliberately avoids any suggestion of a general plan or underlying theoretical principle; the controlling idea of a 'grand narrative' such as is associated with composers of the European avant-garde is explicitly rejected in favour of a variety of ad hoc procedures."
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NW 80803CD
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"Asked whether he would describe his music as 'Sound for the sake of sound,' James Tenney (1934-2006) replied, 'It's sound for the sake of perceptual insight -- some kind of perceptual revelation.' This release aptly demonstrates Tenney's deep exploratory fascination with the nature and potentialities of aural perception. His attraction to these topics was simultaneously intellectual and sensuous, and its musical products at once invite both sustained reflection and the most immediate of corporeal responses. A number of his works feature pitch collections that progressively approach or diverge from the structure of the harmonic series, or that gradually move between its 'harmonically complex' or 'dissonant' upper reaches and its 'harmonically simple' or 'consonant' lower regions. A paradigmatic example is provided by Harmonium #1 (1976). For 12 String (rising) (1971) represents an arrangement for strings of Tenney's classic electroacoustic composition For Ann (rising) (1969), which predated his interest in harmony. It nonetheless shares with much of his subsequent music a ruthless simplification of form and structure that eschews narrative drama in order to highlight the subjective processes and perceptions of the listener. The first movement of Two Koans and a Canon (1982) is entitled "First Koan (a gentler Beast)" and constitutes a variation upon Tenney's earlier Beast (1971) for solo double bass. It is a study in acoustical beating, an alluring rhythmic pulsation audible between tones whose pitches are sufficiently close to each other. The "Second Koan" in turn recalls Tenney's Koan (1971) for solo violin. It exhibits another of his radically reduced formal designs: a steady cross-string tremolo that gradually migrates upwards in register across the strings of the instrument. The brief final "Canon" is the most structurally complex of the movements. Alone of the three it employs a live tape-delay system. From 1975-84, Tenney produced a number of other compositions calling for the use of a tape-delay system in live performance, which he once referred to as 'the poor man's orchestra' for its ability to produce lush textures from few instruments. The most texturally sophisticated of these pieces is Voice(s) (1984), which requires the use of four separate tape machines. The final track, Blues for Annie (1975), offers a glimpse into the breadth of Tenney's personal musical interests. His appreciation for the blues is expressed forthrightly in a literal transcription and arrangement of Jaybird Coleman's 1927 recording of 'No More Good Water 'Cause the Pond is Dry.' "
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NW 80794CD
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"The intense individuality of Morton Feldman's (1926?1987) art and its 'painterly' aspect have tended to push his rich output of works into a zone all of their own, surrounded by a moat of stillness. This recording attempts the reverse process -- to bring his choral works (the previously unrecorded Chorus and Instruments, Voices and Instruments 1, Voices and Instruments 2, and The Swallows of Salangan) into a 'gallery' of other choir compositions of his times. Through the interaction with works of other characters and aspirations, mutual illumination might become a new Feldman experience. Two of the five other works confront Feldman's textless choral singing with words. These, however, carry their own special musical intent. Three early twelve-tone gems [Three Statements] of Will Ogdon (1921?2013) move with Walt Whitman 'into the wordless . . . away from books, away from art,' and reluctantly away from human desire, as embodied in the central poem by Thomas Campion. Robert Carl's (b. 1954) The City brings a transcendentalist layered sound to the mystical reflections of the architect Louis Sullivan, contemplating the natural and the built-human in the lake and city of Chicago. The notion of wordless chorus fans out in varied directions in the other three works. As one of Feldman's closest associates in the New York School, Earle Brown (1926?2002) intrigues us as much for the stark differences from Feldman shown by his abstract choral mobiles (Small Pieces for Large Chorus). The Sound Patterns of Pauline Oliveros (1932?2016) are less abstract than their title might imply -- moving in and out of singing itself into extended vocality, and towards newly-suggested verbal exclamations of a non-semantic kind. Warren Burt (b. 1949), a former student of both Oliveros and Ogdon at the University of California, San Diego, contributes with his Elegy the most recent piece, also the closest to Feldman's simple successions of chorale-like chords. His harmonies, however, acquire their elegiac qualities from chromatic memories and their contradictions, moving along unfamiliar paths."
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NW 80798CD
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"The immersive sonic textures that characterize Michael Winter's (b. 1980) music are crafted from comprehensive lists of data, with each composition encompassing a musical question that is addressed algorithmically. A performance lasts for as long as it takes to 'answer' the question, expressing all results as efficiently as possible. Winter leaves room for unanticipated results by keeping things open, notably in the instrumentation, which, rather than specifying instruments, tends to designate certain properties such as 'plucked strings," or 'sustaining instruments.' In this way, each performance offers a different manifestation of the same underlying structure. For Winter, beauty is the experience of something new, and to experience something new is to evolve. Even though he allows for a great many possibilities, the recordings here evince a highly tuned aesthetic filter. All of the five works included in this collection use plucked string instruments (guitar, virginal, and harp) and pure tones (ebowed guitar and pure tones). Together, they form a metacomposition, bound together by two versions of necklaces. The titles describe the processes that form each work: necklaces represents picking patterns with aperiodic necklaces (strings of data with specific constraints of rotational and symbolic permutation), and in mass and band a constraint akin to a band pass filter is applied to an Ockeghem mass. Likewise, in chorale and finely tuned resonators, instruments resonate the harmonics of a chorale, and quieting rooms makes use of phase cancellation to quiet a room. The title of the piece lower limit refers to Winter's intention to use the smallest amount of code possible -- in other words, to find the lower limit for programming a composition. This idea, in fact, applies to all of the pieces here, since all are concerned with how to express ideas in a maximally efficient way."
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