Black Sarabande expands upon pianist-composer Robert Haigh’s beguiling debut for Unseen Worlds with a collection of intimate and evocative piano-led compositions. Haigh was born and raised in the ‘pit village’ of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire, England. His father, as most of his friends’ fathers, was a miner, who worked at the local colliery. Etched into Haigh’s work are formative memories of the early morning sounds of coal wagons being shunted on the tracks, distant trains passing, and walking rural paths skirting the barren industrial landscape
The album opens with the title track — a spacious, plaintive piano motif develops through a series of discordant variations before resolving. On ‘Stranger On The Lake,’ sweeping textures and found sounds lay the foundation for a two chord piano phrase evoking a sense of elegy. ‘Wire Horses’ is an atmospheric audio painting of open spaces and distant lights. ’Air Madeleine’ uses variations in tempo and dynamics to craft the most seductively melodic track on the album. ‘Arc Of Crows’ improvises on a single major seventh chord, splintering droplets of notes as ghostly wisps of melodic sound slowly glide into view. ‘Ghosts Of Blacker Dyke’ is a melancholic evocation of Haigh’s roots in England’s industrial north — intermingling dissonant sounds of industry within a set of languid piano variations. ‘Progressive Music’ is constructed around a series of lightly dissonant arpeggiated piano chords which modulate through major and minor key changes before resolving at a wistful and enigmatic refrain. In ‘The Secret Life of Air’, a nocturnal, low piano line slowly weaves its way through the close-miked ambience of the room, nearly halting as each note is allowed to form and reverberate into a blur with the next. The ambitious ‘Painted Serpent’ calmly begins with drone-like pads and builds with the introduction of counterpoint piano lines and an orchestral collage of sound underpinned by a deliberate bass motif. ’Broken Symmetry’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ highlight Haigh’s gift for blurring the line between dissonance and harmony - opaque piano portraits of moonlight and shadows glancingly evoke the impressionistic palettes of Harold Budd, Debussy and Satie.
Based on actual 18th-century texts, David Lang’s anatomy theater follows the astonishing progression of an English murderess from confession to execution and, ultimately, public dissection before a paying audience of fascinated onlookers. Through the miracle of opera, she sings through it all. Composed by David Lang, with libretto co-written by Lang and scenic designer Mark Dion, anatomy theater is a tuneful and grisly theatrical event that conjures a time when “specialists” traveled from town to town in pre-modern Europe, conducting public dissections of the corpses of executed criminals, seeking evidence of moral corruption in the interior of the human body. And as Lang himself warns in the liner notes, it’s not for the squeamish — and that includes the performers: “No singers were harmed in the creation of this opera. It seems like an odd statement to make about an entertainment, but it is definitely appropriate to make it, since our piece is so full of terrifying things. Crime and punishment, execution, dissection, the thin line that separates moralistic cruelty from dispassionate scientific inquiry — they’re all there.”
The
Salt Lake Electric Ensemble (SLEE) formed in 2009 with a dual purpose:
to perform and record Terry Riley’s 1964 masterwork In C, and to explore
music making with the most powerful and intriguing musical instrument
of our time: the computer. SLEE’s 2010 recording of In C, notable for
being the first rendition to primarily use electronic instruments, was
lauded by critics and audiences throughout the world.
SLEE is a collective that often shifts personnel and instrumentation
from project to project and has ranged from 6-9 members. The ensemble’s
body of work includes new recordings and performances of music from the
essential composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, along with original
compositions and improvisations.
Susanne Kessel invited 250 composers from all over the world to write
new piano pieces for Beethoven's 250th anniversary in the year 2020. All
pieces refer to Beethoven's music and/or his life.
Susanne Kessel played the world premieres of all the piano pieces in
Beethoven's birthtown Bonn. And further performances also in other
cities and countries.
Ecstatic Science isthe fourth album fromyMusic, "Paul Simon's genre-crossing chamber ensemble of choice," (Rolling Stone), a group of "six contemporary classical polymaths who playfully overstep the boundaries of musical genres,” (The New Yorker) featuring new works from Missy Mazzoli, "one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York" (The New York Times) and Pulitzer Prize-winning Caroline Shaw alongside standout tracks from Gabriella Smith and Paul Wiancko.
yMusic is:
Alex Sopp, flutes and vocals -Hideaki Aomori, clarinets
CJ Camerieri, trumpet and horn -
Rob Moose, violin and guitar,
Nadia Sirota, viola -
Gabriel Cabezas, cello
yMusic, "six contemporary classical polymaths who playfully overstep the boundaries of musical genres,” (The New Yorker)
performs in concert halls, arenas and clubs around the world. Founded
in New York City in 2008, yMusic believes in presenting excellent,
emotionally communicative music, regardless of style or idiom. Their
virtuosic execution and unique configuration (string trio, flute,
clarinet, and trumpet) has attracted the attention of high profile
collaborators—from Paul Simon to Bill T. Jones to Ben Folds—and inspired original works by some of today’s foremost composers, including Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli and Andrew Norman.
"The scariest music you will hear throughout your entire life. Period"
Performed By: Chorus and Symphony Orchestra of the National Philharmonic, Warsaw
Tenor: Kazimierz Pustelak - Soprano: Stefania Woytowicz
Bass: Bernard Ładysz - Chorus Master: Jozef Bok
Conductor: Andrzej Markowski
- "Unnerving, intense, bloodcurdling, sinister, dramatic – the music of
“Kosmogonia” features Penderecki’s famous, unorthodox instrumental
techniques, and some of the darkest music ever composed.
Hailed by The Guardian as “Poland’s greatest living composer”, Krzysztof
Penderecki is the maestro behind the unforgettable, disturbing music on
The Shining (including ‘De Natura Sonoris No. 2’, featured here). A
complex tapestry of sound with striking use of pizzicato and flexatone,
with aggressive barrages from brass and percussion, dissonant woodwind
chords, spoken and hissing sounds, fervent strings, swirling organ,
climactic choral and solo vocals.
Krzysztof Penderecki’s unique music has featured in films such as: The
Shining, The Exorcist, Children Of Men, The People Under The Stairs,
Shutter Island, and many more.
Thanks to the estate of Krzysztof Penderecki, Cold Spring are honoured
to present this masterpiece in digital format for the first time since
the 1974 vinyl release. Sympathetically remastered for CD by Denis
Blackham and Martin Bowes."
(born November 23, 1933, Debica, Poland), outstanding Polish composer of his generation whose novel and masterful treatment of orchestration won worldwide acclaim.
Penderecki studied composition
at the Superior School of Music in Kraków (graduated 1958) and
subsequently became a professor there. He first drew attention in 1959
at the third Warsaw Festival of Contemporary Music, where his Strophes for soprano, speaker, and 10 instruments was performed. The following year was marked by the performances of both Anaklasis and the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 strings. The Threnody
illustrates Penderecki’s skilled and refined treatment of instruments,
making use of quarter-tone clusters (close groupings of notes a quarter
step apart), glissandi (slides), whistling harmonics (faint, eerie tones
produced by partial string vibrations), and other extraordinary
effects. The techniques used in Threnody were extended to his vocal work Dimensions in Time (1961) and his operasThe Devils of Loudun (1968) and Paradise Lost (1978).
Penderecki’s Psalms of David (1958) and Stabat Mater
(1962) reflect a simple, linear trend (letting interwoven melodic lines
predominate and determine harmonies) in his composition. The Stabat Mater combines traditional and experimental elements and led to his other well-known masterpiece, the St. Luke Passion (1963–66). In form, the latter work resembles a Baroque passion, such as those by Johann Sebastian Bach, and Penderecki makes use of traditional forms such as the passacaglia (a variation form), a chantlike freedom of metre, and a 12-tone
row (ordering of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale) based on the
motif B♭-A-C-B (in German notation, B-A-C-H) in homage to Bach.
Penderecki’s Canon for 52 strings (1962) made use of polyphonic techniques (based on interwoven melodies) known to Renaissance composers. Yet he also made some use of the techniques of aleatory (chance) music, percussive vocal articulation, nontraditional musical notation, and other devices that stamped him as a leader of the European avant-garde. His later works include the two-part Utrenja (1969–71; Morning Prayer), Magnificat (1973–74), Polish Requiem (1980–2005), Cello Concerto No. 2 (1982; Grammy Award, 1998), the opera Ubu Rex (1990–91), and the choral work Phaedra (2002).
In
addition to composing steadily, Penderecki taught composition and
conducted. His collected essays, an interview, and other writings were
published in Labyrinth of Time: Five Addresses for the End of the Millennium (1998). In 2004 he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for music.
Disappearing was conceptualized while thinking
about the mechanics of memory. Composer, and Producer, Grant Cutler was
interested in exploring the elastic nature of recollection, how
distorted it can become and the looseness of factual recounting over
time. For the album, Cutler recorded musicians performing against long
delays of themselves, a kind of sonic déja vu where memory and
experience blend together in an evolving present.
The second part of the project was to introduce this music
to a group of filmmakers, animators, cinematographers, documentarians,
and visual artists each of whom picked a track from the set that seemed
personally inspiring and used it as a reverse score of sorts with which
to create an accompanying short film. Each artist had only two
guidelines when making their films: to focus on a moment of simultaneous
creation and dissolution, and, to echo the method used in creating the
music: include an element of improvisation.
The album along with the short films culminate in a
multi-year project which merges music along with the 17 short films into
one cinematic experience. The completed film and album are meditative
audio/visual explorations of temporal realignment and the dissolution of
memory; the constant engagement of reworking the past to establish the
present.
Disappearing finds Cutler weaving the present with the past;
an effortless sliding from tangent to tangent, a blurry electric cloud
brought to focus
Bang on a Can Opera Ensemble:
Isabel Hagen – viola
Mariel Roberts – cello
Pat Swoboda – bass
Owen Weaver – percussion
Conducted by Lesley Leighton
An opera in one act for solo baritone voice, solo piano and ensemble,
David Lang’s the loser has been lauded by the New York Times as a
“boldly unconventional” work, and that’s almost putting it mildly. the
loser is based on the Thomas Bernhard novel of the same name, in which
an anonymous narrator and once-promising concert pianist retells the
story of his friend’s suicide. As it turns out, both were students in
the same master class, taught by Vladimir Horowitz, as a young Glenn
Gould. Playing in the shadow of Gould brings both to the realization
that true greatness will never be theirs, wrecking both their lives
forever.
-is a composer and cellist based in Brooklyn, NYC. As a versatile collaborator, Jensen has recorded and performed with Jóhann Jóhannsson, Stars of the Lid, Owen Pallett, Max Richter and numerous others. As the artistic director of ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble), brought to life some of the most cherished works of modern classical music, including pieces by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Gavin Bryars, Dustin O’Halloran, and more.
Jensen now follows her debut album 'For This From That Will Be Filled' with 'Drone Studies,' highlighting Jensen’s improvisational prowess, venturing even deeper into the meditative mire but with more organic, naturally expressive air.
Clarice Jensen - The experience of repetition as death
Brooklyn-based cellist Clarice Jensen’s gorgeous
sophomore album and first for FatCat’s 130701 imprint, ‘The experience
of repetition as death’, was recorded and mixed by Francesco Donadello
at Vox-Ton studios in Berlin in late 2018 and mastered by Rafael Anton
Irisarri. Following up her hugely impressive 2018 debut, ‘For This From
That Will Be Filled’ , which included collaborations with Jóhann
Jóhannsson and Michael Harrison, all of the material on this new album
was written and performed by Clarice alone and all of the sounds on it
were created with a cello through a variety of effects and effects
pedals.
An outstanding musician, Clarice has recorded and
performed for a host of stellar artists including Jóhann Jóhannsson, Max
Richter, Björk, Arcade Fire, Nick Cave, Jónsi, Stars of the Lid, Dustin
O’Halloran, Joanna Newsom, Nico Muhly, Dirty Projectors, Frightened
Rabbit and Beirut. As the artistic director of ACME (the American
Contemporary Music Ensemble), she’s helped bring to life some of the
most revered works of modern classical music, and as a solo artist has
developed a distinctive compositional approach - improvising and
layering her instrument through loops and a chain of electronic effects
to open out a series of rich, drone-based sound fields. Forging a very
elegant and precise vision, her music has been described by Self-Titled
as “incredibly powerful neo-classical pieces that seem to come straight
from another astral plane” and by Boomkat as “languorously void-touching
ideas, scaling and sustaining a sublime tension”.
For his version of Music for Eighteen Musicians (Steve Reich), Erik Hall
played every part himself, recording one section a day in live, single
takes, painstakingly cobbling together a loving interpretation of
Reich’s masterpiece of minimalism. His methodology, as with Reich’s
piece itself, is workmanlike, and it’s from this humble and steadfast
undertaking that something honest and radiant emerges.
Erik Hall is a musician and producer living in Galien, MI. He has recorded and toured internationally with In Tall
Buildings, NOMO,
Wild Belle, and His Name Is Alive. In 2019 he composed and produced the
film score for The Night Clerk and contributed music to The Mountain. He
has released three albums under the moniker In Tall Buildings including
Driver (2015) and Akinetic (2018) on Western Vinyl
- Inspired by Erik Hall’s recent update of the Steve Reich’s Music for 18
Musicians, we’ve invited other artists in our extended label family to
cover the classical compositions that inform their respective musical
journeys, culminating in a series entitled Composure: Classical Reworks
for Modern Relief. Aimed at providing mental and spiritual respite in
our uncertain era, the series is appropriately commenced by Joseph
Shabason’s take on Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 1.”
"When Satie premiered this piece for the first time, he gathered all of
Paris' music critics and musicians into a theater, and had a big
cocktail party with a piano player playing background music.” Shabason
explains, “Off to the side there was a concert space with a stage,
piano, and chairs. After the party everyone filed into the concert space
and found their seats. Satie got on stage and told everyone that the
background music they just heard over drinks was his new material,
‘thank you and have a good night.’" Motivated by this story of an
innovator breaking format, Shabason's version of the piece intends to
capture the opium infused feeling of Paris in the late 1800s, at a
cocktail party where voices and conversations drift in and out, ignoring
the music that would later prove
immortal, let alone spur an entirely new way of listening and composing
music in the century to come. Shabason elaborates, invoking the ego
dilemma of all working musicians, "I wanted to capture the loneliness of
playing something that's musically meaningful while people just talk
over what you're doing and what you've created. It's something that
every gigging musician has experienced, and it's fucking awful...but
there is also a kind of warm loneliness to it. You know that no one
cares about your music, and in that knowledge you are left with the
feeling of doing something just for yourself…which further solidifies
your resolve and investment in what you’re doing."
Collaborating with string player Drew Jurecka, Shabason uses woozy
tape-manipulated sax, piano, and string swells to create an enveloping
world that's both forward-facing, and faithful to its source material.
Shabason warps the piece into a mildly hallucinatory depiction of
isolation in a crowded space, with hazy synth melodies that urge us to
pay the tab and head home, though not-so-deep-down we know there’s not a
cozier space on Earth than our table for one. In this period of social
distancing it invokes a paradoxical, yet relatable, sentiment: a longing
for the day when the crowds reassemble, so we can find our own fond
loneliness amidst them once again.
Theo Bleckmann, Katie Geissinger, Meredith Monk, Allison Sniffin: voices
Allison Sniffin: bowed psaltery
Michael Cerveris: guest artist
Bang on a Can All-Stars:
Ashley Bathgate: cello and voice
Robert Black: electric and acoustic bass
Vicky Chow: piano, keyboard and melodica
David Cossin: percussion
Mark Stewart: electric guitar, banjo and voice
Ken Thomson: clarinets and saxophones
Meredith Monk’s MEMORY GAME, as its title implies, is both a look back
at a pivotal point in her storied career, and a richly layered portrait
of how vocal music, under the guidance of an indefatigable master, can
play with our expectations in poignant and compelling ways.
Teaming up here with her renowned Vocal Ensemble (featuring Theo
Bleckmann, Katie Geissinger and Allison Sniffin) and backed by the Bang
on a Can All-Stars, Monk explores all-new arrangements of
never-before-recorded selections from her award-winning sci-fi opera The
Games, as well as new versions of several pieces originally released on
Do You Be (1987) and impermanence (2008). What emerges from MEMORY GAME
is a suite of songs that flows with a remarkable narrative cohesion,
stemming in large part from the composer’s willingness to revisit the
past with an insatiably curious eye.
“The first time that I ever worked with Bang on a Can, it was in the
late ‘90s,” Monk tells DownBeat magazine in a recent interview. “That
was really, in a way, the beginning of this project. It’s exciting to
hear these songs again in a new way, with more of an instrumental aspect
added onto the vocal.”
The composition Radio Music Extended, performed by Opening Performance Orchestra, draws upon the concept John Cage brought to
bear in his piece Radio Music from 1956. In collaboration with the Tesla
Museum in �Trest, whose collections include unique exhibits of radio
electronic and audio-visual devices, the 72-minute piece Radio Music
Extended came into being during a private live performance in July 2018.
The seven members of Opening Performance Orchestra and two alternating
guests operated 13 historical radio sets, dating from between 1935 and
1961.
Over the past 60 years or so, the content of the broadcast band of the airwaves has significantly changed, yet the acoustic
environment has remained highly variegated, providing a novel quality of
sound.
- "When I moved into my loft on Desbrosses, the streets were empty, since few people lived there. But both then and now, there were the homeless. Over time the neighborhood changed from an industrial warehouse district to a residential area. Anonymous Man is a memoir about my block. The piece is built around my memories of moving in, meeting my future wife for the first time there, and conversations I have had with two homeless men who made their home on the loading dock across the street."
Morton Feldman - Crippled Symmetry: at June in Buffalo
Recorded live on Monday, June 12, 2000 at the UB Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY.
Eberhard Blum (flute, alto flute, bass flute)
Jan Williams (glockenspiel, vibraphone)
Nils Vigeland (piano, celesta)
In 2000, Eberhard Blum, Nils Vigeland, and Jan Williams came together
once more as “The Feldman Soloists” to perform Crippled Symmetry, the
trio Feldman composed for them, on the 25th anniversary celebration of
the festival he founded.
Required listening for all fans of Feldman’s rich, hypnotic world of enigmatic harmony and mnemonic echo.
- Frozen Reeds, August 3, 2020
- remarks to Crippled Symmetry: at June in Buffalo
Philip Corner - Chord / Gong! (with Carles Santos)
New York, 1978, kindred composers Philip Corner and Carles Santos meet
at the Bösendorfer piano of Charlemagne Palestine to record four-hand
piano versions of Corner’s pieces “Chord” and “Gong!”. The result is a
long-flowing distillation of the source of the two composers’ affinity:
avant-garde practice of austere artistic devotion at play with perfect
imperfections of the uncontainable human spirit.
Composers: Michael Harrison, John Cage, Donnacha Dennehy
Performers: Sophia Subbayya Vastek, Michael Harrison, Nitin Mitta, Megan Schubert
Pianist
Sophia Subbayya Vastek lives in the intersections – struggling to know
her different cultural backgrounds, reveling in the questions, embracing
the space between music now and before, and living squarely in the
crosshairs of her wildest and most intimate emotional selves. Histories, her debut album, lives there.
With Sophia’s Indian heritage as a starting point, Histories is
an exploration of, and homage to, the idea of our individual stories –
those that make up our whole self, and which are unseen and unknown by
others. These stories are often painful, and often beautiful.
Included on Histories are the first studio recordings of two works by Michael Harrison, both recorded on a piano in just intonation. The first, Jaunpuri, is a composition based on a traditional Indian raga and
rare, old vocal composition. The work combines Western compositional
structures, notation, and harmony with the basic structures and
materials of Indian classical music, including raga (a melodic archetype), tala (rhythmic cycle), bandish (fixed melodic composition), gamak (melodic embellishments), and taan (virtuosic riffs).
Harrison’s other work, Hijaz Prelude, combines modal harmonies in raga Hijaz Bhairav (also known as the Hijaz mode in Arabic music) with a Western, arpeggiated keyboard figuration.
In between the works by Michael Harrison lies John Cage, who provides the spiritual glue, and Donnacha Dennehy’s pulsing Stainless Staining –
an expansion of the overtone series for piano and backing tape. In
Dennehy’s work, the repetitive structures and rhythms have the effect of
creating a high-energy mantra, one that might be sung or spoken with
the most ecstatic of convictions.
In many ways, Histories is an exploration
of a personal grief, but it’s also a kind of ‘call to prayer’. Each
track is a marker and the space between, the thread and continuing
narrative. Everyone has stories. Histories marks and honors them.
Baltimore-based Vastek, is a well-traveled
performer and visual artist. With composer David Ibbett, she is a
co-founder of Music of Reality, a multi-disciplinary series that
connects the world of scientific discovery and research with musicians
and artists.
Yesterday, I posted some info on a John Cage forum about a live online event involving Robert Wilson with a sig file stating that I was listening to Philip Corner. One of the replies was from a guy stating that he was also listening to Corner and that it was the above title that Brighternow was listening to earlier. It’s nice to still see some of this work still being released. I think he’s gotta be nearing 90 these days?
@rostasi 87 I believe. Had Covid not happened I would have been up in Glasgow last May to watch a performance of one of his pieces (With Both Ears) at the annual Tectonics festival.
Forma, for multichannel tape and live cello
Commissioned by INA GRM and first performed on the Acousmonium at INA
GRM's Multiphonies Concert Series, Maison de la Radio, Paris on June 1st
2019.
Cello recorded live in concert, performed by Lucy Railton. Serge Synthesiser recorded at GRM Studios in April 2019.
Organ recorded in Skálholt Cathedral, Iceland, by Alex Bonney, performed by Kit Downes in 2017.
All other materials recorded, mixed and created by Lucy Railton at GRM
Studios and in her Berlin studio between November 2018 and May 2019.
Lucy Railton is a British cellist and composer whose
work bridges experimental electronic and electroacoustic practices with
modern classical composition and performance. Since graduating from the
Royal Academy of Music in 2008, Railton has worked as a cofounder and
director of the London Contemporary Music Festival, played with
electronic producers as varied as Peter Zinovieff and Beatrice Dillon and performed works by avant-garde artists such as Iannis Xenakis and Morton Feldman. In March 2018, she released her debut solo album, Paradise 94,
on the Modern Love label. As she explores her interest in
electroacoustic music, improvisation and modified cello, Railton's sound
is an absorbing, often extreme examination of the potential of an
acoustic instrument.
"Up to XVIII century European music was mostly built over theological
texts and chants. To acquire new musical forms the contemporary
composers continue doing something similar to what their colleagues did a
few centuries ago. The basis of these compositions is not only the
Christian doctrine, but also ideas and texts from other traditions. The
75 minutes long rock cantata "The One Thus Gone" is based on the ancient
Buddhist texts.
To set off on this journey, one doesn’t have to be a Buddhist. These
words are extremely universal. They are akin to physical laws and have
no religious affiliation. The more so music. Tibetan chants are similar
to Gregorian plainsongs and Old Believers’ tones, tensons and Russian
epics, blues ballads and hard rock riffs. And, of course, they are
minimalistic. As always Batagov uses minimalist compositional techniques
and imprints of different ages, traditions and styles."
Alexander Manotskov: lead vocals, guitar, dryna
Asya Sorshneva: electric violin, electronics
Sergey Kalachev “Grebstel”: bass guitar, electronics
Vladimir Zharko: drums
Anton Batagov: piano
Featuring Lama Sonam Dorje [2]
Ensemble N’Caged:
Olga Rossini: soprano, Arina Zvereva: mezzo-soprano, Alena Parfenova: mezzo-soprano
The one thus gone (Tathagata in Pali and Sanskrit) – that’s how Buddha
called himself instead of “I”. The name refers to liberation from
samsara, a cycle of death and rebirth. Not only the Buddha, who lived
2,500 years ago, but any person can become “thus gone”. Those who have
“thus gone” explain to the rest of us how everything works, and what
kind of problems and obstacles keep us in samsara.
My composition is based on three ancient texts.
“The Last Words of Senge Wangchuk”, a great yogin and meditation
master who lived in the 11th and 12th centuries. This text is
constituted of the words he pronounced at the moment of his death as his
body was dissolving into a cloud of rainbow light.
“The Prayer of Samantabhadra”. This text was hidden in the 9th
century by the great master Padmasambhava, and revealed in the 14th
century by another great master Rigzin Godem (1337-1408). The authorship
of this text is attributed to primordial Buddha Samantabhadra.
Samantabhadra embodies enlightened mind which is present in everyone’s
mindstream. After having heard our true voice we start to wake up from
ignorance. In the conclusion of this text it is said that all beings who
hear this prayer will attain enlightenment within three lifetimes.
“Prostration to the 35 Buddhas”. In Buddhist tradition there is a
practice of confession of sins: pronouncing the 35 names of “The One
Thus Gone” while doing prostrations (full bows).
It is not at all necessary to be a Buddhist to set off on this
journey. These words are universal. Like the laws of physics, they do
not belong to any religion. Neither does music.
The text of the 4th (final) movement contains just one letter: A. It
is said that the most profound wisdom that needs hundreds of volumes for
its detailed explanation can be transmitted through one single letter
A. When we sing the sound Ah for a long time and listen to it we become
that sound. We become who we really are, and all the knowledge of the
universe and that of ourselves enters our mind without any words and
philosophy.
6 pieces for solo piano. Four of them were written in mid 90's, two -
much later. After having performed all those pieces in various
configurations at different places I revised them in 2018 and
"assembled" this suite/album. The 2018 recording was made on a gorgeous
Bosendorfer 280 VC grand piano.
Maestro Egisto Macchi (Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza - The
Group) recorded this mystical ethnographic trip to the South of Italy
imbued with its rites, superstitions, magical symbols and popular
mythologies in 1977 for the TV Documentary 'Sud e Magia'. Astoundingly
evoking the intensity, magic and psychedelia of its subject with the use
of inventive and unconventional techniques (aerophones, crystal
glasses, prepared piano), Macchi harmonizes kindred spirits from
transcendental, religious and metaphysical sound forms. Produced in the
Feeling Records Studios, Turin, which had the highest level of equipment
and technicians, this pinnacle of experimenal library music is released
for the first time with audio restored from the original masters tapes.
This is not yet a release but certainly New & Notable:
Commissioned by Gaudeamus to celebrate its 75th anniversary, with
support of the Performing Arts Fund NL, and dedicated to Henk
Heuvelmans.
Première 19th September 2020 by the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic
Orchestra and Silbersee conducted by Karina Canellakis, Concertgebouw,
Amsterdam.
- One hundred years is built on the encoding of
the days of all solar eclipses, which took (and will take) place from
1945 to 2045. Composed during this extraordinary year we are
experiencing, 2020, the piece scans the past 75 years, from the
beginning of the so-called 'atomic age', and looks forward 25 years to
2045, the date given by Ray Kurzweil, when technological 'singularity'
will supposedly occur - the moment when artifical intelligence will
surpass human intelligence. Historian Paul Rogers writes of this passage
of time in his essay: A Century On The Edge: From Cold War To Hot
World: 1945-2045 - marks a period when the human community faces the
choice of taking decisions that lead to immense self-destruction or of
acquiring the wisdom to handle its own destructive capabilities.
The piece is not meant as a narrative comment on specific dates or years
that are named, rather a contemplation on the passing of time. How we
look to the past and how we look to the future. As we hear dates and
years gone by, we might associate them with historical or personal
memories, and perhaps feel melancholic about a lost age, or identify
with a particular decade. Hearing dates in the future, might give rise
to uncertainty and fear, but might also evoke feelings of excitement and
hope.
- "The
plants are out and listening to the final rehearsal before tomorrow’s
concert of the Radio Fil and Silbersee at the Concertgebouw. Premiere of
my piece One Hundred Years - a commission from Gaudeamus to celebrate
their 75 years - looking 75 years back and 25 years in the future."
-is a composer and cellist based in Brooklyn, NYC. As a versatile collaborator, Jensen has recorded and performed with Jóhann Jóhannsson, Stars of the Lid, Owen Pallett, Max Richter and numerous others. As the artistic director of ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble), brought to life some of the most cherished works of modern classical music, including pieces by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Gavin Bryars, Dustin O’Halloran, and more.
Jensen now follows her debut album 'For This From That Will Be Filled' with 'Drone Studies,' highlighting Jensen’s improvisational prowess, venturing even deeper into the meditative mire but with more organic, naturally expressive air.
Clarice Jensen - The experience of repetition as death
Brooklyn-based cellist Clarice Jensen’s gorgeous
sophomore album and first for FatCat’s 130701 imprint, ‘The experience
of repetition as death’, was recorded and mixed by Francesco Donadello
at Vox-Ton studios in Berlin in late 2018 and mastered by Rafael Anton
Irisarri. Following up her hugely impressive 2018 debut, ‘For This From
That Will Be Filled’ , which included collaborations with Jóhann
Jóhannsson and Michael Harrison, all of the material on this new album
was written and performed by Clarice alone and all of the sounds on it
were created with a cello through a variety of effects and effects
pedals.
An outstanding musician, Clarice has recorded and
performed for a host of stellar artists including Jóhann Jóhannsson, Max
Richter, Björk, Arcade Fire, Nick Cave, Jónsi, Stars of the Lid, Dustin
O’Halloran, Joanna Newsom, Nico Muhly, Dirty Projectors, Frightened
Rabbit and Beirut. As the artistic director of ACME (the American
Contemporary Music Ensemble), she’s helped bring to life some of the
most revered works of modern classical music, and as a solo artist has
developed a distinctive compositional approach - improvising and
layering her instrument through loops and a chain of electronic effects
to open out a series of rich, drone-based sound fields. Forging a very
elegant and precise vision, her music has been described by Self-Titled
as “incredibly powerful neo-classical pieces that seem to come straight
from another astral plane” and by Boomkat as “languorously void-touching
ideas, scaling and sustaining a sublime tension”.
After reading about architect Anne
Tyng and her work, I became interested in the Platonic Solids, the five
polyhedra for which each face is the same regular polygon, and the same
number of polygons meet at each corner. Plato wrote about these and
assigned each with an element : earth, air, fire, water and ether
(quintessence). I've begun using these shapes to create graphic scores,
and for this piece, I placed them in the following order :
Icosahedron (water)
Dodecahedron (quintessence)
Icosahedron + Dodecahedron
Cube (earth)
Octahedron (air)
Cube + Octahedron
Tetrahedron (fire).
I sought to portray sound that evokes stasis and movement at the same
time, and very generally, to explore the perception of sound through
dimensional space and time.
The opera‘s music is based on the opening phrases of the revolutionary
song «Varshavyanka» but stratches them out in time almost 100 times. The
temporal transformation of the song reveals various harmonic and
melodic metamorphoses that become «nutritional material» for the chorus,
soloists and live electronic music. Thus arises a hermetic,
self-referential construction that feeds on itself.
Russian composer of mostly orchestral, chamber and vocal works that have been performed in Asia, Europe and North America.
Mr. Kourliandski studied flute with Daniil
Kharkeyevich at the P. I. Tchaikovsky State Conservatory in Moscow from
1991–95, where he later studied composition with Leonid Bobylev from 1997–2002 and had postgraduate studies with him from 2002–06. . . .
Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble (MCME)
was founded in 1990 by Yuri Kasparov, under the patronage of the famous
Russian composer Edison Denisov. The ensemble focuses on promoting 20th and 21st
century music. It is Russia’s foremost contemporary chamber ensemble
and consists of some of the best Russian musicians specializing in
modern music. . . .
Comments
The album opens with the title track — a spacious, plaintive piano motif develops through a series of discordant variations before resolving. On ‘Stranger On The Lake,’ sweeping textures and found sounds lay the foundation for a two chord piano phrase evoking a sense of elegy. ‘Wire Horses’ is an atmospheric audio painting of open spaces and distant lights. ’Air Madeleine’ uses variations in tempo and dynamics to craft the most seductively melodic track on the album. ‘Arc Of Crows’ improvises on a single major seventh chord, splintering droplets of notes as ghostly wisps of melodic sound slowly glide into view. ‘Ghosts Of Blacker Dyke’ is a melancholic evocation of Haigh’s roots in England’s industrial north — intermingling dissonant sounds of industry within a set of languid piano variations. ‘Progressive Music’ is constructed around a series of lightly dissonant arpeggiated piano chords which modulate through major and minor key changes before resolving at a wistful and enigmatic refrain. In ‘The Secret Life of Air’, a nocturnal, low piano line slowly weaves its way through the close-miked ambience of the room, nearly halting as each note is allowed to form and reverberate into a blur with the next. The ambitious ‘Painted Serpent’ calmly begins with drone-like pads and builds with the introduction of counterpoint piano lines and an orchestral collage of sound underpinned by a deliberate bass motif. ’Broken Symmetry’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ highlight Haigh’s gift for blurring the line between dissonance and harmony - opaque piano portraits of moonlight and shadows glancingly evoke the impressionistic palettes of Harold Budd, Debussy and Satie.
- Unseen Worlds
- Headphone Commute interview
International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE)
Conducted by Christopher Rountree
Featuring: Marc Kudisch, Robert Osborne
Peabody Southwell and Timur
Composed by David Lang, with libretto co-written by Lang and scenic designer Mark Dion, anatomy theater is a tuneful and grisly theatrical event that conjures a time when “specialists” traveled from town to town in pre-modern Europe, conducting public dissections of the corpses of executed criminals, seeking evidence of moral corruption in the interior of the human body. And as Lang himself warns in the liner notes, it’s not for the squeamish — and that includes the performers:
“No singers were harmed in the creation of this opera. It seems like an odd statement to make about an entertainment, but it is definitely appropriate to make it, since our piece is so full of terrifying things. Crime and punishment, execution, dissection, the thin line that separates moralistic cruelty from dispassionate scientific inquiry — they’re all there.”
The Salt Lake Electric Ensemble (SLEE) formed in 2009 with a dual purpose: to perform and record Terry Riley’s 1964 masterwork In C, and to explore music making with the most powerful and intriguing musical instrument of our time: the computer. SLEE’s 2010 recording of In C, notable for being the first rendition to primarily use electronic instruments, was lauded by critics and audiences throughout the world.
SLEE is a collective that often shifts personnel and instrumentation from project to project and has ranged from 6-9 members. The ensemble’s body of work includes new recordings and performances of music from the essential composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, along with original compositions and improvisations.
Susanne Kessel played the world premieres of all the piano pieces in Beethoven's birthtown Bonn. And further performances also in other cities and countries.
- New Amsterdam
yMusic is: Alex Sopp, flutes and vocals -Hideaki Aomori, clarinets
CJ Camerieri, trumpet and horn - Rob Moose, violin and guitar,
Nadia Sirota, viola - Gabriel Cabezas, cello
Disappearing was conceptualized while thinking about the mechanics of memory. Composer, and Producer, Grant Cutler was interested in exploring the elastic nature of recollection, how distorted it can become and the looseness of factual recounting over time. For the album, Cutler recorded musicians performing against long delays of themselves, a kind of sonic déja vu where memory and experience blend together in an evolving present.
The second part of the project was to introduce this music to a group of filmmakers, animators, cinematographers, documentarians, and visual artists each of whom picked a track from the set that seemed personally inspiring and used it as a reverse score of sorts with which to create an accompanying short film. Each artist had only two guidelines when making their films: to focus on a moment of simultaneous creation and dissolution, and, to echo the method used in creating the music: include an element of improvisation.
The album along with the short films culminate in a multi-year project which merges music along with the 17 short films into one cinematic experience. The completed film and album are meditative audio/visual explorations of temporal realignment and the dissolution of memory; the constant engagement of reworking the past to establish the present.
Disappearing finds Cutler weaving the present with the past; an effortless sliding from tangent to tangent, a blurry electric cloud brought to focusBang on a Can Opera Ensemble:
Isabel Hagen – viola
Mariel Roberts – cello
Pat Swoboda – bass
Owen Weaver – percussion
Conducted by Lesley Leighton
Brooklyn-based cellist Clarice Jensen’s gorgeous sophomore album and first for FatCat’s 130701 imprint, ‘The experience of repetition as death’, was recorded and mixed by Francesco Donadello at Vox-Ton studios in Berlin in late 2018 and mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri. Following up her hugely impressive 2018 debut, ‘For This From That Will Be Filled’ , which included collaborations with Jóhann Jóhannsson and Michael Harrison, all of the material on this new album was written and performed by Clarice alone and all of the sounds on it were created with a cello through a variety of effects and effects pedals.
An outstanding musician, Clarice has recorded and performed for a host of stellar artists including Jóhann Jóhannsson, Max Richter, Björk, Arcade Fire, Nick Cave, Jónsi, Stars of the Lid, Dustin O’Halloran, Joanna Newsom, Nico Muhly, Dirty Projectors, Frightened Rabbit and Beirut. As the artistic director of ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble), she’s helped bring to life some of the most revered works of modern classical music, and as a solo artist has developed a distinctive compositional approach - improvising and layering her instrument through loops and a chain of electronic effects to open out a series of rich, drone-based sound fields. Forging a very elegant and precise vision, her music has been described by Self-Titled as “incredibly powerful neo-classical pieces that seem to come straight from another astral plane” and by Boomkat as “languorously void-touching ideas, scaling and sustaining a sublime tension”.
"When Satie premiered this piece for the first time, he gathered all of Paris' music critics and musicians into a theater, and had a big cocktail party with a piano player playing background music.” Shabason explains, “Off to the side there was a concert space with a stage, piano, and chairs. After the party everyone filed into the concert space and found their seats. Satie got on stage and told everyone that the background music they just heard over drinks was his new material, ‘thank you and have a good night.’" Motivated by this story of an innovator breaking format, Shabason's version of the piece intends to capture the opium infused feeling of Paris in the late 1800s, at a cocktail party where voices and conversations drift in and out, ignoring the music that would later prove immortal, let alone spur an entirely new way of listening and composing music in the century to come. Shabason elaborates, invoking the ego dilemma of all working musicians, "I wanted to capture the loneliness of playing something that's musically meaningful while people just talk over what you're doing and what you've created. It's something that every gigging musician has experienced, and it's fucking awful...but there is also a kind of warm loneliness to it. You know that no one cares about your music, and in that knowledge you are left with the feeling of doing something just for yourself…which further solidifies your resolve and investment in what you’re doing."
Collaborating with string player Drew Jurecka, Shabason uses woozy tape-manipulated sax, piano, and string swells to create an enveloping world that's both forward-facing, and faithful to its source material. Shabason warps the piece into a mildly hallucinatory depiction of isolation in a crowded space, with hazy synth melodies that urge us to pay the tab and head home, though not-so-deep-down we know there’s not a cozier space on Earth than our table for one. In this period of social distancing it invokes a paradoxical, yet relatable, sentiment: a longing for the day when the crowds reassemble, so we can find our own fond loneliness amidst them once again.
Michael Cerveris: guest artist
Bang on a Can All-Stars:
Ashley Bathgate: cello and voice
Robert Black: electric and acoustic bass
Vicky Chow: piano, keyboard and melodica
David Cossin: percussion
Mark Stewart: electric guitar, banjo and voice
Ken Thomson: clarinets and saxophones
Teaming up here with her renowned Vocal Ensemble (featuring Theo Bleckmann, Katie Geissinger and Allison Sniffin) and backed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Monk explores all-new arrangements of never-before-recorded selections from her award-winning sci-fi opera The Games, as well as new versions of several pieces originally released on Do You Be (1987) and impermanence (2008). What emerges from MEMORY GAME is a suite of songs that flows with a remarkable narrative cohesion, stemming in large part from the composer’s willingness to revisit the past with an insatiably curious eye.
“The first time that I ever worked with Bang on a Can, it was in the late ‘90s,” Monk tells DownBeat magazine in a recent interview. “That was really, in a way, the beginning of this project. It’s exciting to hear these songs again in a new way, with more of an instrumental aspect added onto the vocal.”
Eberhard Blum (flute, alto flute, bass flute)
Jan Williams (glockenspiel, vibraphone)
Nils Vigeland (piano, celesta)
Required listening for all fans of Feldman’s rich, hypnotic world of enigmatic harmony and mnemonic echo.
Performed and recorded November 1, 1980
at Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna.
All works by Lili Boulanger (1893-1918)
Commissioned by INA GRM and first performed on the Acousmonium at INA GRM's Multiphonies Concert Series, Maison de la Radio, Paris on June 1st 2019.
Cello recorded live in concert, performed by Lucy Railton. Serge Synthesiser recorded at GRM Studios in April 2019.
Organ recorded in Skálholt Cathedral, Iceland, by Alex Bonney, performed by Kit Downes in 2017.
All other materials recorded, mixed and created by Lucy Railton at GRM Studios and in her Berlin studio between November 2018 and May 2019.
- Yannis Kyriakides
Icosahedron (water)
Dodecahedron (quintessence)
Icosahedron + Dodecahedron
Cube (earth)
Octahedron (air)
Cube + Octahedron
Tetrahedron (fire).
I sought to portray sound that evokes stasis and movement at the same time, and very generally, to explore the perception of sound through dimensional space and time.