Rothko Chapel/Why Patterns?
UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus; David Abel, viola; Karen Rosenak, celeste; William Winant, percussion; California EAR Unit Feldman's works of the seventies were less aggressively strange than those of the fifties and sixties. He sought out warmer, simpler chords, bewitching fragments of melody. Music of this period—the viola-and-ensemble cycle "The Viola in My Life"; a series of concertolike pieces for cello, piano, oboe, and flute; the choral masterwork "Rothko Chapel"—provides a good introduction to a sometimes forbidding sound-world. (Rothko Chapel has been recorded immaculately on the New Albion label... --Alex Ross in The New Yorker The Rothko Chapel is a spiritual environment created by the American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970) as a place for contemplation where men and women of all faiths, or of none, may meditate in silence, in solitude or celebration together. For this chapel, built in 1971 by the Ménil Foundation in Houston, Texas, Rothko painted fourteen large canvasses. While I was in Houston for the opening ceremonies of the Rothko Chapel, my friends John and Dominique de Ménil asked me to write a composition as a tribute to Rothko to be performed in the chapel the following year. To a large degree, my choice of instruments (in terms of forces used, balance and timbre) was affected by the space of the chapel as well as the paintings. Rothko's imagery goes right to the edge of his canvas, and I wanted the same effect with the music - that it should permeate the whole octagonal-shaped room and not be heard from a certain distance. The result is very much what you have in a recording - the sound is closer, more physically with you than in a concert hall. The total rhythm of the paintings as Rothko arranged them created an unbroken continuity. While it was possible with the paintings to reiterate color and scale and still retain dramatic interest, I felt that the music called for a series of highly contrasted merging sections. I envisioned an immobile procession not unlike the friezes on Greek temples. These sections could be characterized as follows: 1. a longish declamatory opening; 2. a more stationary "abstract" section for chorus and chimes; 3. motivic interlude for soprano, viola and tympani; 4. a lyric ending for viola with vibraphone accompaniment, later joined by the chorus in a collage effect. There are a few personal references in Rothko Chapel. The soprano melody, for example, was written on the day of Stravinsky's funeral service in New York. The quasi-Hebraic melody played by the viola at the end was written when I was fifteen. Certain intervals throughout the work have the ring of the synagogue. There were other references which I have now forgotten. --Morton Feldman If there is a Holocaust memorial in Feldman’s work, it is “Rothko Chapel,” which was written in 1971, for Rothko’s octagonal array of paintings in Houston. Rothko had committed suicide the previous year, and Feldman, who had become his close friend, responded with his most personal, affecting work. It is scored for viola, solo soprano, chorus, percussion, and celesta. There are voices, but no words. As is so often the case in Feldman’s music, chords and melodic fragments hover like shrouded forms, surrounded by thick silence. The viola offers wide-ranging, rising-and-falling phrases. The drums roll and tap at the edge of audibility. Celesta and vibraphone chime gentle clusters. There are fleeting echoes of past music, as when the chorus sings distant, dissonant chords reminiscent of the voice of God in Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron,” or when the soprano sings a thin, quasi-tonal melody that echoes the vocal lines of Stravinsky’s final masterpiece, the “Requiem Canticles.” That passage was written on the day of Stravinsky’s funeral, in April, 1971—another thread of lament in the pattern. But the emotional sphere of “Rothko Chapel” is too vast to be considered a memorial for an individual, whether it is Rothko or Stravinsky. Shortly before the end, something astonishing happens. The viola begins to play a keening, minor-key, modal song, redolent of the synagogue. Feldman had written this music decades earlier, during the Second World War, when he was attending the High School of Music and Art, in New York. Underneath it, celesta and vibraphone play a murmuring four-note pattern, which calls to mind a figure in Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.” The song unfurls twice, and the chorus answers with the chords of God. The allusions suggest that Feldman is creating a divine music, appropriate to the somber spirituality of Rothko’s chapel. In a sense, he is fusing two different divinities, representative of two major strains in twentieth-century music: the remote, Hebraic God of Schoenberg’s opera, and the luminous, iconic presence of Stravinsky’s symphony. Finally, there is the possibility that the melody itself, that sweet, sad, Jewish-sounding tune, speaks for those whom Feldman heard beneath the cobblestones of German towns. It might be the chant of millions in a single voice. from the essay, American Sublime, by Alex Ross in the New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/06/19/american-sublime Available here: iTunes HDtracks The Island of St. Hylarion
Music of Cyprus, 1413-1422: Michael Collver, countertenor, corno muto; John Fleagle, tenor, harp; Shira Kammen, vielle; Laurie Monahan, mezzosoprano; Crawford Young, lute; with guests Peter Becker, Karen Clark-Young, Randall Cook, Steven Lundhal, Margaret Raines. This is without a doubt the best recording of the Cypriot-French music to date. --Historical Performance: The Journal of Early Music America Virtually all of the music in this recording comes from one of the most neglected but fascinating sources of late Medieval music, the richly copied manuscript J.II.9 of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin, written between 1413 and 1422 in Cyprus. This manuscript is the sole witness to a brief but extraordinary flowering of western art music in Cyprus at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century. The Cyprus codex begins with a fascicle of plainsong, including several mass cycles as well as offices for St. Hylarion and St. Anne, both of whom are particularly venerated in Cyprus. Then follow a series of polyphonic glorias and credos, several of which are arranged in pairs, a cantus firmus mass lacking the agnus dei (added by a later scribe), 41 isorhythmic motets, 102 ballades, 43 virelais, and 21 rondeaux. The texts of the secular works and eight of the motets are French and reveal familiarity with the poetry of Machaut and his contemporaries. The rest of the music uses latin texts, including a thinly veiled imitation of a motet text by Philippe de Vitry. All the works are anonymous and unique to this codex which stands as one of the few medieval manuscripts that solely represents the musical output of a single court and chapel. In spite of the uniqueness of this repertory it has been neglected by scholars and performers. It is seldom glamorous to deal with anonymous works, and yet the artists responsible for this music were people of uncommon imagination and power. One among them produced a cycle of motets related to the great "O" antiphons of the week before Christmas ending with the vigil motet, "O sacra virgo virginum/Tu nati nata suscipe", and the Christmas motet, "Hodie Puer nascitur/Homo mortalis firmiter". This cycle is clearly a single unit and rivals in scope anything being composed in Europe at the time. Available here: iTunes This Time We Are Both
Larry Ochs, tenor and sopranino; Jon Raskin, baritone; Bruce Ackley, soprano; Steve Adams, alto and sopranino; saxophone quartet recorded live on tour in Russia, 1989 Extremely fresh music contingent on just the kind of quick-thinking, big-picture inventiveness that Rova carries off so seamlessly: * * * * * --Down Beat The 12th annual Leningrad Jazz Festival was well underway when Rova Saxophone Quartet inaugurated its 1989 tour of the Soviet Union with the first of two performances in Lensoviet Concert Hall. Six and a half years had passed since Rova had first penetrated the "Iron Curtain" for a three-city Soviet tour, documented on the hatART recording "Saxophone Diplomacy" and a video of the same title. In June, 1983, Rova had been invited by the offically banned Contemporary Music Club of Leningrad, and had been forced to play literally underground - in the basement of the Dostoevsky Museum. By mid-November 1989, much had changed: Rova was being sponsored by Gosconcert, a department in the Soviet Ministry of Culture, and its 23-member entourage of musicians, friends, family, writers, artists, poets, photographers and engineers, was being escorted by young Russian guides who were openly critical of both their government and the havoc wreaked on their society by 70 years of state socialism. We heard frank stories about black market car lots, ten-year waiting lists for apartments, the cultivation of "connections" for special favors, and the failure of Leninist ideal. "Next they are going to run out of electricity," quipped our tour leader, Misha, when our bus transportation was jeopardized by a gasoline shortage in Latvia ... Available here: iTunes HDtracks Alcatraz
for synthesizers, buoys, birds, fog horns, singing, gambuh flute and cell doors in the resonant spaces of the prison, with Jim Bengston's collaborative photographs Some of the music is mesmeric, even eerie, and some is contemplative and meditational. At other times it is more insistently and rhythmically violent as befits the memory of such a forbidding and foreboding place as Alcatraz. --CD Review Alcatraz is a truly collaborative work. I had long talked with Jim Bengston, a friend since the sixties, about the possibility of combining image with music in a meaningful way. We agreed that there had to be a subject which the photography and the music must separately illuminate; but they ought to inform each other as well. He visited San Francisco on a regular basis when I was living there in the early eighties and somehow the idea of the lonely island as a subject crept into our collective consciousness. Jim's penchant for photographing open, stark landscapes and looming, lonely places seemed perfect for Alcatraz; it appears, in its semi-ruined state, to be an extension of the natural world which surrounds it. My fascination with the sounds of the maritime environment around San Francisco Bay, as witness my "Fog Tropes" of 1982, made the "soundscape" of Alcatraz a natural attraction for me. Beginning in the Fall of '82, Jim photographed out on the island on numerous occasions over a period of two years, and I sallied forth on several of these expeditions with tape recorder and microphone, recording the sounds of buoys, birds and fog horns as well as singing and gambuh flute playing in some of the resonant spaces of the prison. I also captured the famous roar of the cell doors' mechanized closings - this chorus of metal echoing through the wildly reverberant spaces of Alcatraz is probably the perfect sound print of the desolation and utter finality of the place. For me the music and pictures have always exuded meaning, although I am loath to be specific, leaving it to those regarding the pictures and listening to the music to find their own hermeneutics. --Ingram Marshall Available here: iTunes Set of Five
Nocturne, John Cage; Set of Five, Henry Cowell; Invocations to Vahakn, Alan Hovahness; Toki No Mon, Somei Satoh; Varied Trio, Lou Harrison David Abel, violin; Julie Steinberg, piano; William Winant, percussion Available here: iTunes Music of Norway
Lullabies, dances, cattlecalls and folktales from Norway. Willow bark flute, voice, hardanger fiddle, non-tempered organ, dulcimer, synesizer, bouzouki. Selections from the Heilo catalogue with Kristen Braten-Berg, Pernille Anker, Hans Brimi, Torleiv Bolstad and Eivind Groven a.o. Available here: iTunes The Perilous Night/Four Walls
Margaret Leng Tan, prepared piano, piano; Joan La Barbara, soprano Tan brings out the sheer emotional and physical intensity of these works with her sensitive approach and faultless execution. Magnificent and necessary. --Metro Times, Detroit "The Perilous Night" was written for the prepared piano, John Cage's now classic invention from the late 1930's, where various objects inserted between the strings of a grand piano act as mutes which completely transform the timbral characteristics of the instrument. "The Perilous Night", one of Cage's more complex preparations, calls for a piano to be heavily muted with materials ranging from the standard bolts, nuts and weather stripping to bamboo slivers. John Cage has mentioned that the idea for the title, "The Perilous Night", came from Joseph Campbell's recounting of an Irish myth concerning a perilous bed which rested on a floor of polished jasper. Since 1982, Jasper Johns, a long-time colleague of Cage's, has created a series of "Perilous Night" works all of which contain a page from John Cage's score. ... the revelation of a masterpiece. --Yorkshire Post UK Available here: iTunes Singing Through
Joan La Barbara, soprano; Leonard Stein, piano; William Winant, percussion Contrasts the sacred with the secular, the serene with the sexual. Joan La Barbara is the perfect vehicle ... for this delicate music. --CD Review Available here: iTunes
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New Albion Records, Inc.Archives
October 2010
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