Rhymes With Silver
Joan Jeanrenaud, cello; Julie Steinberg, piano; David Abel, violin, Ben Simon, viola; William Winant, percussion Joan Jeanrenaud, cello David Abel, violin Benjamin Simon, viola Julie Steinberg, piano William Winant, vibraphone and percussion This recording features Joan Jeanrenaud, the cellist for the Kronos Quartet for 20 years, in her first soloist recording, with the Abel, Steinberg, Winant Trio, and Benjamin Simon, violist for the Stanford Quartet. Rhymes With Silver was commissioned by Mark Morris for Yo-Yo Ma, and was premiered in 1997. The Mark Morris Group has toured the dance version of this piece across North America and Europe. This recording is the concert version, and was produced by Lou Harrison, in July, 2000. The work itself melds baroque with Javanese cadences, twentieth century dance forms, and strains of the mid 20th century avant garde. Available here: iTunes HDtracks Timbre Hollow
Dave Cerf, Erik Hoversten, guitar; Dominique Davison, cello; et al. "Timbre Hollow" is the debut album by Threnody Ensemble -- a new chamber group founded by guitarists Erik Hoversten (formerly of A Minor Forest), Dave Cerf and Dominique Davison. Incorporating into their compositions elements of improvisation, what is most striking about these pieces is Threnody Ensemble's use of non-Western instrumentation and techniques (hocketing, droning, etc.) in combination with more typical chamber instruments: Indian, Indonesian, and Cuban elements are all apparent but not overt. The effect is to complicate ideas of musical identity and authenticity, to discomfit lazy 'classical vs. folk' distinctions. But above all, the use of steel-stringed acoustic guitars and cello, with a variety of instrumental guests, creates a shimmering soundfield that is at once beyond instrumentalist ego and at home on the concert stage -- chamber music in the new era. Threnody Ensemble's core members come from diverse music backgrounds, though all were at one time or another heavily involved in the independent rock world. Erik Hoversten studied ethnomusicology and composition at UC Berkeley and founded the noted San Francisco avant-rock band A Minor Forest (Thrill Jockey). Dave Cerf studied non-Western musics at Cal Arts and was a member of the Washington, DC, based group Lorelei. Cellist Dominique Davison, also of A Minor Forest, has performed orchestral music since childhood and currently plays in the New York band 33.3. Available here: Groove HDtracks Where the Heart is Pure
Berkely Symphony Orchestra; Kent Nagano and Laurent Pillot, conductors; Kees Hulsmann, violin; Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano; Robin Sutherland, piano; Nadya Tichman, violin; Jack Van Geem, percussion Lewis writes in an attractive tonal idiom that appeals to both heart and mind. The music is euphonious and often disarmingly pretty, but with a core of strength that shows itself in surprising harmonic choices and vigorous instrumental textures. --San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle Where The Heart Is Pure was composed as a tribute to the wonderful Northwest poet Robert Sund, whom I've had the pleasure of knowing for over twenty-five years now. When I first met Robert, he was living in a converted net shed overlooking the Skagit River in the Northwest part of Washington State. For several years I made the journey out to visit him from my home in Seattle before moving to San Francisco. When I went to visit, we would typically stay up into the early hours of the morning while I improvised on the guitar and he read his poetry. Since I'd always wanted to set Robert's poetry to music, I decided to create a song cycle depicting a journey out to see him on the river. With that in mind, the first section of the composition starts with me leaving the urban environment I've always had to live in in order to survive as a composer. To relate to that idea, the music is jagged, yet with a jazz-like swing, with the soloist singing my own version of scat. The second section is the traveling music which depicts the actual journey out to see him. This section then leads to a cello solo which is the actual arrival music, bringing the listener to the setting of the first poem. All three poems are then set so the listener can easily understand them. --Peter Scott Lewis There Is No Exile Where The Heart Is Pure (for Pablo Casals) Behind the barn, the first week of March, on a bright morning after long rain, the windy cedar tree turns round and round in the sunlight. A winter horse rubs himself on the corner of the barn. Little pieces of cedar glide down where the ants are calling home their old senators who have failed utterly. Coming home, carrying suitcases full of noise, they pass through small American towns. On the barn wall, rusted nails bleed; and in fences, in hinges, in boards. The horse (I think of Casals in exile!) plays a suite unaccompanied in the silver cedar boards. Inside the barn, the stranded haywagon shudders. Between its floorboards seeds trickle to the earth. A dry dusty odor mingles with festering dampness, and a hand -- blue ridges and rivers coming and going through it -- rests on the white sheet of the windows. My grandmother comes to swing open wide the huge double doors, doors like drifiting continents, and a wedge of healing sunlight slips into the barn before her. --Robert Sund Available here: iTunes HDtracks New Music For Bowed Piano
For bowed piano, performed by the Colorado College New Music Ensemble Works for Bowed Piano Ensemble Just for fun, put this record on and ask your friends to tell you what instrument is making the sounds. Assure them that it's an instrument they're quite familiar with. Unless they already know what a bowed piano sounds like, they're sure to be mystified. Scott's pieces betray a Steve Reich influence; the harmonies are rich, relatively consonant, and unexpected, and repetitive passages with a steady eighth-note pulse alternate with long sustained chords. --Keyboard, May 1984 The Recording reconsidered upon its reissue-- It is generally agreed among artists that their productions, once disseminated through reproductions, take on a life of their own, as though they were adult people who had once been their artist's children. It's not that these compositions have matured, but when they are heard they must stand on their own merits, even as they are perceived by those familiar with my (much more complex and large scale) recent work, as early essays in an untried medium. I hope that this reissue will convey again some of the sense of excitement and discovery we all felt on our first voyages into an uncharted sound world. --Stephen Scott, June 1999 From the original liner notes: I first became aware that one could bow the strings of a piano in 1976, when I heard David Burge play a composition by Curtis Curtis-Smith. This was a solo piano work, played mostly on the keyboard but utilizing also some prepared piano techniques. One striking effect was produced by drawing nylon fish line across the strings. I was captivated by the sound and began immediately (before David's performance was over as I recall) to imagine the sound of several players bowing a piano's strings simultaneously, thus producing sustained chords. Thus was born the first composition for ensemble-bowed piano, Music One for Bowed Strings, which I completed in 1977 and performed that year with the Colorado College New Music Ensemble. It should be stressed that all of the sounds heard in the ensemble pieces are produced by the piano strings; no electronics or other sound producing devices are involved. The recordings are made "live" exactly as they are performed in concert. --Stephen Scott, November 1983 Available here: iTunes Hollow Bell
Honkyoku, for solo shakuhachi the companion recording to Blowing Zen: Finding an Authentic Life, published by H J Kramer In China during the Tang Dynasty, there lived a highly educated, eccentric Zen monk named Fuke. Fuke was prone to wandering about the streets ringing a bell, preaching the Dharma and chanting sutras. A young flute maker named Zhang Bo followed Fuke around the streets listening to his Zen doctrine. Zhang Bo longed to be Fuke's disciple but Fuke would not accede. Rejected by Fuke, Zhang Bo decided to craft a flute from a thick piece of bamboo and tuned it to imitate the sounds of Fuke's bell. He called the instrument his hollow bell. The shakuhachi is an instrument that dates far back into time and is usually associated with Japanese ritual and meditation. It is an instrument of extraordinary color and emotional range. In the modern era it has traveled from its monastic and folkloric identity to appear in every context, from symphonic work to free jazz. This record revisits the root material through the playing of the English musician, Ray Brooks, and it is the musical companion to the story told in his book, Blowing Zen (published by H J Kramer). Ray Brooks left the West in the era of the shifting cultural sands of the seventies, traveled the world, and found himself in Japan. There he came across the shakuhachi and with it the discipline of zen buddhism. Decades later his story is circulating among the western face of zen practice, as one of our stories, with all the ironies and coincidences of the core interest in 'mindfulness' that is across Europe and North America. The material on this record is referred to as 'original music' (honkyoku), and consists of repertoire that sits at the foot of history. Yet Ray's playing is not like a Western person attempting to sound Japanese. His playing is honest and transparent, without borders. It is a music that evokes the moment through celtic ritual, memory through zen melody. Available here: iTunes Packet
Steve Lacy, soprano sax; Irene Aebi, voice; Frederic Rzewski, piano Lacy and Rzewski ... make a compatible pair, creating luscious settings for Aebi's art-song renderings of Malina's supple, dark poetry and Lacy's stepwise tunes. --CD Review This work had its origin in the '60s. That's when I met Irene Aebi and Frederic Rzewski in Rome. The three of us have been working together ever since. The Living Theatre (founded by Julian Beck and Judith Malina in New York) was at that time very active in Italy and, as the most powerful and innovative theatre group anywhere, was becoming part of all our lives. I knew them from New York from the late '50s (The Connection, The Brig), and so did Frederic, who had composed and played with them. Later, in Paris, Judith gave us a copy of her just published "Poems of a Wandering Jewess" (1982 Handshake Editions, Jim Haynes). But it was Irene who was most struck by the poems. She fell in love with Judith's lyrics because of their heartfelt clarity and the range of feelings therein. She felt that "they would make wonderful songs". The music was written in August 1992, partly in Paris and partly in Greece. Over the next two years it was reworked, arranged and completed by the addition of a previously written song on words by Julian Beck (Theatre, from his obituary, 1985) which serves now as an introduction to the eight others by Malina. The songs are about theatre, life, death, birth, aging, pain, wandering, being a woman. They were written expressly for Irene, who, for now, is the only singer capable of performing them. All together they form a Cycle of Jazz Art Songs, which function as a musical structure and serve as basis for the improvisational match between the performers. Play-Wordplay-Fixed-Open. Naturally a work like Packet is different every time we do it. The title refers to the idea of a loosely bound but tightly connected parcel of songs, carried around the world by a "Gypsy-Jewish" Performing Artist, perhaps on a Packet Boat... --Steve Lacy PS: Before recording took place, we performed this work first at the Theatre Biplan in Lille, France, then at the Centro d'Arte in Padova, Italy, and finally at the American Center in Paris. Available here: Groove HDtracks Oiseau Bleu
Mélodies francaises de Charles Gaounod, Jules Massnet, Louis Beydts and Maurice Delage. Darynn Zimmer, soprano; Gait Sirguey, piano; Soloisti New York conducted by Ransom Wilson This imaginatively crafted recital of rarely heard French melodies places Zimmer in the forefront of emerging young American sopranos. --Classical Pulse! This collection of lesser known French art songs of the fin-de-siecle era presents the startlingly pure voice of Darynn Zimmer within piano and chamber orchestra settings. Poems of love, of nature, of despair, celebration and whimsy. This recital was created to evoke a world that had not yet fully become modern. Available here: iTunes HDtracks Persian Folklore
Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Alberto Almarza, flute, Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic, Juan Pablo Izquierdo, conductor Had Bela Bartok gathered folk material from Persia, his string quartets might have tuned out something like Reza Vali's. --Philadelphia Inquirer Many composers of the late nineteeth and early twentieth centuries used the folk music of their native countries as a source of inspiration for their compositions. For some composers, such as Stravinsky, this was a short-lived infatuation soon to be followed by neoclassicism, or, for others, one of several different forms of modernism. Among the major European composers, Bela Bartok, Manuel de Falla, and Zoltan Kodaly remained significantly committed to using folk music as primary sources for their works. In the present generation Reza Vali is a leading exponent of this practice and one of the few using Persian folk songs as a basis for composing Western classical music. As a student at the Teheran conservatory, Vali began to collect Persian folk music, an activity he continues today. He soon began composing music based on the actual melodies he had collected as well as writing music in the style of these songs - 'imaginary' folk music, to borrow a phrase from Bartok. In 1978 Vali completed his first set of folk songs for voice and piano. The next three sets, composed in the early 1980s, were also written for voice and piano, but in 1984 Vali began to write folk songs for different combinations of instruments. This recording includes Set No. 9 for flute and cello, Set No. 11B for string quartet, and Four Movements for string quartet and string orchestra. A stunning blend of Persian folk music and the western classical tradition. That anyone would even try to combine two such disparate influences is remarkable; that Vali has done it so beautifully is big news. --Stereophile Available here: iTunes HDtracks Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel
for conch, conch trio and ten trombones variously for ten trombones, solo conch shell, didgeridu, and conch trio This is where you have been forever and will always be forever. --Stuart Dempster, speaking about what it feels like to be in the cistern where time seems to stop. Every so often I have arranged one of the trombone master classes to take place in the cistern at Fort Worden, Port Townsend, the infamous two million gallon 186 foot diameter water tank about 70 miles northwest of Seattle. The most recent time, on 18 June 1994, consisted of nine current and former students, ten trombones in all including me. This excursion turned into a recording session that served the purpose of making this CD as well as providing sources for the Meet the Composer commission through their Composer/Choreographer project for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Arriving at the cistern about 10:00 am -- Al Swanson and I had been there since 8:30 -- I explained what would happen. The reverberation time of 45 seconds is so great that it is nearly impossible to communicate unless you are grouped together; however, if everyone is close to and facing the wall it is possible to whisper and be heard anywhere on the full circumference. The looks of amazement on the students, or anyone, as they climb down the ladder and hear their first sounds is worth the whole exercise! While spinning very slowly I face each of the other trombonists in turn. The trombonists are spread around the circumference of the cistern approximately 80 feet away from each other. When I face them straight on they are to hear what I play and continue playing that item until I face them again with either the same or, more likely, new information. If I face down they are to stop what they are doing; if I face up they are to ignore what I play and continue playing the previous information. This latter allows for solo passages. Because of the extraordinarily long reverberation the pacing needs to move extremely slowly in order to not have too much activity at once. The result is a series of multiple sound overlays underground, which is described accurately by the title Underground Overlays. --Stuart Dempster Available here: iTunes HDtracks Christop Maria Moosmann
organ works of Arvo Pärt, Giacinto Scelsi, and John Cage. Recorded in the Cathedral of Rottenburg, Germany. Moosmann's sensitive and articulate performances reveal just how expansive, how impressionistic, how exquisite the instrument can be. A gorgeous introduction to modern organ repertoire. * * * * --Classic CD None of these three composers are or were organists, yet here is some of the most compelling contemporary organ music. Perhaps it is the intense religiosity of Pärt and the cooler spiritualism of Scelsi or Cage (both of whom were devotees of Zen Buddhism) that make their organ excursions so valid, because the organ is, finally, the instrument of the divine. All three have found ways to breathe life into the "monster which never breathes" (Stravinsky). Perhaps the breaths it takes are simply very long and deep. All of Pärt's organ output is heard here. Compared to his repertory of choral and vocal sacred music, this is a small canon, but it is good to know it, especially in the light of his longer works such as "Passio" and "Tabula Rasa". Many of his principles of composition - the directness, the studied simplicity, what he calls "tintinnabuli" - are found in these works. By Cagean standards, "Souvenir" is a relatively mild piece; for the most part it wanders freely along reiterating rather neutral melodic fragments and harmonic clusters with occasional rude outcroppings from the organ's lower and louder extremities. Like much of Cage's music, it is meant to be about that moment in time, and nothing more nor anything less. Giacinto Scelsi has been called the Charles Ives *and* John Cage of Italy - the former because of his independence and removal from mainstream musical institutions, the latter because of an unceasing experimentalism. But he is really neither - he is only the Scelsi of Italy, "l'unico". "In nomine lucis" seems to be about the very foundations of the organ itself. It sits and rumbles mysteriously until it finally erupts near the end, where the listener is literally blown away. The beating tones caused by microtonal differences in the mechanical registrations of the organ have a rhythmic life of their own and give the music an otherwordly quality. Sublime compositions finely recorded and performed -- the urge to explore must be strong with an instrument you physically occupy. --The Wire Available here: iTunes HDtracks |
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October 2010
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