Remede de Fortune
works of Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377). Ballades, balladelles, rondelets, rondeaux and complaintes: Micheal Collver, alto; John Fleagle, tenor, harp; Shira Kammen, vielle; Laurie Monahan, mezzosoprano; Crawford Young, lute; with guest Robert Mealy, vielle An eloquent, haunting recording. Passion and refinement combine here in convincing balance. Mauchaut's advice not to trust Fortune still rings painfully true. --The Boston Phoenix The most influential 'dit amoureux' or courtly love poem in Medieval Europe, the "Remede de Fortune" of Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) secured its creator's position as the premiere poet musician of 14th century France. Written around 1340 for the extravagant court of Jean of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, the 4300 lines of the "Remedy of Fortune" codify with extreme refinement the complaints of chivalric love expressed in the previous century's famous "Roman de la Rose". A little less than a fourth of the Remede text is presented with notated music, but it is exceptional as the only long work of its kind integrating both said and sung poetry. The earliest extant copy of this work is also exceptional as one of the most extraordinary illuminated manuscripts of the period, featuring remarkably naturalistic scenes of courtly life. It was probably commissioned in 1350 by the future King Jean le Bon as a memorial to his wife Bonne, the daughter of Machaut's patron. Bonne, who had succumbed to the plague in 1349, has often been identified as the Lady of the Remede, and its inspiration. Available here: iTunes HDtracks Daughters of the Lonesome Isle
Margaret Leng Tan, pianos ... the most convincing interpreter of Cage's keyboard music. —The New York Times The eight works on this album feature the different kinds of "instruments" used by John Cage in his substantial piano oeuvre—the prepared, string, bowed and conventional piano as well as the toy piano. The disc's thirteen year span (1940-1953) encapsulates the evolution of Cage's aesthetic from Bacchanale, his first prepared piano composition, to the chance-derived abstraction of Music for Piano #2. These bookends of the album also frame my relationship with John Cage: Bacchanale was the first piece I played for him in 1981 and we discussed Music for Piano #2 the day before his fatal stroke in 1992. —Margaret Leng Tan Available here: iTunes HDtracks Crystal Psalms
An homage to Kristallnacht. A concert performed by 7 European radio stations, scored for 7 choruses, 4 trombones, 4 celli, 4 violas, 4 flutes, 4 clarinets, 2 tubas, 2 saxophones, 6 accordions, 6 percussionists, plus pre-recorded sounds. Without remembering and learning there is no survival. --Alvin Curran On October 20, 1988, a large part of western Europe heard a unique radio concert -- CRYSTAL PSALMS -- a concerto for musicians in six nations, simultaneously performed, mixed and broadcast live in stereo to listeners from Palermo to Helsinki. This special event, composed and coordinated by myself, while part of a worldwide series commemorating the 50th anniversary of the infamous Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), was, through its unusual concept, one which demanded and demonstrated an exceptional quality of international artistic and technological collaboration -- the bringing together groups of musicians and technicians (some 300 in all, in six major European cities) who neither saw nor heard one another, yet performed as one unified ensemble to realize this complex score. The score was composed to be played by complementary ensembles in each of the six locations. These consisted of: a mixed chorus (16-32 voices), a quartet of strings or winds, a percussionist and accordionist. While each group of musicians was conducted independently, a recorded time track -- heard by each conductor -- was used to synchronize all six ensembles. A pre-recorded tape containing sounds of many aspects of Jewish life was often employed together with the live sounds. Hence, the archaic sounds of the shofar (ritual ram's horn), the Yemenite Jews praying at the Western ("Wailing") Wall, famous Eastern European cantors taken from old sound archives; children in a Roman Jewish orphanage; my young niece singing her Bat Mitzvah prayers and my father singing in Yiddish at a family gathering. Ship horns, trains, crows and breaking glass, too. To this sonic panorama one hears live choral fragments of the Renaissance Jewish composers Salomone Rossi from Italy and Caceres of the famous Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam, as well as from the renowned 19th Century composers of the Jewish liturgy, Lewandowski and Sulzer. This event -- for me a very special form of human artistic collaboration -- now exists, along side the memory of the inhuman pogrom of 1938 which inspired it. One can only wish that it had been otherwise that instead we could be remembering and celebrating some noble acts of humanity and love. --Alvin Curran Available here: iTunes HDtracks Mandara Trilogy
Three works for voice and electronics Three works for Voice and Electronics Mantra is a 23-minute sound meditation... It is strong, it is dark, it is powerful. --San Francisco Chronicle Mandalas are sacred pictures that can lead viewers to a state of "Satori" through intense and concentrated viewing of them. It seemed to be that "listening" was as cognitively viable as "seeing". Bloody human heads and skulls on the loins, copulating, and stomping on horrendous devils ... looking at those extraordinary and ferocious gods with their outraged faces twisted with anger, through the silence of the mandala, I couldn't help but feeling tremendous waves of furor and blasting roars. I felt the heaving engulfing waves steadily pushing forward, and body piercing arrows of lightning radiating from the mandalas. --Somei Satoh Available here: iTunes HDtracks Chanting the light of Foresight
Rova Saxophone Quartet A brain-food delicacy. --Westword, Denver The Tain Bo Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) is a central part of the eighth-century Ulster cycle of heroic tales and is Ireland's nearest approach to a great epic. It tells the story of a giant cattle-raid, the invasion of Ulster by the armies of Medb and Ailill, queen and king of Connacht, and their allies, seeking to carry off the great Brown Bull of Cuailnge. Following an abandoned collaboration with the playwright Lee Brewer that was centered on the Thomas Kinsella translation of The Tain, I found myself under a spell and so began the work for the Rova. The wonderful rhythms and colours of the ancient names and places; Badb, Bricriu, Conchobor, Cuchulain, Finnabair, Galeoin, Scathach and Daire mac Fiachna must have floated their way to surface in some musical line or other. Although extremely difficult to accomplish, I wanted to have part of the quartet's movements in "resonant intonation" with pure intervals combining in the saxophones radiant timbres. After composing the music I made a tape on the Prophet 5 synthesizer of the tuning so that the players could match the intervals in their rehearsals. Rova has taken this challenge seriously. The result is sounds that I have not heard previously coming from saxophones and is right in the tradition of Rova cutting an alternate groove in contemporary music. When we originally conceived of the project we wanted to leave room for lots of improvisation. This not only takes place in the "Pipes of Medb" and "Medb's Blues" but in addition Rova created the Battle Music section which is one of my favorites and points to their strong compositional abilities. --Terry Riley Available here: iTunes She Is a Phantom
Harold Budd with Zeitgeist One shatters glass in a vacuum, then finds the art part among the shards. —Harold Budd With this work, composed for Zeitgeist, plus the release of "By the Dawn's Early Light" in 1991, I returned to composing music for ensembles. For a decade I made mostly solo albums, sometimes collaborating with other artists, but I found that I was too often not interested in making a statement as much as I was interested in just making an album. This seemed pointless to me; I changed. I became very attracted to the "suite structure" of Sandro Chia and others (and earlier in Mantegna and Barnett Newman, for example) and saw it as a way of making composition a process of literary discovery as opposed to searching for titles after the fact. (I first used this in 1988 with "The White Arcades".) Thus, for this work, I invented—conjured—at least two dozen "titles", more accurately called fantasies, observations, remembrances, whatever. I selected seventeen and placed them in a sequence that seemed absolutely right to me, that is, charged with arcane connections. The process of composing the music was in fact a process of discovery as I wound my way through maze of cross-references which only made themselves apparent in the process of confronting the hidden agenda in each work, in its placement. A Briefly Glanced Smile seems a recurring motive; number 13 is numbers 6 and 7 played simultaneously, a fact I didn't realize until well after the fact. --Harold Budd Available here: iTunes HDtracks The People United Will Never Be Defeated!
Stephen Drury, piano; Quilapayun A spectacular performance. --The New York Times "The People United" is a series of 6 cycles, each of which consists of 6 stages, in which different musical relationships appear in order: (1) simple events; (2) rhythms; (3) melodies; (4) counterpoints; (5) harmonies; (6) combinations of all these. Each of the larger cycles develops a character suggested by the individual stage to which it corresponds, so that the third cycle is lyrical, the fourth tends toward conflict, the fifth toward simultaneity (the fifth is also the freest), and the sixth recapitulates, in such a way that the first stage is a summary of all of the preceding first stages, the second a summary of the second stages, and so on. Two songs, aside from the theme itself, appear at various points: the Italian revolutionary song "Bandiera Rossa", in reference to the Italian people who in the seventies opened their doors to so many refugees from Chilean fascism, and Hanns Eisler's 1932 antifascist "Solidaritatslied", a reminder that parallels to present threats exist in the past and that it is important to learn from them. After the sixth cycle the pianist is offered the option of improvising a cadenza, which Stephen Drury chooses not to exercise on this recording; but in compensation we are offered a remarkable recording of Sergio Ortega's great song. The extended length of the composition may be an allusion to the idea that the unification of people is a long story and that nothing worth winning is acquired without effort. --Frederic Rzewski, January 1994 One day in June, 1973, three months before the bombing by Pinochet's military coup, I was walking through the plaza in front of the Palace of Finance in Santiago, Chile, and saw a street singer shouting, "The people united will never be defeated" - a well known Chilean chant for social change. I couldn't stop, and continued across the square, but his incessant chanting followed me and stuck in my mind. On the following Sunday, after the broadcast of the show "Chile Says No to Civil War", which I directed for Channel 9, we went with a few artists to eat at my house outside Santiago. Upon arrival I sat down at my piano and thought about the experience in the plaza and the events at large. When I reproduced the chant of the people in my head, the chant that could not be restrained, the entire melody exploded from me: I saw it complete and played it in its entirety at once. The text unfurled itself quickly and fell, like falling rocks, upon the melody. In their enthusiasm some of my guests made suggestions that were too rational for the situation I was composing in. Out of courtesy I pretended to accept, but arranged myself to leave the text in its symptomatic landscape. The song was performed in public two days later by the group Quilapayun in a heavily attended concert in the Alameda. --Sergio Ortega, on El Pueble Unido Available here: iTunes Voyage That Never Ends
A 46 minute work for solo bass For solo contrabass I haven't heard better double bass playing than Scodanibbio's. I was just amazed. And I think everyone who heard him was amazed. He is really extraordinary. His performance was absolutely magic. --John Cage, in Musicage Scodanibbio travels the world with his double bass and performs for spell-struck audiences. He is recognized as the leading proponent of his instrument for contemporary composition and was for many years the colleague and collaborator of Giacinto Scelsi and Luigi Nono. Dozens of works have been written for him by such composers as Bussotti, Donatoni, Estrada, Xenakis, et al. He has written over 30 works for strings, and his quartet was recorded by the Arditti for Auvidis Montaigne. He tours extensively with Terry Riley and is equally at home in classical and improvised music. This disc represents a suite of compositions that he has been performing for ten years, and it will redefine what people consider to be the double bass. This recording was made direct to two track on November 18-19, 1997 in Modena, Italy. Available here: iTunes HDtracks The Passion According to Four Evangelists
Carole Haber, Gloria Raymond, William Hite, David Murray, The Back Bay Channel For the modern reader, the word "passion" suggests strong emotion or sexual desire. However, the word derives from Latin -- passio -- and even more distantly, from Greek -- pascho, pathos, pathema -- meaning "to suffer." In this latter sense, it relates to "the passion" -- the gospel narrative of Jesus' suffering and death on the cross as told by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the New Testament. The challenge of composing a passion in the twentieth century is considerable given the fact that there is no sizable contemporary repertoire in this genre and hence, no prospective models -- only two "recent" works come to mind: Krzysztof Penderecki's St. Luke Passion (1963-65) and Arvo Part's Passio (1973). In these modern passions, as well as those by Bach and other baroque composers, the story is narrated by a single figure, one of the four evangelists. From the beginning, I decided to take a different path in terms of storytelling and musical dramatization. In writing the text, I began with the Revised Standard version of the gospels, and after interweaving the four stories together, I set about the task of "editing" the entire text. I distilled the stories into a poetic form which has been created, not as literature, but as a text to be set to music. In The Passion According to Four Evangelists I intend every note to be heard simply and directly -- I hope that the power of the story is felt through the starkness and clarity of the musical expression. I am not interested in reflecting trends or fads (the latest "-isms") or relying on historical references -- rather, for each scene, I have strived to compose music which proceeds from the inner core of the narrative. I have tried to convey only the essential -- no more, no less. Beyond that, that story speaks for itself. Available here: iTunes HDtracks Apologetica
I Cantori & The Archbishop’s Ensemble In the library of a small Catholic college in Pennsylvania I found the complete Chilam Balam, the sacred books of the Maya Indians of Yucatan. The prophet Balam in his 15th century writings foretold of strangers from the east who would bring a new religion to the Maya. It was from these books that most of Apologetica's text was gleaned. The choral-string piece Totoka (track 3) and the introducton to the song Lovely Bird (track 5) use texts created from mixing Hopi and Navajo words and phrases. Apologetica, the final work in this set of pieces uses a text drawn from The Tears of the Indians, a 1542 book by Fray Bartoleme de las Casas, the Spanish Bishop who was known as the Protector of the Indians. Apologetica went through several incarnations before reaching its final form of 14 pieces -- ten songs and four instrumental interludes. The texts, created by Sheilah Britton and myself, are as true to the spirit of the original sources as possible. The world premiere of Apologetica took place at St. Moritz Cathedral in Kromeriz, Czech Republic in June 1996 with Zdenka Vaculovicova conducting the Archbishop's Ensemble. Since that time there have been complete and excerpted performances in Kobe, Japan, the ISA's Drama City, and at Musica Visual Festival in Lanzarote, Canary Islands. --Daniel Lentz Available here: Groove HDtracks |
New Albion Records, Inc.Archives
October 2010
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