The Music of Chen Yi
The Women’s Philharmonic, JoAnn Falletta,conductor; Chantileer; traditional Chinese instrumentalists A native of Guangzhou, China, and a graduate of the Central Conservatory of Beijing, Ms. Chen came to the United States in 1986 and has become one of the most important composers of her generation. Available here: iTunes HDtracks Mom’s
for Macintosh computer It's as if he became so enamored of the beauty of the sample that he just had to take it apart, to discover what it was that made it so great, all the while creating something else equally lovely. --L.A. Weekly There is nothing commonplace about the sophisticated sampling practiced by Carl Stone, who has been in the musical transformation business ever since graduating from CalArts in the '70s. For Stone, who says he is fascinated by everything from Japanese Enka to Motown to Mozart, sampling provides a way to encompass all his musical interests. Sampling that which is carved in Stone is like voyaging microscopically deep inside sound. "Sometimes," Stone says, "I'm simply attracted to a kind of wonderful moment in an otherwise dreary piece. So I'll say to myself, 'What would it be like to go in and really examine this closely and see how it works and see what can result from turning it inside out?' "It is my hope," he continues, "to make music that makes you wonder, so it's interesting for me to start with something that's not so wonderful, a musical cliche, and then put it through the paces so it becomes something I enjoy." Stone's slowly unraveling, unpredictable musical process creates truly delightful music. --Wired Available here: iTunes HOME (Revisited)
New Performance Group; Gamelan Pacifica; Philandros of the Seattle Men's Chorus; Mimi Dye, viola; Thomasa Eckert, soprano For a postminimalist, Giteck traverses a wonderful range within each piece, surging from darkness into light, from sorrow into sexuality, from stasis into dance. --Village Voice "Om Shanti" was composed in 1986 and is dedicated to People Living With AIDS. It is the first of the four works on this album which I call collectively 'my music and healing series'. "Om Shanti" was commissioned for the New Performance Group by the Institute for Transformational Movement in Seattle, shortly after the loss of the Institute director, Peter Guiler, who died of AIDS. "Om Shanti" has also been heard on two Artists Against AIDS benefit concerts in Seattle. The text for the first movement is by Shankaracharaya and is sung in Sanskrit. I am without thought, without form. I am all-pervasive, I am everywhere, yet I am beyond all senses. I am neither detachment nor salvation nor anything that could be measured. I am consciousness and bliss. I am Shiva! I am Shiva! Om is the primordial human expression for all sounds in the universe according to yogic traditions; Shanti is peace. This is my prayer for people living with the AIDS virus. --Janice Giteck Available here: iTunes HDtracks Written With the Heart’s Blood
New Century Chamber Orchestra featuring Stuart Canin performs Chamber Symphony for Strings Opus 110a, Two Pieces for String Octet Opus 11, Symphony for Strings Opus 118a. Best Small Ensemble Performance. --Grammy nomination 1997 The poet Carl Sandburg once said that Shostakovich's music is music "written with the heart's blood", and it was this feeling that enabled my colleagues and me in the New Century Chamber Orchestra to maintain the passionate energy needed to record these magnificent works. The power of Shostakovich's music is evidenced by the fact that its composer used it as a weapon in the fight against Hitler: witness the 7th [Leningrad] Symphony, written in 1942, which became the worldwide symbol of resistance against Nazism. The dedication of the Eighth String Quartet "to the memory of the victims of fascism and war" was a constant reminder to us musicians of how visceral Shostakovich's music is; and yet the recurring motifs of hope and renewal show that Shostakovich was ever a human being, always hopeful of an end to dark times. --Stuart Canin, Music Director Chamber Symphony for Strings, Opus 110a arranged from Quartet No. 8 by Rudolf Barshai Shostakovich composed his Quartet No. 8 in the astonishingly short period of three days in July 1960 at Dresden, where he was working on the music for a war film about the destruction of that city called "Five Days - Five Nights". The feelings aroused at that time catapulted Shostakovich to create an "autobiographical" work in five continuous movements in which the composer was replaying the significant events of his life. Two Pieces for String Octet, Opus 11 The Prelude was composed in Leningrad in 1924 and the Scherzo followed in 1925. He drafted also a fugue as part of this opus but decided never to publish it. The first performance of his Opus 11 took place at the Mozart Concert Hall in Moscow (now called the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater) on January 9, 1927. What most biographers ignore or omit is that Shostakovich's octet pieces were written concurrently with his First Symphony, and although composed for a small group of strings, were Shostakovich's experiment in creating an overwhelming "symphonic" texture with few musical resources. His mood at that time was demonic, pessimistic and tumultuous. Symphony for Strings, Opus 118a arranged from Quartet No. 10 by Rudolf Barshai Shostakovich composed his Tenth Quartet during a very busy summer in 1964. The year began with an enormous tribute to the composer when the Modern Music Festival in Gorky was devoted entirely to Shostakovich's music. This event brought international attention to the composer and his music. He traveled from Gorky to Leningrad to oversee the Lenfilm Studios production of Hamlet. Then for the next three months he traveled to Moscow, Central Asia, and then back to Moscow and Leningrad. He was at his dacha at Zhukovka in early May when he began composing his Tenth Quartet, dedicated to his third wife, Irina. By August the quartet was completed. The work was premiered on November 20 by the Beethoven Quartet at the Moscow Conservatory. Available here: iTunes Composition No. 165 [for 18 instruments]
performed by the University of Illinois Creative Music Orchestra, conducted by Anthony Braxton There are static and mutable cloud formations that drift in and out of the canvas of the music. POOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW! "Hey, even I recognized that cloud! (chord!)" said Johnathon. "Don't rush it," cried Ben, "it'll come in its own time. In Composition No. 165, moments float in and out of the sound space -- yet there are target recognition states. This is a sequential event continuum that places equal emphasis on sound and space -- the moments come ... the moments go." --Anthony Braxton Available here: Groove HDtracks Homage to Johannes Ciconia (ca. 1370-1412)
madrigals, motets, virelais, ballata and canons: secular music for voices with corno muto, harp, vielle and lute The musicians of Project Ars Nova really know how to perform the music, presenting it in a way that shows they have it in their blood, communicating their sense of excitement in what was and remains some of the most thrilling music written around 1400. --Gramaphome In 1950, Willi Apel published a remarkable collection entitled "French Secular Music of the Late Fourteenth Century", containing music that had previously been virtually unknown, not only to the general public but to most music historians as well. At a time when twentieth century music was undergoing a veritable explosion in both tonal and rhythmic complexity, it came as a stunning surprise for many to find pieces written around 1400 that were rhythmically as wild as anything that was being written in 1950. Taking a prominent place in Apel's collection were works by Matteo de Perugia (d. 1418), a musician of Pope Alexander V; with some fourteen pieces, Matteo was the most widely represented composer in the anthology. Shortly after Apel's publication Heinrich Besseler, one of Germany's most eminent historians, launched a polemic against what he perceived to be a distortion of our perspective of the music at the end of the fourteenth centuy, a distortion caused by our own fascination with 'rhythmic complexity.' In a essay entitled "Hat Matheus de Perusio Epoche gemacht?" he argued that the truly epochal figure was not Matteo da Perugia, but the more obscure Johannes Ciconia. Besseler's argument was twofold: First, although we have a large amount of music by Matteo, it all came from a single manuscript, copied under his aegis, that happened to have survived. Otherwise, Matteo's work appears to have made little impact upon his contemporaries. Indeed, none of his works were copied in the large anthology manuscripts that transmitted most of the surviving repertory from that period. By contrast, Ciconia's music was known during his lifetime, not only in northern Italy but in France, Germany, and as far afield as Poland. Second, in the sound and textures of Ciconia's music, Besseler perceived the shape of much of what was to come in the fifteenth century. Ciconia's music has a simple rhythmic drive with a great deal of forward propulsion, melodic lines of uncommon elegance, a good deal of motivic imitation and repetition, and a clear harmonic language that often yields a radiant sonority of extraordinary beauty. Besseler was right. Beautiful as Matteo's music is, it is Ciconia's art to which the generation of the early fifteenth century composers owes much of their charm and beauty of style. Indeed, in many of the motets of the young Du Fay, one can literally hear his excitement with the kinds of textures and sonorities that he had found in Ciconia. ...Shapely readings, spare in texture but played spiritedly. --New York Times Available here: iTunes Memorias Tropicales
string quartets of Aurelio Tello, Javier Alvarez, Roberto Sierra and Celso Garrido-Lecca Readers with a care from white-hot to tepid for that most elevated of chamber ensembles, the string quartet, and more particularly in its recent repertoire out of the European mainstream, will likely love Memorias Tropicales. --Fanfare The string quartet has been the vehicle by which the classical and romantic composers of western music have consistently expressed their deepest and most profound musical thoughts. This is no less true in the twentieth century, and modern instrumental techniques have given contemporary composers a more colorful palette from which to draw their musical landscapes. While the roots and early flowering of the string quartet are clearly the pride of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European community, the contributions of Latin American composers to this genre in the twentieth century are astonishing. In the last generation Alberto Ginastera, Silvestre Revueltas, and Heitor Villa-Lobos were among those who made significant additions to the string quartet literature. The composers on the present disc are among the major contributors of the present day. As diverse as the works on this disc are, there is the common thread among the composers of an awareness of the folk and traditional (native) music of their respective Latin American countries. In education they share an eclectic background which includes the study of music indigenous to their own country and an awareness of contemporary international currents in musical expression. The variety and richness of musical style and depth of emotion is convincingly illustrated in this collection of four works from Latin American composers -- one from Mexico (Alvarez), one from Puerto Rico (Sierra), and two from Peru (Tello and Garrido-Lecca). Available here: iTunes A la Memoire d’ un Ami
realized on an IBM 3081 at Princeton University, and at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University Death is the title piece's subject, and the sense of space and loneliness is astounding. Mowitz's rich, booming, unidentifiable tones weep in some vast acoustic of the imagination. --Village Voice A la Memoire d'un Ami is about memory and, in particular, memories of my close friend and first composition teacher, Norman Dinerstein, who died suddenly at age 45, while I was in the middle of making this piece. The entire piece is synthetic -- the sounds were all made on a large, very UNmusical mainframe computer. That the sounds, gestures and general cast of the work bear such a close resemblance to sounds we know in the natural world was willful on my part - for me, computers are not machines programmed to yield unimaginable precision, but rather just a means of searching for imagined sounds and musics. That the results of sound generation instructions I give to computers are often quite unexpected, I take as a wonderful irony, and it's precisely this quality of unexpectedness that I find most stimulating and instructive in fashioning a work of art. --Ira J. Mowitz Available here: iTunes HDtracks Etudes for String Orchestra, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Maria Triptychon
New Century Chamber Orchestra, Stuart Canin, violin; Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, Sara Ganz, soprano A first-rate performance: * * * * --San Francisco Chronicle Martin composed the Etudes for String Orchestra in 1955-56. The work was commissioned by Paul Sacher for the Basel Chamber Orchestra, and premiered on November 23, 1956. This striking work consists of a sharply profiled slow overture, followed by four etudes, each of which treats an important aspect of string performance. Composed in 1950-51, Martin's Violin Concerto was first performed in the spring of 1952, when Joseph Szigeti played it with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under Ernest Ansermet. The work assumes the traditoinal three-movement concerto form. The creation of Maria Triptychon evolved through the friendship Martin shared with the soprano Irmgard Seefried and her husband, the violinist Wolfgang Schneiderhan. The work is a setting of three canticles: the Ave Maria, the Magnificat in Martin Luther's German translation, and the Stabat Mater. Available here: iTunes Music of North Sumatra
traditional music of three ethnic groups that live on the shores of Lake Toba: the Toba, the Karo and the Mandailing. Voices and instruments rise in sacred and secular celebration with an idyllic elegance that belies the music's vigorous, complex locomotion. --Rolling Stone 75 thousand years ago, a volcano erupted deep in the interior of North Sumatra, spreading ash as far as Sri Lanka and leaving behind a crater now known as Lake Toba. One hundred kilometers long, it is the largest volcanic crater lake in the world. The fertile volcanic soils of its shores have supported intensive agriculture for millenia. Its great natural beauty has made it Indonesia's third-largest tourist attraction. This is the original homeland of the Batak, a family of seven Indonesian ethnic groups with a population of perhaps two million. These seven groups (Toba, Karo, Simalungun, Pak-pak, Dairi, Angkola and Mandailing) have related but distinct languages, customs, and traditional arts. Such is the variety of Batak music and dance that no one program could present even a sampling of it all. Festival of Indonesia has chosen to concentrate on three highly contrasting traditions: those of the Toba, the Karo and the Mandailing. The Batak groups are divided by religion (the Mandailing are Islamic; the Toba, Christian) and by language (Toba and Karo in particular are mutually unintelligible), but unified by a common passion for genealogy. It is not unusual to meet Batak men who can recite fluently the names of eight generations of their ancestors. These ancestral trees represent a sort of blueprint for Batak society; they explain the origins of and relations between the clans (marga) which dominate Batak social life. Every Batak belongs to one of these patrilineal clans. They are exogamous: a man may not marry a woman from his own clan, but must search among other clans for a wife. The marriage ties which link clans form an intricate web of kinship which touches every aspect of Batak society. The clans also order Batak culture, ceremony, mythology and the arts. There are musical compositions specific to one or another clan; clan membership determines the order of events at the life-cyle ceremonies at which music and dance are essential. Music and dance play a crucial role in Batak society. The word for "ceremony" ("gondang" in Toba; "gendang" in Karo) is actually a musical term and refers both to the Batak orchestra of drums, gongs, and oboes and also to the tunes they play. The musicians are essential to a ceremony because they are the intermediaries between humanity and the Creator. The sounds of the drums and gongs convey human prayers to the spirit world. Musicians thus command great respect in traditional Batak society and they must follow a certain code of behavior. "The musicians must be honest men," explained one old Toba Batak man, "otherwise they risk angering the spirits." Available here: iTunes |
New Albion Records, Inc.Archives
October 2010
|