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Zwei Gefühle and Solo Works
Violin and viola players whisper over their instruments. A guitarist waits with the closest attention for the moment to make a gesture we might easily have missed. The tuba player rises to go over to the open piano, there to send sounds echoing into its interior. Two cellists, bowing with heavy pressure down near the tailpiece, produce an urgent rasping. From the timpanist comes the sudden fortissimo that seems to shock the music to a standstill… Renowned German composer Helmut Lachenmann’s mus…
The Works for Percussion 2
John Cage’s vision of the future of music was first shaped by an intense creative period from 1935-1942, when he wrote many of the seminal works of percussion chamber music featured here. When he composed these works, the young Cage was basically the same age as the members of Third Coast Percussion. This release includes all three of the groundbreaking Constructions. First Construction (in Metal) utilizes dozens of metal instruments which are beaten, scraped and shaken, creating an other world…
Save Percussion Theatre
Aiyun Huang’s unique recital, “Save Percussion Theater,” is a video-recording of theater music for percussion dedicated to the pioneering work of the Parisian group “Trio Le Cercle,” for whom many of these works written and by whom they have been championed. This recording, in essence a document of the complete percussion works from the French school of theater music, is an ambitious undertaking. Here the camera replaces the eye of an audience member, and the microphone his or her ear, yet wit…
Songbirdsongs
Songbirdsongs is among John Luther Adams’ seminal works. This is the first time the cycle appears on CD. Although music has been written involving the sounds of birds for centuries, no composer has ever approached the concept in this way. Based on Adams’ observations and studies of actual bird songs, he scored them for various ensembles of piccolos, ocarinas, flutes and percussion. Rather than having a fixed score, each piece consists of a collection of unordered phrases for each instrument. T…
The Number Pieces 6
New York based ensemble Essential Music had a strong relationship with John Cage in his later years. This experience gives these recordings a special authority. Recorded in 1993-94, they are being released for the first time. In 1987 John Cage began writing his “number” and “time-bracket” compositions, which became his primary compositional method for the remainder of his life. These works are named for the number of musicians participating, consist of the number of parts with no com…
Electronic Works 3
Until Spring was first conceived in 1975 on the Buchla synthesizer using only analog techniques. “It was about 10 years from Silver Apples to Until Spring,” Subotnick explains, “and I’d evolved a whole concept and a technique, but I had gone as far as I could go with it. I could do everything I wanted to do, but I couldn’t do it in real time.” As computers and software developed in the coming decades, Morton Subotnick created a software-based instrument that he felt could allow him to compl…
In the Shadows of No Towers (Art Spiegelman)
On 9/11, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman (creator of “Maus”) was in the immediate vicinity of Ground Zero, fleeing the crumbling World Trade Center with his family. He wrote In the Shadow of No Towers to illustrate the first-hand horror of that day, and the grief and disillusionment which followed. Inspired by Spiegelman’s book, guitarist/composer Marco Cappelli transforms it into a multi-media production. Actor John Turturro, a quintessential New Yorker, narrates the English v…
Sanctuary
Roger Reynolds’ Sanctuary for percussion ensemble is conceived to be both visually and sonically dramatic. Composed for a spatially distributed ensemble and live electronics, the work makes spectacular use of DVD’s surround sound capabilities. Sanctuary is a malleable work intended to evolve with the experience of its creators (composer, performers, and technicians) and conceived so as to adapt to, and capitalize upon, the changing resources and contexts within which it is realized. Sanctuar…
The Works for Percussion I
John Cage’s percussion works are among his most historically important. After 42 Volumes in Mode’s Cage Edition, Mode is releasing the first volume dedicated to his percussion music. Percussion Group Cincinnati is particularly respected for its knowledge of and experience with the entire range of John Cage’s music, having made tours and festival appearances with him on a number of occasions in Europe and in America, and having had pieces created by Cage especially for the Group. Volume 1 cons…
Madame De Shanghai - Après Presque Rien - Visage 2
This is Luc Ferrari’s second disc for Mode and it features three pieces from different periods and for different ensembles, two of which are first recordings. “Visage 2” is for brass and percussion and was written in 1955-56. This is an early work for Ferrari and it is informed by his study of serialism at Darmstadt, yet is based on the confrontation between two sexual bodies (note the lovely nude woman on the cover with Ferrari as he looks over his composition on the page). The music itself is …
The Piano Works 4
“Hispania “Triptyque pour piano” (1939). Suite No. 5 “Il Circo” (1935). Suite No. 6 “I Capricci di Ty” (1939). Stephen Clarke, piano. Mode’s Scelsi Edition continues with the fourth volume devoted to his piano works — three first recordings of major, large scale works from his early period of the 1930s. The piano plays a role of undeniable importance in Scelsi’s life and work. From 1930 to 1941, and again from 1952 to 1956, the composer produced an enormous repertoire for the instrument, includi…
Works With Flutes
The release of this CD celebrates Aldo Clementi’s 75th birthday in 2010. Clementi is one of the remaining living composers of the Italian avant-garde generation, which included Berio, Nono and Maderna. Clementi’s works for flute (including works for multiple flutes and flute with tape) are performed by one of his long-time collaborators, Roberto Fabbriciani – some of these works were written for or dedicated to him. Many of these works utilize Clementi’s signature explorations of the canno…
The Works For Saxophone 3 & 4
Ulrich Krieger completes his A Cage of Saxophones survey of Cage’s works composed for, or which can be played on any instrument or instruments. For this volume, Krieger combines works specifically composed for saxophone with works of no specified instrumentation that are suited for saxophones and winds. Most of these are “indeterminate”works, which require the performer to create the realization based on materials supplied by Cage. In some situations, Krieger used Cage’s compositional “tools” …
The Art of the Toy Piano 2
Margaret Leng Tan, toy pianos, toy instruments, piano, percussion, music boxes, voice. In addition to being a renowned new music pianist, Margaret Leng Tan is the foremost specialist at the toy piano. She has concertized worldwide with her miniature instruments, bestowing them with serious music status in repertoire both written for her and arrangements. For this disc of attractive yet challenging music, Ms. Tan performs Cage's classic 'Suite for Toy Piano' plus her arrangement of Cage's seminal…
Njinga: The Queen King – The Return of a Warrior
Written and Directed by IONE Original music and Sound by Pauline Oliveros Traditional Congolese Music by Titos Sompa Set and Costume Design by Valerie Maynard, Dance and Movement by Carol Chappell, Nego Gato, Biza Sompa and Titos Sompa, Traditional Brazilian Music and Dance by Nego Gato.
Njinga the Queen King is a collaborative effort between writer/director Ione and composer Pauline Oliveros, which they refer to as “a play with music and pageantry.” It is based on historica…
Maim (Water)
Maim, a major piece in Chaya Czernowin’s œuvre, is a large scale, 50-minute orchestral tryptch with 5 soloists. The 5 soloists are include regular interpreters of her music: Rico Gubler, tubax (a hybrid of a saxophone & tuba); Peter Veale, oboe & musette; John Mark Harris, piano & harpsichord; Seth Josel, guitars; Mary Oliver, viola. Maim, “water” in Hebrew, is the metaphor which dominates the piece. Elementary forms of water appear throughout Maim, musically translated. Scattered droplets — ar…
Works With Piano - Eonta
Pianist Aki Takahashi’s follows up her acclaimed first disc of Xenakis piano works (which won a "Diapason d’or" in France) with this second volume, of works for piano with instruments. She is joined by an all-star cast of players: Rohan de Saram (formerly of the Arditti Quartet), The JACK Quartet, and the Callithumpian Consort conducted by Stephen Drury. All works are underrepresented in current recordings or difficult to find at all. Included is the first new recording in over 10 years o…
Trio
The expansive length of Morton Feldman’s Trio (1 hr., 45 min., 22 sec.) requires a new approach to listening, which takes scale, the physical experience of sound, and novel uses of musical memory into consideration. With his delicate manipulation of musical materials, Feldman blurs the listener’s sense of time as their musical memory struggles to distinguish between past and present sounds - listeners are free to lose themselves in the beauty of each musical moment. Aki Takahashi and Rohan…
The Minimalists
A two-CD set, and the lineup consists of Steve Reich (City Life) Terry Riley (In C) Louis Andriessen (Worker's Union) Kyle Gann (Sunken City) John Adams (Short Ride in a Fast Machine) David Lang (Street) "Orkest de Volharding, Jussi Jaatinen. In the spring of 1972, composer Louis Andriessen and saxophonist Willem Breuker brought together musicians from improvised and from traditional music, at a historical and tumultuous concert in the Amsterdam Carré theatre.They became the Orkest de Volharding…
Epigram And Evolution: Complete Piano Works
These piano pieces were written at every turning point in Roger Reynolds’ creative life, marking his evolution. The music is driven by relentless attacks toward catharsis, but also bittersweet chords, and trembling, rolling, wandering or sweeping masses of sound. We feel as though we are being pushed around by forces beyond human imagination. This sense of being carried away by an uninterrupted undercurrent may be the image of the world we live in. The featured pianists are the legendary Yuji Ta…