Composition / All styles

The music of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957) is one of in-betweens. Stylistically, Lang’s oeuvre occupies the space between a multitude of genres, ranging from contem porary composition and free improvisation to the wider realms of hip hop and DJ-culture. By virtue of Lang’s radical openness to creative conversation and collaboration, and to ideas and influences from other areas of artistic and scientific exploration, his oeuvre finds connections to the worlds of film, dance, theatre, …

Cezary Duchnowski, although perceived as a specialized composer with consciously chosen specialization, is very open to extremely versatile activity in the musical field. Apart from absolute music, he’s also keenly interested in relations between music and the word, music and theatre (or rather performance art) as well as visual arts in the wide sense. What he aims at with this kind of syncretism is a genuine interaction of various media. In his musical activity, he explores various areas of the…

** Und du… was composed in 1963, commissioned by the Austrian Broadcasting Co. It was supposed to be played “radiophonically,” i.e. on tape and with loudspeakers only, to reach and involve a group of listeners corresponding to the medium’s effective radius. My own involvement with the nuclear situation – the dangerousness of which against the background of Hiroshima was clear, but not nearly to the extent it is today among the broad public – prompted me to take the equally fundamental anxiety I …

This habit some experimental musicians have of applying forced context or stories to what is essentially pure improvised music does sometimes perplex me. Here Janek references Kaspar Hauser with the title and in the sleeve notes. He also states the intention “…to de- and reformulate the idea of beauty”. When referencing the case of Kaspar Hauser, I assume Janek sees himself as “…set free…” from traditional technique, and aims, on this disc at least, to “…redefine by discover[y] and recover the p…

58' was composed in 2010 on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of d-zAkord. I wanted a very minimalist piece with few sound events and long silences. At that time we presented t'Drone(s)Scape', a sound/living installation lasting 3 hours. The public was invited to sit or lie down in the center of the sonic maelstrom for a multicast travel. It is in this context that 58' was imagined. Although unconventional, the 58' score is extremely precise. The musicians follow a graphic score, with time p…

Painted Lights, a new album of compositions by Kui Dong is now available on Kairos Music. The record, which features performances by Juliet Petrus, Deirdre Brenner, Third Coast Percussion, Arditti Quartet, Koehne Quartett, Volti, Piedmont East Bay Children's Choir, Robert Geary, and Raphael Schlüsselberg, comprises four pieces of chamber and choral music written by Dong between 2009 and 2017. California Shoreline (2017) for soprano, string quartet and prepared piano opens the album, followed by …

*2022 stock* Robert Hughes, composer and author, is a graduate of the University of Buffalo (now SUNY Buffalo) and composition student of Aaron Copland, Carlos, Chavez, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Lou Harrison. He has written for symphony orchestra, chamber ensemble, voices, performance art events and a wide variety of media, including twenty film scores and a large body of electronic music. His compositions include commissions from the San Francisco Symphony, Cabrillo Music Festival, Oakland Sympho…

Wolfram Schurig's musical career began with instrumental playing. After basic training on the recorder, his concert studies with Kees Boeke, one of the protagonists of historically informed performance practice, left their mark on him. This experience plays an important role in Schurig's working method as a composer: "You simply write music differently when you are on stage yourself. You owe it to the performer to deliver something that is playable, and in which he can find himself as a co-creat…

Just arrived, this is the newest edition RZ release focused on a radical electronic (+ Ensemble) music by Clara Maida "During the first years of my compositional research, my goal was to mark out, in my music, the flux of the psychic energy at work in the unconscious and its underlying structure. At the time, I was going through an analytical process favouring access to this unconscious activity, and my readings in the field of psychoanalysis were helping me in the effort to elaborate a musical …

German composer Michael Reudenbach's works and studies from 1991-2009 are presented in a six-panel digipack with a 22-page booklet of notes, images and photos

Born in 1934, Christian Wolff is the last surviving member of the group of composers that also included Morton Feldman and Earle Brown, which gathered around John Cage in New York in the 1950s. Wolff's own music has remained faithful to that Cageian experimental tradition ever since, and the eight works for pairs of instrumentalists here show how, in the right hands, the varying degrees of freedom his works allow their interpreters can produce astonishingly beautiful results. The common denomina…

Six modern song cycles for soprano and piano by Holliger, Sciarrino, Lachenmann, Kurtág, Rihm and Bernhard Lang, sung by Sarah Maria Sun with pianist Jan Philip Schulze, with several first recordings.

Marc Chan's My Wounded Head 3, an open-ended piano piece inspired by Bach's Passion chorales, played in a 72-minute continuous recording by Rob Haskins.

Twenty-four tracks of saxophone music by Henry Cowell and Percy Grainger, many of them first recordings, for saxophone ensembles, piano and orchestra, directed and played by Ulrich Krieger with guest ensembles and the Glens Falls Symphony Orchestra.

Structured improvisation compositions by violinist Malcolm Goldstein, ranging from jazzy to dense microtonal sound, in which he plays with the Montreal-based Ratchet Orchestra as composer, soloist and ensemble member.

Volume 7 of Mode's Edition Christian Wolff, on 2CD: the composer plays his own Incidental Music (2003-04), written for a Merce Cunningham Dance Company Event, and the ongoing series Keyboard Miscellany, on piano and melodica.

Roger Reynolds's complete works for cello, on 2CD and composer supervised, with many first recordings, played by Alexis Descharmes with Ensemble Court-circuit, violin, electronics and piano, and readings by the composer.

Four chamber works by Chris Newman, all first recordings, played by Berlin's Ensemble KNM conducted by Steffen Tast, with Newman as vocal soloist in Cologne.

Five chamber works by Tim Hodgkinson, co-founder of Henry Cow, for ensemble and electronic sound, bass clarinet and strings, and string quartet with harp, trombone and synthesizer, played by Hyperion Ensemble and others.

Six chamber works by Keeril Makan performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble and pianist Cory Smythe, including Mercury Songbirds, Afterglow for solo piano and Mu for prepared violin played by Erik Carlson.

Four works by Johannes Schöllhorn: the concert piece clouds and sky for piano and orchestra with the WDR orchestra, rota for contrabass clarinet and string quartet, red and blue for percussion sextet, and a self-same song for solo contrabass clarinet.

First complete recording of John Cage's works for organ, played by Gary Verkade on the organ of Gammelstad Church, Sweden: Some of 'The Harmony of Maine', Souvenir, ASLSP and Organ2/ASLSP, with 4'33'' on the DVD only.

Helmut Lachenmann performs with and supervises Ensemble Signal in Zwei Gefühle, Musik mit Leonardo for speaker and ensemble, and plays three of his own piano works, recorded after a four-concert tour of the programme.

First CD recording of Songbirdsongs by John Luther Adams, a cycle for piccolos, ocarinas, flutes and percussion based on real bird songs, with Callithumpian Consort, plus Strange Birds Passing.

Multimedia adaptation of Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers by guitarist Marco Cappelli, narrated by John Turturro in English and Enzo Salomone in Italian, with music by Sintax Error and video art by Anne Rothschild.

Six minimalist works by Reich, Riley, Andriessen, Gann, Adams and David Lang played by Orkest de Volharding under Jussi Jaatinen, including first recordings of City Life for wind orchestra and Kyle Gann's Sunken City.

Complete piano works by Roger Reynolds on two CDs, from Epigram and Evolution (1960) to The Angel of Death (1998-2001), played by Yuji Takahashi, Eric Huebner and Marilyn Nonken, with new recordings and remastered analog reissues.

Pianist Heather O'Donnell places short works by Charles Ives, including the first recording of London Bridge Is Fallen Down!, alongside first-recorded piano responses by Zimmermann, Finnissy, Tenney, Corbett and Schneller.

Xenakis Edition volume 10 and the first complete recording of Iannis Xenakis's string quartets, played by the JACK Quartet: Tetras, Tetora, ST/4-1,080262 and Ergma, the last quartet, released on CD and surround-sound DVD.

First recordings of four Piano Sonatas by Chris Newman (Nos. 1, 4, 6 and 10, composed 1982-2004), played by Michael Finnissy, a collaborator of the composer for over twenty-five years, in composer-supervised recordings.

Six compositions from 2001-2004 by Tim Hodgkinson, co-founder of Henry Cow, for ensembles, clarinets and electronics, with the Hyperion Ensemble and other guests and Hodgkinson himself on clarinet and bass clarinet.

First recording of John Cage's Chess Pieces (1944), rediscovered in a painting and transcribed by Margaret Leng Tan, with her recording of Sonatas and Interludes and the first recording of Vittorio Rieti's Chess Serenade.

Composer-supervised first recordings of Joël-François Durand's music on the four elements: La terre et le feu for oboe and ensemble, Les raisons des forces mouvantes for organ, La mesure des choses III and Athanor for orchestra.

Four films on John Cage by Frank Scheffer and Andrew Culver, gathered as From Zero: 19 Questions, Fourteen with the Ives Ensemble, Paying Attention and Overpopulation and Art with Ryoanji, plus extras.

Alain Bancquart's large-scale microtonal cycle on the myth of the Minotaur, on texts by Marie-Claire Bancquart, recorded at its world premiere of the complete version at Radio France on 27 May 2000.

Cellist Michael Bach plays J.S. Bach's Cello Suite No. 3 on the curved bow, with two works by Dieter Schnebel, Mit Diesen Händen with mezzo-soprano Mechthild Seitz and Fünf Inventionen, first in the Art of the Curved Bow series.

Vocal works by Luciano Berio, among them Folk Songs, Sequenza III, Chamber Music, O King and Circles, sung by Christine Schadeberg with Musicians Accord, reissued with the first recording of Quattro Canzoni Popolari.

First recording of the second half of John Cage's Freeman Etudes for violin, Books Three and Four, played by Irvine Arditti, the second release in his traversal of Cage's complete violin works for Mode. Released 1989.

John Cage's Freeman Etudes, Books 1 and 2 (the first sixteen etudes for solo violin), played by Irvine Arditti at blistering speed under the composer's supervision.

Debut recital by Argentinean pianist Haydée Schvartz with piano works by Pärt, Berio, Scelsi, Kagel, Cage, Gandini and Valverde, including first recordings of Berio's Brin and Leaf and Cage's Perpetual Tango.