Tombstones
Tombstones is a collection of twenty songs composed by American composer Michael Pisaro-Liu between 2006 and 2010, journeying into experimental pop with pieces that are "experimental or indeterminate but still a song". This disc features eleven songs under the artistic direction of the Lille-based pianist Barbara Dang. Dang and six members of the Muzzix collective (Yoann Bellefont, Ivann Cruz, Raphaël Godeau, Peter Orins, Christian Pruvost, Maryline Pruvost) recorded the pieces in June 2020, wit…
l'Infini des Possibles
l'infini des possibles is a set of twelve studies for solo piano, written by French composer Bruno Duplant in 2019. The score consists of lowercase letters (a, b, c, d, e, f, g) and spaces in between, which leaves the pianist an openness for interpretation and artistic determinations. The Belgian pianist/conductor Guy Vandromme intensely studied these 12 pieces via in-depth discussions with Duplant over two years, and realized them for this recording of a double CD in the spring of 2021, on a St…
In Better Shape Than You Found Me
* In pocess of stocking * In Better Shape Than You Found Me is a one-hour piece jointly composed and realized by American composer/violist Jordan Dykstra and Dutch composer/musician Koen Nutters in the year 2020. Dykstra plays viola, pitch pipe, crotales, piano EBow, electronic programming, field recordings, and Nutters delivers the piano programming and field recordings. The two bring together their sounds and structures in very organic ways, merging into a single, intriguing sound world. Maste…
Which Side Are You On?
The first woman to record Frederic Rzewski's setting of Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, Bang on a Can/Steve Reich pianist Lisa Moore sheds powerful new light on Wilde's jailhouse meditation on imprisonment, debasement, and the barriers that he faced as a homosexual. Rzewski, a revolutionary American composer with associations in both the modern classical and avant-jazz worlds, has created an aggressively emotional soundtrack to Wilde's moving prose. De Profundis breaks down the boundaries between …
The imagE - imAge Set
Neuma presents the complete recordings of Roger Reynolds’s "imAgE" series (2007-2015). The series features six pairs of comparatively short, related works that showcase several solo instruments: flute; viola; cello; contrabass; piano; and guitar. Each pair, composed for the same instrument, represents opposing ideas- the first is evocative, and the second is more articulate and punctuated. All works were composed for the performers on the album.
Naga (2 CD Box)
Fairy tale opera has been a challenging genre for composers, with even some of the musically most successful examples, like Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel of 1893, more often presented for children than for adults. Scott Wheeler’s (b. 1952) Naga, working from a text that lies between fairy tale and mythology, stands much closer to Mozart’s marvelous exemplar, The Magic Flute, in its musical account of a restless man setting out on a spiritual quest in a world polarized between good and evil for…
48 Hours
When a twenty-minute piece takes two weeks to rehearse is an audience robbed of some of the richness of their experience by not witnessing that creative journey? For 48 Hours, Vonnegut Collective worked collaboratively with composer Tullis Rennie. Together they documented the trajectory of the rehearsal process and the motivations of the performers as the group tackled their most challenging work to date - Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet. Recordings from rehearsals and interviews with players are wo…
Roger Reynolds at 85, Vol 1: String Quartets
This release documents Roger Reynolds’ most recent string quartets in composer supervised first recordings by the acclaimed JACK Quartet. “Flight”, commissioned by Jack Quartet, arose from a collaborative process lasting almost five years. Its four movements reflect upon the stages of humanity’s aspirations for flight. Of “not forgotten” Reynolds writes: “As the years pass, one notices that certain elements in one’s days have unusual persistence in the mind. Such elements may involve individua…
Memory in Motion: Percussion in Surround
“Memory in Motion: Percussion in Surround” was a research project developed to examine how percussionists memorize musical actions within ensembles. As part of this research, director Aiyun Huang commissioned new works to compliment selected existing repertoire. Zihua Tan wrote Sorites to compliment Iannis Xenakis’ Persephassa and Alcides Lanza wrote mnais mnemes to compliment his own earlier composition sensor VI. In both cases, the composers were asked to use the identical setup and notational…
Musica Selecta
As the title and subtitle imply, this is a kind of greatest-hits album, with music selected by ECM label producer Manfred Eicher from the 12 albums on the label devoted to the music of Arvo Pärt. Pärt's music is so malleable that people tend to make their own versions of it rather than collect it, but if you wanted an anthology as a starter box, this would be the one to choose. Eicher has worked closely with Pärt since the 1980s, and he has indeed made a sensible "sequence" out of works that do …
Tabula Rasa
The 1984 ECM album Tabula Rasa was the vehicle that introduced the revolutionary music of Arvo Pärt to audiences outside Eastern Europe and initiated what was to become one of the most extraordinary musical careers of the late 20th century. Like many of the first generation American minimalists, he limited himself to diatonic harmonies and generated pieces by setting processes in motion, but the radical simplicity he achieved was the result of religious contemplation that was at least as, if not…
Music For 18 Musicians
* 2021 stock * Steve Reich's landmark Music for 18 Musicians is perhaps Steve Reich’s most popular, if not most important, piece of music. Defining characteristics of Music for 18 Musicians piece include an ethereal, trance vibe, pulsating bass clarinets, a consistent beat, and slowly developing chord progressions unfolding over the length of approximately one hour. Steve Reich’s genre-defining minimalist compositional tool, phasing, is demonstrated in full force here. We will dive deeper into …
The Piano Works 7 - Chess Serenade
A major discovery and first recording of an important Cage piece from 1944. In 1944, John Cage was invited to participate in “The Imagery of Chess” exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. The artists included Calder, Noguchi, Motherwell, Breton, Duchamp, Ernst, Man Ray, Tanning and other leading surrealists.Cage contributed a painting entitled “Chess Pieces”. It was purchased at the show and went into a private collection. For decades it was deemed lost and was (almost) forgotten…
Whispers Out Of Time
Roger Reynolds’ (b.1939) music is a bit of a paradox: intimate in detail, while on a broader scale it is epic. It fits well with the music of his friends: Toru Takemitsu and Iannis Xenakis. The three works on this disc were composed over a four-year period (1987-1990). All are first recordings, and the first complete disc of Reynolds’ orchestral music. Symphony[Myths], dedicated to Takemitsu, is for large orchestra: woodwinds in fours, piano, harp and an extended percussion section. It is see…
The Works for Percussion 4
A Flower; The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs; 51’15.657” for a speaking percussionist (realization Whiting); Music for Two (By One) (realization Whiting) — Bonnie Whiting, voice & percussion + Allen OTTE/John CAGE: Connecting Egypt to Madison through Columbus Ohio, Cage, and the History of the American Labor Movement (realization Otte) — Allen Otte, voice, prepared piano, percussion. It includes full video and 48khz/24-bit PCM audio + 73 minute video interview with Whiting and Otte, discuss…
My Wounded Head 3
An indefinite, open-ended composition of short sections that allows the performer to decide what and when to repeat or to go on to the next phrase is not new. Terry Riley's In C is the milestone score of decades ago. Slow, prolonged, quasi repetitive and contemplative works in the Western classical style are also familiar though the scores of Morton Feldman, John Adams, Brian Eno, John Luther Adams, and Gavin Bryars. Thus, Marc Chan's piano piece, My Wounded Head 3, inspired by Bach's Passion Ch…
Complete Music with Saxophones
22 works are included, 9 by Grainger, 7 by Cowell and 5 by Cowell as arranged by Grainger. Many are first recordings. They are scored for varied instrumentation: sax ensembles, sax & piano and sax & orchestra. Ulrich Krieger, saxophones & director, various artists
Señales
Señales —Señales, “Homenaje a Jonathan Harvey” for violin & ensemble (Irvine Arditti, violin. Ensemble Signal/Brad Lubman); Páramo de voces for piano & tape (Alberto Rosado, piano); Intermezzo malinconico for bass clarinet solo (Adrián Sandi); Homenaje a Remedios Vario; Recuerdos del Porvenir (ensemble recherche)
On the Edges
"The main focus of Gerald Eckert’s music is frequently not placed on a centrally triggered event or center of action, but on what has been triggered by this event and how the consequences are subsequently developed. In other words, he focuses his sights on what an impulse is followed by. For Außen, von tief innen (Outside, from Deep Within), the consistent subtle and quiet tonal structure of the work is the fine delineation of multiphonics in bass flute and double bass clarinet alongside the ton…
The Works for Percussion 3
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 w…