Music For High Winds
Clarinetist Carol Robinson had the unique opportunity to work directly with Giacinto Scelsi on his music: "I discovered this music in 1981. Captivated, I began including pieces in concerts the following year. A friend of the composer who attended a concert gave him a recording of my performance. As a result, Scelsi invited me to Rome. In his apartment overlooking the Roman forum... On numerous occasions we worked in detail on all his music for clarinet, an instrument particularly important…
Musica Da Camera
Luigi Dallapiccola's Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera for piano, Tartiniana Seconda and Parole di S.Paolo; Goffredo Petrassi's Sestina d'autunno "Veni Creator Igor", Seconda Serenata Trio, Dialogo Angelico for 2 flutes; Ensemble Dissonanzen.
1 = Petrassi: Sestina d'autunno "Veni Creator Igor", for mandolin, guitar, viola, cello, double-bass & percussion (1981-82).2-12 = Dallapiccola: Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera, for piano (1952).13 = Petrassi: Seconda Serenata Trio, for mandolin, guitar & har…
Mexico: New Music For Strings
This recording features six of the most inventive younger composers (born between 1957 and 1977) in Mexico's contemporary music scene. Irvine Arditti and the Arditti Quartet gave the first performances of many of these works for string quartet or solo violin. The works were recorded in 2002 during the first Radar festival." Composers featured: Juan Felipe Waller, Hebert Vázquez, Germán Romero, Iván Naranjo, Rogelio Sosa, Hilda Paredes. Recorded at: April 1-3, 2002 (Irvine Arditti) and April 10-1…
Complete Music For Violin & Piano
Here, collected for the first time, are all of Morton Feldman's compositions for violin and piano. It is also a kind of walk through his compositional development, from the Webernesque early Piece for Violin and Piano (1950); through the experiments with graphic notation in Projection 4 (1951); followed by an excursion into the jungle-like density of David Tudor's energy in Extensions 1 (1951); to the cryptic notational riddles of Vertical Thoughts 2 (1963); from the dry carpet-dusting Spring …
The Orchestral Works 1: Hymnos, Hurqualia, Konx-Om-Pax
Volume 2 in Mode's Scelsi Edition presents three of his rarely heard and recorded orchestral works, vividly captured in outstanding sound. Hymnos' large orchestra is divided antiphonally into two almost identical groups, symmetrically placed on each side of a central axis made up of the organ, timpani, and percussion. About halfway through the piece, as a result of accumulated pedal tones and their harmonics, the aura of a phantom choir miraculously appears-or so it seems-in a spine-tingli…
The Number Pieces 2: Five³
During the last few years of his life, John Cage wrote many pieces in the same general vein as Five3. They are often referred to as "the number pieces." This references the titles of the pieces, which are all simply the number of the performers. Superscripts are added as necessary to distinguish the individual pieces (this is the third quintet, for example). These works are also called "the time-bracket pieces," a reference to the notation of the pieces. Each event in the piece consists of…
String Quartet No. 1
The Flux Quartet follow their acclaimed, best selling recording of Feldman’s monumental 6-hour String Quartet No. 2 (mode 112, 5-CDs or 1-DVD) with this release, thus completing their cycle of Feldman’s string quartets. String Quartet No. 1 is one of Feldman’s earliest long-scale pieces. Unlike other recordings of String Quartet No.1, the FLUX recording respects Feldman’s tempo and all of the repeats, making it the longest recording of the piece.
The set also contains Feldman’s two quartets f…
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…
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…
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 w…
Music in 2 Dimensions – Works for Flute
In honor of the 40th anniversary of great composer/ conductor Bruno Maderna’s (1920-73) death, Mode is pleased to release the first complete CD of Maderna’s music for flute. The flute played an important part in Maderna’s oeuvre due to his friendship with the exceptional flutist Severino Gazzelloni, who had premiered almost all of the flute compositions. Musica su due dimensioni is among the earliest examples to make live music interact with electro-acoustic sounds recorded on tape. There …
Cage Edition Vol.52 : The Works for Percussion 4
**CD Edition** 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.
Xenakis Edition 15, Orchestral Works
**CD Edition** Metastaseis A (first recording), Orchestra Sinfonica RAI; Terretektorh for 88 musicians dispersed among the public; Nomos Gamma for 98 musicians dispersed among the public — Residentie Orkest The Hague, Arturo Tamayo, conductor.
String Quartet No. 2
In the 1970s Morton Feldman took up the study and collecting of antique Turkish rugs, a highly evolved and exquisite folk art. The rugs are intricately patterned, symmetrical in basic design but with constant variation and displacement in the detailed execution of that design; strikingly and subtly colored, including fine variegations of principal colors resulting from the dyeing process. Analogies are clear to Feldman's music as it takes up large-scale patterning, partly working with his famili…
Naima
Swiss musician Roland Dahinden is not your typical trombonist. Equally at home in New Music, Jazz and Improvisation, he is a favorite interpreter of Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Christian Wolff and Alvin Lucier, as well as being acclaimed for performances in the trombone/piano duo with Hildegard Kleeb. On disc, Dahinden is well known for his Hat Art recording devoted to Cage and Wolff. This disc is the first release of his own compositions and interpretations of John Coltrane's classic Nai…
The Great Works For Voice
Mode's reissue of Christine Schadeberg's 1995 recital of vocal music by Luciano Berio is a welcome addition to the catalog. While her performances don't make the listener forget the individuality and panache of Cathy Berberian, for whom most of these pieces were written, Schadeberg more than holds her own in her technical and expressive mastery of the music. Her voice is not large, but is remarkably flexible and secure, and her tone is pure. These performances are models of precision and clarity…
Sonic Encounters
The second recording from Margaret Leng-Tan, the "diva of the avant-garde", featuring works by three composers whom she specializes in: John Cage (USA), Somei Satoh (Japan) and Ge Gan-ru (China/USA). With Sonic Encounters: The New Piano, she explores the effect of Asian aestehtics on contemporary American composers and the influence of American composers on their Asian counterparts.The first recordings of two early works by Cage impart a hard-edged brilliance not usually associated with the prep…
Works for piano 1949-1987
in this edition we hear for the first time the complete solo piano works from between 1949 and 1987 of the swiss avant-garde composer Hermann Meier. Before the time of the three movement sonata meier composed several dodecaphonic works some of which were cyclic. these were not considered for this CD, since the sonata contains structurally a replica of all that meier wrote before. the sonata coincides with the first serial sketches and visions, together with integral thinking using rows and is as…
Mani
Mani is the very first recordings of the new collection Contra Naturam, a collaboration between Ictus Ensemble and Sub Rosa. Mani is released as a double-CD; Includes 24-page booklet.The concept of Contra Naturam: The "magic of the record" befits contemporary music, which starts by adhering to an open, flexible sonic space where magnetic bolts of lightning shoot through. In that respect, at least, it has always been pop. The record lifts the curtain on a virtual stage; it creates its own sp…
Criss-Cross / Hanover
**2020 small repress** Black Truffle present the premier recordings of two recent works by legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier. Lucier has been crafting elegant explorations of the behavior of sound in physical space since the 1960s and is perhaps best known for his 1970 piece I Am Sitting In a Room (LCD 1013CD). He has written a remarkable catalog of instrumental works that focus on phenomena produced by the interference between closely tuned pitches, often using pure electron…