★Folkways Records
New American Music, Vol. 3
*2024 stock. Custon CDr* Works by Talib Rasul Hakim, William Bolcom, Howard Swanson and Frederic Rzewski are presented here. Highlights include Bolcom’s "Whisper Moon" for chamber ensemble and three of Rzewski’s songs, whose lyrics are drawn from words by Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes and Guatemalan revolutionary Otto Rene Castille.
New American Music, Vol. 2
*2024 stock. Custon CDr* Trumpets and trombones twist through dense pockets of sound in Lucia Dlugoszewski “Angels of the Inmost Heaven”; the voice of a lone guitarist punctures the silence in James Fulkerson’s “Patterns” II and VII; flute, bassoons, viola and vibraphone are intended to “turn some dancers on” in Carman Moore’s “Youth in a Merciful House”; and a guitarist laments to the hum of an Elizabethan-type string and woodwind consort in Stanley Silverman’s “Planh.” This is a thoughtfully b…
Invocations
*2024 stock. Custom CDr* How do people pray around the world? On this album, Richard Kostelanetz recorded ministers and religious leaders from diverse religious backgrounds to further explore “those qualities that make all prayers sound like prayers, regardless of differences in language.” The album contains prayers in German, French, Polish, and Persian, as well as Latin, English, Spanish, and Turkish. The recordings are layered, with prayers occurring in multiple languages at once. In this con…
Vox Humana: Alfred Wolfsohn's Experiments In Extension Of Human Vocal Range
Have you ever considered what the full range of tone and pitch the human voice is? Have you wondered if there was some latent singing ability that all people were capable of achieving?
Voicings For Tape / Soprano / Piano
2024 stock. Voicings for Tape/Soprano/Piano is a collection of performances by composer, educator, and pianist Sorrel Doris Hays that reflect her Southern roots and feminist themes. The first of four tracks, “Southern Voices for Tape” consists of random spoken conversations interwoven with music from a 1979 Sacred Heart concert. “Blues Fragments” is an excerpt from “Southern Voices for Orchestra” featuring soprano Daisy Newman. “Celebration of NO” is from a larger work titled “Beyond Violence” a…
Voices Of The Satellites
*2024 stock* On October 4, 1957, the space race was triggered by the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik I, the first human-made satellite to orbit the earth. This recording, produced and narrated by Professor T.A. Benham of Haverford College, chronicles the sounds of the first thirteen American and Soviet satellites launched during the ensuing year. One track features the audible heartbeat of Laika, the first dog in space.
Travelon Gamelon: Music For Bicycles
2024 stock. This early (1982) project from Arizona “Audio Artist” Richard Lerman presents musical composition performed with bicycles. Lerman explains: “A gamelan orchestra is a large group of percussive instruments, usually metallic, from SE Asia. In fact, the sound of such a group is not unlike the timbre of amplified bicycles.” With such an idea, he embarks on a project that captures the amplified sounds of moving bicycles in harmonious rhythms creating songs. Liner notes include detailed inf…
Tract: A Composition Of Agitprop Music For Electromagnetic Tape
*2024 stock* Created by Turkish musician and electronic music composer İlhan Mimaroğlu, Tract is dedicated to fellow countryman Nȃzim Hikmet, whom Mimaroğlu regarded “as the greatest poet of the revolutionary struggles.” Utilizing the voice of Turkish singer Tülay German (identified as Tuly Sand on this recording), Mimaroğlu creates an audio collage of political messages in the propaganda style (agitprop) of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Although his text is based on “direct and …
Sounds Of New Music
2024 stock. Sounds of New Music is a collection of 18 compositions from the 1920s to the mid-1950s representing attempts at a "new means of musical expression." Some use familiar instruments in new ways, while others experiment with new instruments; the formats of the compositions range from structured musical scores written for orchestra to electronically altered music using tape-recording devices. Composers include Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, and John Cage, whose "Dance" is played on a transf…
Science Series: Sounds of Frequency
2024 stock. While some of the sounds on this album could be the noise produced by various electric equipment (fax machine buzz, phone busy tones etc.) this album is actually to provide “a standard by which record playing equipment can be checked for frequency response, and distortion, without equipment other than an oscilloscope and volume indicator.” Recorded and annotated by Peter Bartok. Liner notes include detailed information about each track (frequency) and method of testing.
Reelizations 1
2024 stock. This 1980 recording explores combinations of acoustic instruments and recording technologies. The increasing cost of large ensembles performing new works led composers to experiment with inexpensive alternatives. Barton Smith creates his own orchestra mixing recordings and acoustic instruments with everyday items such as swivel chairs and glass bottles. Liner notes include descriptions of how each track was composed, the composer's biographical information, and suggestions for how ea…
Reelizations 2
2024 stock. This 1982 recording builds on Barton Smith's previous Reelizations release, incorporating acoustic and electronic instruments with tape-recording technology into a unique one-person orchestra. The ability to create and perform music with the use of new technology and without large and expensive orchestras made sharing creations easier, especially for accompaniment in film, radio, and television. Liner notes include descriptions of how each track was composed, instrumentation, and sug…
Songs From The Bardo
Songs from the Bardo begins with a bell ringing out once, twice, three times, as a ritualistic chant emerges from the dense silence. The collaborative composition by avant-garde icon Laurie Anderson, Tibetan multi-instrumentalist Tenzin Choegyal, and composer and activist Jesse Paris Smith is a guided journey through the visionary text of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, unfolding in an 80-minute ebb and flow of sound and words. Songs from the Bardo is a transporting experience, meant to draw the l…
Futuribile (The Life To Come)
*2024 stock* What did the future sound like in 1980? Futurible is brought to you by Italian composer Gianni Safred and will take you both back in time and into the future. Safred uses Moog and Arp synthesizers that have now become commonplace in popular music. These sounds are "suitable for space travels, space explorers, experiments, fantastic adventures, future enterprises, interplanetary stories, important achievements, industrial accomplishments of broad implication… modern scientific discov…
Extended Piano
*2024 stock* Elliott Schwartz plays four of his compositions for solo piano and pre-recorded tape, a project that remains "a continuing attempt to enhance, expand, obscure, develop or otherwise modify the piano sonority and the act of piano performance, through electronics." In his improvisatory piece "Grand Concerto" he uses fragments from the Grieg, Tchaikovsky No. 1 and Liszt No. 1 piano concertos; it is as epic in scope as the classical favorites.
Computer Music From The Outside In
*2024 stock* A 1983 Folkways release, Computer Music from the Outside In showcases three composers narrating the ideas and processes behind their computer music compositions, as well as the compositions themselves. The first two pieces are by Barton McLean: “Etunytude” is an etude-like piece made of gradually changing harmonic sounds, and “The Last Ten Minutes” is meant to be an abstract representation of the devastation of “the last nuclear holocaust.” “The Whistling Wind,” by Karl Korte, is ba…
Computer Music
*2024 stock* Computer Music serves as the official musical documentation of the November 1981 International Computer Music Conference, held at North Texas State University in Denton, Texas. The album features five compositions with music that ranges from electronic sounds to female vocals, flute and horns, stringed instruments, and percussion. The composers include Larry Austin, whose early works were recorded with the help of Leonard Bernstein; Bruce Pennycook, who now teaches music at the Butl…
A Different View
*2024 stock* Contrabass (double bass) solo virtuoso Bertram Turetzky performs seven solos on the contrabass in this 1981 release. Using bow, plucking strings, tapping on the instrument’s wood body, and employing a little audio technology, Turetzky demonstrates the full range of musical sounds that can be produced on the contrabass. His repertoire on this recording includes a piece dedicated to him (“The Last Contrabass in Las Vegas”), two of his own compositions, and the Lennon-McCartney ballad …
Together To The Tune Of Coltrane's "Equinox"
Big Tip! Known for her contributions to the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, Sarah Webster Fabio published a plethora of poetry collections and works of cultural criticism. Together to the Tune of John Coltrane’s “Equinox” is her fourth and final record for Folkways, and sees her vivid language and distinctive voice becoming enmeshed with a dynamic backdrop of exploratory jazz. Fabio pays homage to Black jazz and blues musicians Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and John Coltrane. F…
Jujus / Alchemy of the Blues
Big Tip! Jujus/Alchemy of the Blues is Sarah Webster Fabio’s third album for Folkways. Funky riffs and jazz arrangements written and performed by her children and their band Don’t Fight the Feeling underpin Fabio’s poetry, giving her words gravity. "I feel that these [poems] represent the epitome of my experimenting with the integration of music and poetry in a Black idiom taken from the rich source of inspiration welling from the Black experience here in America,” explains Fabio in the album’s …