★Maria de Alvear World Edition
Mature Hybird Talking
On Mature Hybird Talking Frank Gratkowski, one of the world’s most advanced and original voices in the field of improvised music, teams up for the first time with one of the leading ensembles for composed contemporary music. He dedicates this 45-minute piece to James Joyce and Iannis Xenakis, who both had a major impact on him. Inspired by the rhythm and sound of Joyce's language, Gratkowski and the Ensemble Modern create a widely ramified, sensitive and incredibly vital musical organism. Energy…
Magna Mater
*In process of stocking* "Magna Mater for voices, ensemble and video installation (2013) is one of Maria de Alvears most important recent works. It constitutes a ritualistic invocation of all-nourishing Mother Nature. Sounds, words and images evoke her power and wisdom, the destructive power of earthquake, asteroid impact, drought and firestorm, and the life-giving elements of soil, sun, water, air, sky, clouds, rain.
In this decidedly visceral music, Maria de Alvear explores archetypal human c…
Die Verwandlung des Zornes
*In process of stocking* The Zooming is implemented musically; it captures places on the globe that lie in a constantly narrowing field of view around the Kollegienkirche in Salzburg, the site of the piece's premiere. In the north and south, the latitudes represent the boundaries at 90° each, in the east and west, the longitudes at 180° each. The places where the four wind instruments play in the Kollegienkirche each lie on an imaginary line projected in the four different cardinal directions, n…
Direccional o no · El pensamiento modifica la materia sobre la que se asienta
"As far as my artistic memory goes, I have always been fascinated by the boundaries between continuity and discontinuity, between the sayable and the unsayable, between the countable and uncountable; between what can be described completely by an algorithm and what cannot; between precise writing and writing that only manages to approximate any given phenomenon; between directionality and a lack thereof, adirectionality — a conflict that, not without a certain degree of internal struggle, I woul…
Popol Vuh
"The Popol Vuh- the Book of Counsel“ of the K'iché-Maya belongs to the most important creation myths of the early advanced civilizations in the world. A Maya from the K'iché people, who had learned Spanish during the conquista, wrote down the the texts in K'iché with Latin letters between 1545 and 1555. Before that, the texts were only passed on orally. Father Francisco Ximenéz copied this book and translated it into Spanish. Then he returned the original to the K'iché people. In this way the b…
Nine unfinished Symphonies
The Nine Unfinished Symphonies were conceived as one entity. They are written in my musical native tongue; the musical grammar and idioms with which I have become so familiar that I can converse in them spontaneously, without thinking, so that I can devote my full attention to what I actually want to do. It appears that we need narratives, such as the ‘sacred’ number nine with symphonies, or the concept of the Unfinished, which stands in sharp contrast to the fragmentary or the ‘uncapitalized’ u…
Pathological Curves
To sonically modify sound, not as a composerly or listenerly injunction but as a condition of its possibility: such is the task of Elizabeth Hoffman. Hers is not merely a music of the "verb" - that composers "do" something or "perform" something on the sonic. Hers is an "adverbial" music.
Above all, adverbial music modifies - sound, yes, but more fundamentally the space in which sound appears and the temporality that it solicits as it vanishes, always. Adverbial music, reticently and generously,…
Wave Piano Scenery Player
Wave Piano Scenery Player consists of several artifacts brought into a single structure: large black oil paintings on paper sheets dividing an automatic grand piano in two parts (sounding body, keyboard); tree pieces of music hamonically linking the 88 keys of the piano by combining them with mirotonally tuned sinewaves; a subwoofer/loudspeaker reproducing the elctronic tones; a pianist and a computer, both acting as performers.
The time-based form is deivides into threee parts, in which Sabat c…
Painted Cakes Are Real, Too
When you are listening to his pieces and are completely at ease, they offer the listener the beauty of pure sound: I believe this also applies to his likeminded friends. Even when and if they are of a continuous narrative type, they just create the right situation to listen to sounds. As the title reveals: Painted cakes are real, too. The beautiful sounds are repeated in order to remain purely sound. This repetition does not build up a narrative, it becomes more complicated and excited not in or…
Der Uhu des Ihi
"Leukert brings back intuition into the computer-mechanical techniques of contemporary classical music. His compositions derive from the hearing experience - he has become a David Lynch for the ‘cinema pour l’oreille’, who is operating with the ironically associative scepticism of Godard. A blessing that Maria De Alvear’s small label ‘World Edition’ now produced eight of Leukert’s audio pieces on CD; among them the enchanting trilogy Wildwechsel" . - Alban Nikolai Herbst
Improvisation
That’s the name of the game... Marco Blaauw plays on a quartertone double bell trumpet, a shell, brought from Madagascar,a slide trumpet, piccolo trumpet, quartertone flugel horneven megaphone and flexible tube. Gijsbrecht Royé plays on a self-made bass-zither. To play on the four groups of bass grandpiano strings, he uses different kinds of sticks; two bows (normally used for double bass), metal strings, nails, brushes, knives, rat-tailed files and metal scouring pads.
Sitting Between Chairs
* 2021 Stock * Metamusic. A suitable term for all these works, if by this we understand that musical aspects are somehow transcended, transgressed.
Sitting between chairs. A transgression which leads, through interactions of materials and intentions, controlled use of randomness or indeterminacy, conceptual game of measurement or definition, to the contemplation of music itself as yet another fragment of the whole, because the sound objects may have a dramatic or musical nature.
How could this w…
World
* 2021 Stock * A sprawling, wandering hourlong geological survey of the composer’s ambitious spiritual world. Her music does not develop; it accumulates. - Bernard Holland, New York Times
The only single, continuous orchestral movement I know of to surpass the finale of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in duration. - Kyle Gann, Village Voice
Hildegard Kleeb - pianoJoseph Kubera - pianoThe Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble Petr Kotik - conductor
Libertad
* 2021 Stock * "There are pieces which must be done. The work Libertad is one of them. Inspired by the lyrics of Tsolagiu M.A. RuizRazo, it is one of those compositions that gave me enormous pleasure while working and that accompanied me with a wave of very great power [...] Perhaps this work [...] is one of those that carry the most power. There is an enormous mysterious protective circle around it. It is one of the works that has given me the most riddles, that contains knowledge that I can on…
Sexo Puro
* 2021 stock * Nobody who attended the first performance of Sexo Puro is ever likely to forget it. On that October afternoon, the conciliatory power of this work, which Maria de Alvear sees as a “meditation on inner goodness”, came into sharp collision with the irreconcilable powers that sometimes gather at contemporary-music festivals.
It was probably not even the theme of sexuality that so profoundly disturbed a part of the audience at the 1998 Donaueschingen Festival, even though it is seldom…
Section
* 2021 stock * The structures of Chris Newman's music are apparently simple, like his music pictures: large, thick dots of notes, but a lot of space in between: "The raw and the cooked" (Roland Barthes). He himself likes to cook well and with pleasure. Just his lamb chops, for example. He only puts them in a hot pan with oil; there is also chard, just pulled out of the water, but also more complicated things: coq au vin or bœuf bourguignon.His music has a strong physical structure, is quasi carn…
Dedicatorias
* 2020 stock * Dedicatorias is a series of 60 sound works each lasting 1 minute which were largely accomplished between 2013 and 2015. The list of dedications is neither exhaustive nor can it be. It is subjective art which comprises very different techniques, influences and materials: sound remnants, illuminated in their confrontation, metamorphosis and combination which bring up to date and question the bearer and media. Radio is the paramount reference.
In these miniatures, there is a place fo…
Legende
* 2021 stock * Acousmatic events dispense with performers. There are no musicians, even at public concerts. The audience is able to follow what is emanating from the loudspeakers with eyes closed and still not miss anything. What it hears is composed, and demands the same attention as any other kind of music listened to on a stereo system or via headphones. It is worth remarking this fact because so many people are no longer able to hear things without seeing something as well in video clips or …
Ataraxia
*2020 stock* Unlike my earlier freetonal and 12-tone works, my music since 1981 has been characterized by the use of repetition, and since 2004 by generally soft dynamics. While often termed "minimalist" or "postminimalist," I have come to prefer the term "focused music," as my works tend to concentrate on very specific, and often a limited number of, music elements.
Typically, there is but a single dynamic level specified, and sometimes not even that. I like to provide a good deal of freedom fo…
Angelus Novus
*2021 stock* Angelus novus is the third opera by Madrid composer Jorge Fernández Guerra. This time, he draws on a selection of texts by Walter Benjamin, which he uses to create a dialogue of sorts between a male character and a female character, who could be an alter ego or perhaps an angel.
The dialogue appears to transpire during the final moments of the character’s life, which may be reminiscent of Benjamin’s final moments at the Spanish border as he fled the Nazis.
Angelus novus premiered a…