★Mode
Labyrinthe de Minotaur
** 2021 Stock ** French composer Alain Bancquart (b.1934) is one of the leading composers of microtonal music in Europe. Labyrinthe du Minotaur explores the myth of the Minotaur and the labyrinthe. This large scale piece constantly delves into microtonal and harmonic relationships together with a lyrical polyphony. It is based on texts by his wife, author Marie-Claire Bancquart. The unusual instrumental ensemble incorporates (in addition to the above musicians): pianos in quarter- and sixteenth-…
Shadow of an Idea
The influence of two American composers – John Cage and Morton Feldman – has been decisive on Walter Zimmermann. With Cage, it was his music from the late forties – works like the String Quartet, the Suite for Toy Piano and the Six Melodies – that caught his attention: works underpinned by precise numerical construction, yet with an engaging directness of expression. Feldman has been an inspiration to Zimmermann’s lyrical impetus, and Cage to his constructivist urges. Yet the two do not always …
Another Sunrise
** 2021 Stock ** Peter Garland’s music is uniquely American; a blend of minimalism with influences from South/Central America, Asia and the Native Americans; along with American mavericks John Cage, Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, and Edgar Varèse. Born in 1952, he studied with Harold Budd and James Tenney. The works on this record share a special meditative, and at times ecstatic, spirituality. Garland has a long artistic association with the performers on this disc. Essential Music’s…
Look She Said (Complete Works For Bass)
** 2021 Stock ** “The double-bass – the paradox of its large size and basically quiet sound, and its low registral grounding – has long attracted me. I’ve also been fortunate in knowing outstanding double-bass players.” – Christian Wolff This disc collects all of Wolff’s large body of works for the bass, including a piece for solo electric bass guitar. Two of the works were written specifically for Robert Black, who prepared these pieces with Wolff. The composer attended all of the recordings se…
Metamorphoses (Book I) / Five Pieces for Piano
"This historic release couples George Crumb’s earliest work for piano, the Five Pieces for Piano (1962) with his most recent piano cycle, Metamorphoses (2017). Margaret Leng Tan has long been a champion of Crumb’s music, and he composed Metamorphoses (Book 1) for her. This recording is of the German premiere at the legendary Donaueschingen Festival in 2017.Crumb’s Metamorphoses is a natural descendent of his monumental Makrokosmos I & II piano cycle of the early 1970s. With a nod to Mussorgsky’s…
Kurzwellen
"The performers in Kurzwellen react to the completely unforeseeable events which they receive on short-wave radios while performing on their instruments. But this is not improvisation. Stockhausen’s score instructs them how to transform what they hear: how they imitate and modulate it, make it longer or shorter, how to rhythmically articulate it, higher or lower, louder or softer, darker or more playful. Whether they should play and as solo, duo, trio or quartet, etc.Though not so familiar now, …
Complete Piano Works
This release brings all of Morton Subotnick’s piano music together on one album for the first time, along with four first recordings, all supervised by the composer.Liquid Strata is an important work in Subotnick’s oeuvre. Here the electronic component is what he calls “ghost electronics,” and this is the first of 11 Ghost Pieces. In these works, Subotnick sought to address technology in a way that highlights rather than compromises the inherent features and strengths of acoustical instruments. …
Dispersion
"Working with forces unknown to me has always been an exciting challenge,” says Elliott Sharp, “especially when those forces are in the form of younger musicians, highly skilled and enthusiastic.” For his work with the musicians of the Veni Academy, he chose three previously composed works that would be easily adaptable to a large ensemble whose instrumentation was not the result of prior design plus one newly composed for the occasion. The chosen pieces were based on well-defined processes that…
The Works for Piano 10
"The Solo for Piano is part of the legendary Concert for Piano and Orchestra. It is an indeterminate work, consisting of 63 pages made of 84 different types of composition, each appearing as its own type of notation. The performer creates his own performance by choosing which pages to play and in which order; pages can also be omitted. John Cage began by choosing, using chance operations, a way of composing based on either his Music for Piano series – single notes, or on Winter Music – chords, o…
Killer Instincts
Sarah Maria Sun’s "Killer Instincts" is a gloriously creative and colorful collection of songs about bad people doing bad things. It is also a concept album — a pleasurable journey in bad people’s shoes.
Absence
"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…
Works for Flute
"Flutist Roberto Fabbriciani continues his releases dedicated to the flute repertoire of single composers with works by Belgian composer Henri Pousseur (1929-2009). Previous releases on Mode featured Aldo Clementi and Bruno Maderna.As with Fabbriciani’s preceeding Clementi and Maderna releases, this Pousseur release marks the first time Pousseur’s works for flute have been collected in one recording. It is important to note that Fabbriciani had a long working relationship with the composer.The s…
Negoum
The music on this album was recorded in the studio the day after Frances-Marie Uitti and Ayman Fanous spent ten minutes improvising together in concert, in a first meeting. It represents bidirectional ideas in music often and erroneously thought to be opposites: western vs. eastern, improvised vs. through-composed. In this recording they are stood on their head, examined, dissected, tortured, and ultimately reconciled. Fanous says: “Musically, Frances and I came from two distinct sets of emphase…
For Bunita Marcus
"For Bunita Marcus opens with a clear call to our attention. With these first six notes, we step over the threshold and into the journey of the piece. We know that we are in this for the long haul: Morton Feldman’s late works are notorious for being marathons. He composed For Bunita Marcus in 1985, immediately after his four-hour For Philip Guston, and two years after his six-hour String Quartet (II) These earlier works make an hour-long solo piano piece seem short. Still, it is a long time to …
The Complete Cello Works
"This album collects for the first time four of the most important works from Horatiu Radulescu’s later period, all composed for cello, and all performed by his widow Catherine Marie Tunnell. Radulescu and Tunnell began working together almost immediately upon meeting in 1995. By the time they were married in 1997, Radulescu had already composed for her two of the pieces on this disc (the solo Lux Animae and the cello sonata L’Exil Intérieur), and revised and rededicated her a third, older work …
Works for Organ & for Cello
"Mode’s Horatiu Radulescu Edition, curated with Radulescu’s widow Catherine Marie Tunnell and his publisher Lucero Press, continues with a collection of his works for organ and works with cello.Radulescu’s complete organ works are performed here by German organist Christoph Maria Moosmann, a long-time Radulescu collaborator with a great understanding of his music and sonic goals. Some of the works were written for or dedicated to him. Further definitive recordings are guaranteed by performances …
Harawi
**Deluxe 2LP set with gatefold cover** "Harawi is a cycle of twelve songs scored for soprano and piano composed in 1945. Harawi (known to Spanish speakers as yaraví) designates a song about a fated love that ends in the death of both lovers. Olivier Messiaen remarked that “it is the story of Tristan and Isolde.”The surrealistic text of Harawi is Messiaen’s own. Using the musical structures Messiaen had created for Harawi, he built massive phrases in these songs, expanding space and time, creatin…
Lokale Musik
Despite having an undeniable canon, the minimalist music movement which developed during the 1960s and continues to flourish and evolve today, is defined by a remarkable breadth in ideas and compositional approach. Particularly in Europe, it rapidly took on a diverse number of influences and became very much its own thing. Of the composers who proposed an alternate reality for this territory of sound, there have been few more accomplished than the German composer, Walter Zimmermann.All too often…
Works with Guitar
Like his near contemporary Franco Donatoni, Aldo Clementi (b.1925) is an Italian composer who has had a very fruitful association with that most Italian of instruments, the guitar. Both Clementi and Donatoni shared similar paths in their compositional development: the early influences of major early 20th-century composers through the adoption and later rejection of serialism and the Darmstadt courses they both attended, culminating in their very individual mature styles. Clementi's recent pieces…
Dream, American Music for Electric Guitar
“Dream” is a musical journey through the sound of the electric guitar in American concert music, based on sonic research and on the simplicity and beauty of the electric guitar timbre and colors.Sorrentino’s transcription of Dream by John Cage opens the program. This version demonstrates the pure beauty of the electric guitar’s clean sound with only the addition of light reverb. This is the first CD release for the lost electric guitar composition by Morton Feldman, The Possibility of a New Work…