★New World Records
Five Works For Voices, Instruments, And Electronics
Kenneth Gaburo (1926–1993) composed works for instruments, voices, electronics, multi-media, theater, and a variety of other resources. Foremost among his many interests was a concern with the voice and with language—how we shape language and how we are shaped by it—and with making works that existed somewhere between the boundaries of music and language. Of the works on this CD, three are intensely concerned with what Gaburo termed “Compositional Linguistics” (Antiphony III, Antiphony IV, and M…
Schlingen Blängen
Schlingen Blängen is an invaluable addition to the slender but precious discography of Charlemagne Palestine, one of the legendary figures of the amazingly fertile New York and West Coast experimental music/art scene of the sixties and seventies. He is considered to be a seminal figure of early minimalism—as important as his better-documented contemporaries. His performances on the giant bells at St. Thomas Church and his evening-length Bösendorfer shows are still spoken of with awe by those who…
Ikon and other Early Works
This CD comprises the text-sound works (1974-1980) on which Ingram Marshall concentrated throughout the seventies and falls into two parts: the works from the Fragility Cycles period (Cries Upon the Mountains, SUNG, Sibelius in His Radio Corner, and IKON) and the earlier works (Cortez, Weather Report, and The Emperor’s Birthday).
“Cortez, Weather Report, and The Emperor’s Birthday
form a kind of trilogy representing my work with “text-sound” in the
early seventies. The techniques used to gener…
Music From The Once Festival 1961-1966
With Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, Donald Scavarda, David Behrman, George Crevoshay, Philip Krumm, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Sheff, Bruce Wise. Ann Arbor, Michigan, seems an unlikely site for the establishment of a major avant-garde festival that would shake the new-music community. Tucked away in America’s heartland, the city is equally removed from the Eastern metropolises whose artists pride themselves on sensing the pulse of the times, and from the nonconformis…
Lonesome Road (The Crawford Variations)
Larry Polansky, though known primarily for his work in the field of computer music, has produced a major addition to the keyboard literature, this massive theme-and-variations on Ruth Crawford Seeger’s arrangement of the folk song "Lonesome Road." Inspired by his deep engagement with her music, Lonesome Road (1988-89) is a prime example of Polansky’s penchant for building large architectonic structures through complex transformational processes. The work is in three sections of seventeen variati…
Terry Riley
Uncle Jard (1998) (saxophone quartet, piano, harpsichord, and voice) is a particularly compelling example of this. In this piece, Indian classical music and blues/jazz elements co-exist in a stylistically coherent whole: ragtime and raga have never been so closely intertwined. The piece is divided into three parts. While in the first and second parts the texture of the saxophone ensemble is enriched by the voice and keyboard, in the third part the voice is not featured. Assassin Reverie (2001), …
ShamanSong
Composer/performer Joan La Barbara (b 1947) has been an influential figure in experimental music since the early 1970s. She has devoted her career to the exploration of the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument. Going far beyond traditional boundaries, she has created works for multiple voices, chamber ensembles, music theater, orchestra and interactive technology. ShamanSong features three premieres of vintage La Barbara "sound paintings" of pensive beauty and spiritual resonance.
ShamanSo…
O, O, O, O, That Shakespeherian Rag
O,O,O,O, That Shakespeherian Rag collects six of the most important compositions from his relatively small body of work. By the late 50s Martirano had begun to freely incorporate elements of jazz and popular music. O,O,O,O, That Shakespeherian Rag(1959), one of his two magnum opuses, is a prime example of this musical synthesis—a serialist choral setting of passages from three Shakespeare plays, accompanied by a chamber orchestra that includes a jazz ensemble. Schoenberg meets bebop in a wild, i…
Columbia- Princeton Electronic Music Center 1961- 1973
Works by Bülent Arel, Charles Dodge, Ingram Marshall, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Daria Semegen, Alice Shields. The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was the first electronic music center to be established in the United States. From 1959 to the late 1970s, it was one of the premiere sound facilities in the world. The vast majority of pieces composed at the Center - approximately three hundred - were composed during this period. Some have become classics of music history. This selection, draw…
Philomel
Compositions performed by Bethany Beardslee and Lynne Weber (sopranos), Jerry Kudern and Robert Miller (pianos). The four works on this recording span a period of a decade and are among the best of Milton Babbitt’s output, tape and otherwise. Philomel, for soprano, recorded soprano, and synthesized sound, is one of the undisputed classics of electroacoustic music and this is its definitive recording. Two versions of Phonemena —one for soprano and piano, the other for soprano and tape— another vi…
Robert Ashley
Compositions performed by Barbara Held (flute), Thomas Buckner (voice), MIDI Orchestra. Robert Ashley is known primarily for his theater-based pieces and television operas. This new release presents the world premiere recordings of two of his “orchestral” pieces, Superior Seven (concerto for flute), and Tract (for orchestra and voice), where the orchestra is provided by a MIDI synthesizer. In Superior Seven, the flute floats freely in and out of an atmospheric electronic sound tapestry. It is a …
The New York Composers Orchestra: First Program in Standard Time
Acoustic jazz recording featuring Holcomb's eleven-minute title-track, Lenny Pickett's ten-minute Dance Music for Composer Orchestra, Elliott Sharp's eight-minute Skew and Horvitz's nine-minute Paper Money and an eleven-minute composition by Anthony Braxton.
New Music for Four Guitars
*2022 stock* An amazing collection of works by Loris Chobanian (Sonics), Walter Hartley (Quartet forGuitars), Lejaren Hiller (Metaphors), William Ortiz (Abrazo),Stephen Funk Pearson (Mummychogs (Le Monde)) and James Piorkowski (The Struggle of Jacob), performed by Buffalo Guitar Quartet.
Mass/Seven Pious Pieces
*2022 stock* This collection of two tonal works by composers known for their non-tonal compositional style is a fine example of contemporary approaches to sacred choral music. Salvatore Martirano’s Mass is a setting of a traditional Latin Mass whilst Donald Martino’s Seven Pious Pieces sets religious texts by Robert Herrick. The vocal writing is masterful with transparent textures and flowing contrapuntal lines.
Sound Forms for Piano: Cage/ Cowell/ Johnston/ Nancarrow
Works by John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow, Ben Johnston and Henry Cowell. Performed by Robert Miller, piano.“...in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds.” — John CageThe most characteristic features of American music are its eclecticism and innovation. The works presented here are perfect examples; their only common feature is that they were written for a piano altered in some w…
Future Travel
Long out of print in its original, 1981 LP version from Street Records, Future Travel, has now been released again, remastered for digital media, by New World Records (80668-2). All the music composed and performed by David Rosenboom from this historic album is included, along with a new version of And Out Come the Night Ears, which was first introduced on an LP from 1750 Arch Records in 1978. One of the first albums composed almost entirely with a digital synthesizer, Future Travel, features th…
The Open Air Meeting
Muhal Richard Abrams: piano; Marty Ehrlich: alto saxophone, clarinet.
This disc is taken from a live recording of an open air concert
which took place August 11, 1996 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
This duet concert was, on one level, a meeting between two of the
seminal jazz innovators of their respective generations. The nuanced and
subtle interchange of ideas between these two great musicians-as they
challenge and provoke each other to explore new musical ground-is
enthralling thr…
One Line Two Views
One Line, Two Views features seven compositions for nine-piece
ensemble by Muhal Richard Abrams. Works range from the subtle textural
and tonal explorations of “Textures,” “Hydepth,” and the title track to
the hard bop revisitations of “11 over 4” and “The Prism 3.” The disc is
rounded out by an ebullient, joyous, and celebratory “Tribute to Julius
Hemphill and Don Pullen” and the blues-tinged “Ensemble Song.” Abrams
opts for unique instrumentation including violin, harp, and accordion.
…
Coplanar
born in buenos aires, argentina, in 1941, guillermo gregorio has lived variously in europe and the united states since 1986. he was an active participant on the argentine music scene throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s.“what affects me more than any other thing,” gregorio says, “is my involvement in visual arts, and my architectural and design experience.” in his compositions, a reinterpretation of the fundamental and structural concepts of constructivism converges with the historical exp…