Various Artists

Featuring: Dieter Schnebel, Henri Pousseur, Luigi Nono, Sylvano Bussotti, Hans Otte, Gyorgy Ligeti

condition (record/cover): NM / NM (price tag on front) Insert included. | The record that started it all. Neue Chormusik I is the first volume of Wergo's landmark series documenting the revolution in choral music that took place in the 1950s and 1960s, performed by the ensemble that was at the center of that revolution: the Stuttgarter Schola Cantorum under Clytus Gottwald. Eight works trace an arc from the Second Viennese School to the mid-1960s avant-garde, and the programme reads like a syllabus for understanding how the human voice was liberated from its inherited conventions in the space of half a century.

The disc opens with two works by Anton Webern that serve as the historical foundation for everything that follows. Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen Op. 2 (1908), a two-minute setting of Stefan George for unaccompanied mixed choir, is one of the earliest atonal choral works - the voices moving in a canonic web of extraordinary delicacy, already anticipating in its economy and transparency the vocal writing of the 1960s. The Zwei Lieder Op. 19 for mixed choir with celesta, guitar, violin, clarinet and bass clarinet concentrates an entire world of expression into two minutes - Webern's late instrumental palette surrounding the voices like a halo of precise, crystalline colour.

Henri Pousseur's Sept Versets des Psaumes de la Pénitence for four mixed voices carries the serial inheritance into the postwar period - the penitential psalms subjected to a rigorous but expressive compositional method that honours both the sacred text and the structural demands of the material. Dieter Schnebel's Deuteronomium 31, 6 for 15 solo voices pushes further: the biblical text ("Be strong and of good courage") fragmented, its phonemes redistributed among the voices, language becoming music becoming sound. Luigi Nono's Sarà dolce tacere for 8 solo voices is one of the most beautiful pieces of the entire postwar period - settings of Cesare Pavese in which the Italian words float in a luminous suspension, silence and sound held in an equilibrium of extraordinary tenderness. The title says it all: "It will be sweet to be silent." Sylvano Bussotti's Siciliano for 12 male voices - barely two minutes of sensuous, graphic-score-derived vocal writing - closes the first side with a flash of Mediterranean theatricality.

Side B is given over to two substantial works. Hans Otte's Alpha-Omega for 12 male voices, organ and percussion is the longest piece on the disc at over seventeen minutes - a monumental work that draws on the ritual and spatial dimensions of sacred music while operating in an entirely contemporary language. Otte, later celebrated for his Book of Sounds piano cycle, here reveals the breadth of his early ambitions. The disc closes with György Ligeti's Lux Aeterna for 16 solo voices (1966) - the masterpiece that needs no introduction, the work that Kubrick placed at the heart of 2001: A Space Odyssey, its sixteen independent vocal lines weaving a fabric of micropolyphonic light that remains one of the supreme achievements of twentieth-century music. This is the Schola Cantorum's own recording, and it has an authority that no subsequent version has quite matched.

LP with 8-page booklet including score excerpts. Released on Wergo, 1974. Performed by the Stuttgarter Schola Cantorum, chorus master Clytus Gottwald.