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1998 release ** "Wendy Mae Chambers (b 1953) is known for the scope and originality of her works, typified by large and unusual instrumental combinations. In Chambers’s own words, Twelve² is a voodoo tone poem in eleven movements for twelve percussio…
Vocal compositions performed by Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Constantine Cassolas and Paul Sperry with the Da Capo Chamber Players and released by New World Records in 1984.
Alvin Lucier is best known for his pioneering work in the mid-sixties in the exploration of sonic environments, particularly sounds that we would never perceive under ordinary circumstances. Vespers and Other Early Works restores to the catalog sever…
Inspired by the perspectives and timescales of nonhuman beings and distant orders of magnitude in the universe of life, Rewild seeks new strata in musical parameters, exploring the uncanny zones at which pitch becomes rhythm, harmonic interval become…
Joseph Kubera, piano. Michael Byron (b. 1953) was a pupil of James Tenney, and later, of Richard Teitelbaum. The body of music he has composed over the past thirty years has been harmonically rich, rhythmically detailed, and increasingly virtuosic. D…
While certain recognizable fingerprints are found throughout the body of Daniel Lentz's (b. 1942) work, he has never been content to settle within one particular style or mode of music for long, moving ever forward in an evolutional continuum, an ove…
The guitar is the popular instrument par excellence. As apt for Brazilian sambas for Irish ballads or American blues, the guitar has also recently been adapted as a surrogate for plucked instruments from non-Western musical traditions; no idiom seems…
Peter Garland (b. 1952) studied with Harold Budd and James Tenney at Cal Arts and had long student-mentor friendships with Lou Harrison, Conlon Nancarrow, Paul Bowles and Dane Rudhyar. Like Harrison, Garland has forged his own musical vocabulary as a…
Ocean/Shore 2 (2003) is one of a series that are studies on the use of diverse materials and on the coexistence, within a piece of music, of various instruments. As in the meeting and interaction of water and land, these instruments can have fundamen…
"James Moore (b. 1979) is a composer with an eye toward the world of games and experimental theater. He’s an electric guitarist who’s willing and eager to treat his instrument as a playground, not a reverent, static tradition. He’s a tinkerer, a char…
Tip! "A cycle of six movements and a coda, Six Seasons is as protean as the ocean waters that serve as its substance and underlying metaphor. In creating a space of many spaces and multiple temporalities, Lei Liang (b. 1972) resides in select company…
Lejaren Hiller (1924-1994) was a musically eclectic composer, often combining several different types of techniques in the same piece. In the mid-sixties, he asserted that his "objective in composing music by means of computer programming is not t…
Robert Carl (b 1954) has long been interested in Japanese music and culture, and in the spring of 2007 he received a grant from the Asian Cultural Council to travel to Japan to interview Japanese composers between the ages of thirty and sixty—his con…
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 …
Complete sessions / expanded edition. One of the most important jazz albums of the 1970s – finally in its definitive edition. Julius Hemphill's Dogon A.D. is the missing link between the avant-garde and the blues, between the cotton fields and outer …
With Notebook, Lukas Ligeti turns a band, a method and a score into the same thing: four pieces where intricate design and on‑the‑spot decision‑making fuse into chamber music that thinks aloud in real time.
This album exemplifies the depth to which Larry Polansky (b. 1954) explores and connects different musical ideas: In Three Pieces for Two Pianos and Old Paint, mathematical models and algorithmic processes are used to set folk songs; in k-toods, simp…
Born in Michigan but for most of his life a true Californian, Robert Erickson (1917-1997) had a reputation as a maverick. His musical path was never a straight line, nor, really, a line at all but a landscape, with ranges of features rather than mere…
The harp is a strange and compelling instrument that in its technological ancientness beckons composers and listeners alike to bask in its heavenly aura. Like hand drums and acoustic guitars, the immediacy of a harp's sound production demands an inti…
We want to fabricate a new music. We imagine a situation in which the sounding together of tones is never taken for granted, is continually renewed and reinvented. We know that the effect of any set of simultaneous tones, by means of the multiplicati…
Radiolorians (2018) finds Pisaro-Liu drawing inspiration from another gifted observer of this world-in-variation, the German zoologist, naturalist, and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who promoted and popularized evolutionary thought via exten…
Music for violin and resonator guitar by Robert Ashley, Lainie Fefferman, Paula Matthusen, James Moore, Larry Polansky and Ken Thomson. Longtime friends and collaborators James Moore and Andie Springer began performing as a duo in 2011 while on to…
The Piano Concerto No. 2 is an experiment in classical form. The work contains the same sudden juxtapositions and abrupt contrasts of mood as his futurist music. But the excesses of his recent Ballet mécanique are compensated for by an almost spare, …
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(19…
Lejaren Hiller (1924-1994) is, understandably, best known for his computer-assisted compositions and works utilizing electronics. The three pieces included in this collection span a crucial fifteen-year period in Hiller's career. The first was writte…
Larry Polansky (1954–2024) was a visionary American composer, guitarist, theorist, and educator whose work forged deep connections across mathematics, computer science, intonation theory, and experimental music. His compositions-performed here by col…
In his compositions, composer/performer Kyle Bruckmann seeks to integrate rigor and internal logic with raw immediacy while fully engaging his fellow performers as not simply dutiful interpreters, but creatively invested collaborators. Aesthetically,…
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 …
Important reissue of two historic minimalist albums, originally released on LP via the Advance label and out of print for decades now. Mastered from original tapes according to the composers original specifications. Packaged with informative liner no…
In modern experimental music, and especially among a number of musician-composers emerging in America during the Sixties, a fixation on process and awareness became a structural hallmark, exploring the gradual change of sonic materials, built environ…
Works by Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, Pril Smiley, Bülent Arel, Mario Davidovsky, Alice Shields . In 1950, the Columbia University Music Department requisitioned a tape recorder to use in teaching and for recording concerts. In 1951, the first…
“... 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 Cage The most characteristic features of American music are its eclectic…
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." In…
Michael Pisaro (b. 1961) is a member of the Wandelweiser collective, an international organization of musicians which he has defined as 'a particular group of people who have been committed, over the long term, to sharing their work and working to…
"This collection of songs represents one hundred years of music produced by American composers and poets of color—the best of us. Some identify(ied) as Negro, some African-American, some Black, some men, some women, and some insisted they were beyond…
Max Giteck Duykers (born 1972) stands out for his ongoing dedication to the sound worlds made possible by the Pierrot ensemble. Therefore it is fitting that the first recording devoted exclusively to Duykers's music should feature two of the four "Pi…
The title of this recording has multiple meanings for its composer, Larry Polansky (b 1954). These are the generations... is a translation of the Hebrew title for the second work on the program, Eleh Tol'd'ot, the first words of the thirty-fifth vers…
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 Marti…
Born in Michigan but for most of his life a true Californian, Robert Erickson (1917-1997) had a reputation as a maverick. His musical path was never a straight line, nor, really, a line at all but a landscape, with ranges of features rather than mere…
Ezra Sims (1928-2015) was known mainly as a composer of microtonal music. Surrounded by world-class performers who championed his music, he produced a large number of chamber and solo, choral, and two orchestral works. With his unwavering commitment …
An insatiable listener, learner, and reader, Stuart Saunders Smith (b. 1948) has taken into his mind and spirit myriad styles of musical performance spanning centuries, methods of compositional practice of all sorts, and innumerable close personal re…
Recordings of works by Joseph Byrd, student of Morton Feldman and John Cage and frontman for The United States Of America, are finally available by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble via New World Records.Byrd collaborated with a number of Flux…
The immersive sonic textures that characterize Michael Winter's (b 1980) music are crafted from comprehensive lists of data, with each composition encompassing a musical question that is addressed algorithmically. A performance lasts for as long as i…
This recording is the product of a remarkable intercultural musical experiment. It contains five strikingly varied works, each one the fruit of musical cross-pollination between America and the island of Bali. The three American composers represented…
Six Primes is composed using the first six prime numbers 2, 3, 5,
7, 11, and 13 to govern both its tuning and temporal structure,
including harmony, rhythmic subdivisions, and form. I wrote this music
to explore the limits of using the same intege…
**2020 stock** I was born in Detroit (1931), studied chemistry and music at Princeton (1949–53), and after the army, pro-baseball, and working as a chemist at Cape Canaveral, I went to “Koln State” (Music School) in Germany on the GI Bill, (1959-63) …
Chris Brown’s (b. 1953) compositions Some Centre (2019) and First Light (2016), performed with such assured lucidity and subtle shading by the three members of The Chromelodia Project, engage with significant precursors in music and in literature, dr…
Orchestra Works brings together three groundbreaking compositions by Alvin Lucier, each redefining the orchestral tradition through radical explorations of sound, space, and perception. Performed by the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra under conductors…
Rory Cowal is a distinctive pianist, one who draws liberally on classical chops, ample experience with improvisation, and a predilection for the new and uncharted. This makes him especially attractive to composers who wish to blur the boundaries betw…
Glorious Ravage is a panoramic free jazz song cycle by San Francisco Bay Area bassist and composer Lisa Mezzacappa, that features a large ensemble of stellar California improvisers performing with films created by Bay Area moving image artists Janis …
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. Philome…
Wrestling with the notion of balancing both formal construction and creative spontaneity has allowed Scott Fields (b 1952) to compose a powerful body of work with ties to extramusical concerns from the realms of literature, philosophy, and science. S…
Alvin Singleton’s (b. 1940) approach to music-making has all along been involved in an interplay with listeners and their psychology. While this does not mean he has been centered on simply pleasing his audiences, his work seems to constantly draw hi…
Piano Music 1963-1998. Piano Plus is a collection of six piano pieces written by Richard Teitelbaum (b. 1939), a pioneer of interactive electronic and computer music, between 1963 and 1998. Piano Plus illustrates the use of cutting-edge technology to…
Just when you think you are grasping the breadth and quality of the music of Julius Eastman (1940 - 1990), a recording such as Julius Eastman: The Zürich Concert shows up, and you have to go back and reassess his work and wonder what will show up nex…
Robert Palmer (1915-2010) produced more than ninety symphonic, choral, chamber, and solo works throughout his career, earning a reputation in the mid-twentieth century as one of the country's leading, most daring, and -- at the same time -- appealing…
Underwater Princess Waltz is a bold and imaginative project by the Belgian/Dutch electric guitar quartet Zwerm, featuring a vibrant collection of “one-page pieces” by leading figures in American experimental music: Karl Berger, Earle Brown, Alvin Cur…
In many respects Earl Howard’s (b. 1951) music is an anomaly that resists categorization and the seductiveness of genre. He is an important force in improvised music and yet his work employs complex structures and rigorous transitions of sound and te…
Listening is the foundation of Raven Chacon’s (b. 1977) wide-ranging artistic practice. “I am a listener,” he simply declares, but the attention he gives to sound is complex and vast, encompassing far more than what is immediately audible. From his e…
The music on these CDs takes us into a new realm of music making, one that Alvin Lucier has defined for us and one that demands that we start to listen anew. His work has been more often described in terms of science than of art as if it were a serie…