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Rewild
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 becomes beating rate, and timbres morph over time. Like a giant body or ecosystem slowly breathing, Rewild’s constantly transforming sound-world orients temporal perception toward global listening. By offering an aural metaphor for the interacting gradual …
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 accordio…
Cecil Taylor Unit
This record presents further evidence of Cecil Taylor’s genius and awesome ability to work within the group context, in which he furthers his exploration of the piano “as catalyst feeding material to soloists in all registers.” This music at times gets very intense. It will take you down forgotten little streams in your mind and swell them with rivers of sound as Taylor pours notes on your ears. Listen.
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"More than free, the music has a beguiling formal structure, and Taylor feeds all the e…
Dialogues and Contrasts / Colloquy
The title Dialogues and Contrasts describes the nature of the exchange which takes place between the performer and the materials committed to tape. In the first movement the exchange is more in the nature of an argument. Though initially each side appears to favor an independent thematic course, as the movement progresses the performers engage in direct response to the statements on tape. The second movement is more subdued and reflective, with many solo passages, particularly from the French ho…
Desolation Pops
"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 charmer, and a fella who’s always up for another round at the bar of wacky ideas and intellectual questioning. He’s excited for new and unexpected opportunities for collaboration, but always maintains a voice that seems to stay recognizably his own throu…
Ending(s)
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 overriding arc that defines his growth as a composer -- beginning with traditional music, diverting into electronic music, moving into performance art pieces for his various touring groups, then sallying into minimalism, followed by work distinguished f…
Dreamers of Pearl
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. Dreamers of Pearl (2004-05) evinces a sensitivity for the sound of the piano, a sensibility of extended playing-listening, and an interest in repetition and change through gradual and seemingly clandestine processes that transform and extend what we h…
The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 1
This newly remastered reissue marks a welcome return to the catalog of the first volume of the classic 4-CD collection that was formerly available on the CRI label. The works recorded on this disc span the first six years of what Harry Partch (1901–1974), slightly tongue-in-cheek, called the “third period” of his creative life. They show him moving away from the obsession with “the intrinsic music of spoken words” that had characterized his earlier output (the vocal works of 1930–33 and 1941–45)…
Lejaren Hiller: A Total Matrix of Possibilities
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 the immediate realization of an aesthetic unity, but the providing and evaluating of techniques whereby this goal can eventually be realized." In this sense Hiller was a forward-looking composer, in that each piece was an experiment that lead towa…
From Japan
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 contemporaries, whom he describes as the “post-Takemitsu” generation. The complex interplay of history, culture, and memory has long occupied Carl’s thoughts, and forms the basis of his musical exploration of Japan.
Carl’s perspective of the relationshi…
Six Seasons
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, artists who have fashioned a syntax of exploration both attendant to and divergent from music history’s established grooves and curves of innovation and tradition. Of the composers now lionized through the ever-expanding and often-arbitrary canon, …
'Waves breaking on rocks
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 kind of new indigenous music, celebrating pan-cultural experience and vision, and unafraid to suggest that music can still give us a glimpse of that which is sacred. Waves Breaking on Rocks (Elegy for All of Us) (2003) is a suite of elegies that was…
Hyo- shin Na: All the Noises
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 fundamentally very different characters (piri and violin, or clarinet and cello), yet shouldn’t lose their basic nature in the interests of harmony, or even beauty. On first hearing, one might consider All the Noises in the World (2006) to be a piece of trad…
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…
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.
Three Pieces in Polytempic Polymicrotonality
The author of these notes has spent his life explaining radical music, and the music on this disc may be the most radical I've ever written about. Peter Thoegersen (b. 1967) is not yet a name known to the music world; not for any lack of connection to other famous musicians, but because he came to composition late, and because his artistic aims are so broad and complex that they have taken years to evolve. His aesthetic is well defined, and he is upfront about having a name for it: "Polytempic P…
The Wind Demon And Other 19th Century Piano Music
This compendium of American piano music of the last half of the nineteenth-century is a potpourri of popular salon pieces and works of more serious aspirations. Together they conjure a characteristic portrait of the society for which they were composed, evoking images of frontier primitivism, brownstone-ballroom elegance, urban sophistication, as well as a more academically inclined formalism looking back to European models. Scintillating pianism by Ivan Davis and absolutely fascinating notes on…
These Are the Generations
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 verse of the first book (B'rey'sheet) of the Torah. Beyond referencing Polansky's Jewish heritage, the phrase reflects this particular collection of works on several levels.
The compositions included stem from different generations of Polansky's musical …
Granular Modality
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 texture. His electro-acoustic music is realized with a K-2600 Kurzweil that for Howard is not merely a keyboard synthesizer but an open system, a computer with a most effective interface with modules and a key map that enable more freedom in the compos…
Music of the Federal Era
Music of the Federal Era is an excellent overview of late 18th and early 19th century compositions by Benjamin Carr, Oliver Shaw, Raynor Taylor and others, performed on period instruments. The variety of styles represented on this disc reflects two kinds of music that existed quite separately: one centered in the cities, essentially European in origin, and the other in villages and the countryside. For while America found itself politically independent at the end of the Revolutionary War, cultur…
The Redness of Blood
Jerome Kitzke (b. 1955) has described himself as being as much a storyteller as a composer, and that description makes sense. Throughout his music there is a strong dramatic, narrative, theatrical component. Performers shout, sing, move and dance, often as though possessed by the music. An obvious ancestor here is Harry Partch, and though Kitzke’s music does not use just intonation, it projects that “corporeal“ quality that this predecessor valued as essential.The pieces on this disc make for in…
Seth McCoy, Sherrill Milnes, James Richman, Jon Spong, American Fife Ensemble, The Continental Harmony Singers, The Liberty Tree Wind Players
Music Of The American Revolution: The Birth Of LibertyAn evergreen for Fourth of July festivities, this reissue of music from the American Revolution restores to the catalog a classic of the original Recorded Anthology of American Music. It is a scholarly and well-programmed musical recreation of a defining moment in the nation's history, mixing propaganda songs, psalmody, fife-and-drum music, and wind band music, the four types of music most prevalent and popular at the time.
Highlights include baritone Sherrill Milnes's renditions of three propa…
Songs of Love, Luck, Animals, & Magic
In aboriginal times the coastal Indians of Northern California shared a tremendous wealth of food, clothing, and material goods. From Trinidad, California, to the Oregon border, the forests almost touch the Pacific Ocean, which gave the people the bounty of both the woodlands and the sea. The Tolowa and the Yurok, along with their neighbors the Hupa and the Karok, are the southernmost representatives of the elaborate Northwest Coast Indian culture area. This disc contains a variety of love songs…
Form
Comet-like radiance, conviction, fervent intensity, penetrating thought on many levels of seriousness and humor, combined with breathtaking adventurousness and originality, marked the inner and outer life of Stefan Wolpe, as they do his compositions. -- Elliott Carter
Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) is an acknowledged master of modern music whose oeuvre has had a lasting influence on both classical and jazz musicians. Though receptive to prevailing musical trends, Wolpe was an individualist who forg…
Kathleen Battle, Raymond Murcell, Rose Taylor, The Harmoneion Singers, Neely Bruce, Lawrence Skrobacs
Angels' Visits (And Other Vocal Gems Of Victorian America)This recording is a collection of American songs and hymns published mostly during the 1860s and 1870s that deal generally with angels, heaven, and death. Considering the rather morbid subject matter of these songs, they are surprisingly pleasant and refreshing. Death and its associated aspects were a major topic in fiction, poetry, art, and music during much of the nineteenth century in Victorian America. Consequently, the songwriters aimed at a broad popular audience because the subjects were …
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.
The Light That Is Felt - Songs of Charles Ives
Charles Ives composed nearly 200 songs throughout his life. Wiley Hitchcock, in the thorough introduction to his 2004 critical edition 129 Songs, described the Ives song canon as the contents of a kind of scrapbook or commonplace book or chapbook, or even a desk drawer. Into such a receptacle Ives tossed irregularly, if not casually, his reactions Ñin the form of songsÑto memories, personalities, places, events, discoveries, ideas, visions, and fantasies in his life.' Whether popular tale or per…
Anthony Philip Heinrich, Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, Christopher Keene, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Anthony Und Joseph Paratore
The Ornithological Combat of Kings/Night in the TropicsHere are two extremely entertaining concoctions by two nineteenth-century American Romantics who wrote music on a grand scale. After a broadly lyrical first movement in the grand tradition of his friend and mentor Hector Berlioz, Gottschalk introduces, appropriately enough, a Cuban rumba into the second and final movement of his breezy south-of-the-border excursion, Night in the Tropics. The sources of Heinrich's musical style are in Haydn and to some extent Beethoven, but with the ornateness of…
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…
I'm On My Journey Home: Vocal Styles And Resources In Folk Music
This album is a loosely structured survey of different types of vocal styles and resources found in rural Anglo-American lower- and middle-class communities. Some of the modes of performance, such as hollering and solo ballad singing, have almost died out; others, such as Sacred Harp singing, formal duet singing, and square-dance calling, continue to flourish. The album is divided into three major sections: a survey of nonstandard vocal effects that shows how much music infuses the everyday comm…
The Birthday Party
On first hearing, the piano music of Peter Garland (b. 1952) creates a feeling of dislocation, then astonishment: It is so very different from the contemporary concert music we are familiar with. The composer's intent, his emotional directness is immediate -- despite the unusual sound world and different sense of time that these pieces exhibit. The three pieces on this CD, 'The Birthday Party' (2014), 'Blessingway' (2011-12) and 'Amulet' (After Roberto Bolaño) for 4 pianos (2010), are quite diff…
Oh My Little Darling: Folk Song Types
This superb anthology of old ballads and other folk-song types comprises pre-war commercial and field recordings made in the rural Southeast, the part of the United States that most closely met the textbook definition of a "folk culture," in which culture was relatively homogeneous and customs were shared across class and ethnic lines. For this reason, this album focuses on the rural Southeast as a rich source of American folk life, ranging roughly from Virginia and Kentucky south to Alabama and…
When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom'd
Of the numerous settings of Walt Whitmans poetry, and this poem in particular, Sessions's is generally agreed to be one of the very finest and most sensitive. His mature style - a highly personal, instantly recognizable mix of severity and control with passion and serenity - projects the poetry now in simple chordal declamation, now in the long, high-arched melodies of which he is the master, conveying wonderfully the feel and variety of Whitman's lines. Over the years, Sessions's elegy has ta…
Winter Cantata, Other Works
Vincent Persichetti's choral music plays an important part role in his output. In many ways his Mass is an orthodox a cappella Mass, its Renaissance heritage reflected in its use of a Gregorian chant as the unifying theme, and in its reliance on imitative counterpoint as its chief developmental technique. His Winter Cantata, based on a collection of haiku, is scored for women's chorus, flute, and marimba. Without any overt musical references, the work is Japanese in spirit, largely as a result o…
Earle Brown: Selected Works 1952- 1965
This long-awaited reissue of the CRI recording of Earle Brown’s (1926–2002) music is the best overview of his seminal early works. “It is obviously a great pleasure for me that Cri is re-releasing its 1974 recording of my work, and an even greater pleasure that I am able to add to the repertoire. The performance of Times Five and Novara still seem very fine representations of the works and are performed brilliantly by the Dutch musicians. December 1952 as realized by the late, brilliant pianist …
Words Fail Me
The majestic beauty and savage turbulence that one often beholds while witnessing an awesome act of nature is also evident in Lois V Vierk's vigorous and delicate music. In her meticulously wrought works, she enfolds the rapture of opulent expression in the elegance of formal rigor, a combination that derives much of its power and grace from a sensitive integration of Western experimental practices with the traditional classical music of Japan. "I've always felt equally drawn to the West and to…
Music for Woodwinds
Through her novel approaches to texture and melody, German-American composer Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888–1944) became one of the most distinctive modernist voices of the mid-20th century. Beyer was the first woman known to have composed for electric instruments (Music of the Spheres, 1938). Her compositions anticipate elements of minimalism, a movement that would manifest two decades after her passing. Beyer was long omitted from the written history of ultramodernism, but her activities as a c…
The Haymakers (An Operatic Cantata, Part The Second)
Making its first appearance on CD, The Haymakers is an integral and indispensable part of the mosaic of the emerging American musical culture of the nineteenth century. It is a secular dramatic cantata on an American subject and was written in 1857, when large-scale American works were not yet supposed to have developed. It is the best-wrought and was the most successful of the five penned by George F. Root (1820-1895), remembered primarily for rousing Civil War songs like "The Battle Hymn of Fr…
Gertrudes
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 tour with playwright Richard Maxwell's Neutral Hero. This anthology comprises compositions by their friends and colleagues, all written or adapted for the duo and their unconventional instrumentation of violin and steel-string resonator guitar. Lar…
The Yankee Brass Band (Music From Mid-Nineteenth Century America)
Brass bands flourished in mid-nineteenth century America and were an integral and indispensable part of the social, cultural, and political life of the land. Regimental bands assumed tremendous importance during the Civil War whilst civic bands supplied the bulk of the entertainment in many a small town in the post-bellum years. It was during this period that the march as a genre experienced its greatest musical flowering with the advent of Sousa and his contemporaries. The schottisches, waltzes…
Mass/Seven Pious Pieces
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.
From Behind The Unreasoning Mask
Clearly influenced by Varese's concept of "pure sound," the four works on From Behind the Unreasoning Mask privilege the exploration of sound as a means of musical expression. In the 1970s, the integration of new vocal and instrumental techniques and, sometimes, electronic sound sources into the composer's vocabulary broadened the tonal, textural--and, consequently--expressive palette immeasurably. Roger Reynolds's (b. 1934) From Behind the Unreasoning Mask (1975) presents an interplay between a…
A Retrospective (1977-2009)
The music on this disc was written over a period of more than thirty years. Over the course of those years, so much has changed in technology, in music, in life in general. But throughout the work represented here one can recognize the remarkable, entirely original voice of Charles Dodge (b. 1942). He is truly a composer who writes music that does not sound like anybody else's. He has never been part of any “ism” or movement; he is his own category. And although his stylistic approach and his…
Concerto For Clarinet And Orchestra / Third Essay For Orchestra, Opus 47
The Third Essay was Samuel Barber's last completed work and its drama and lyricism are entirely characteristic of the neo-Romantic style he composed in for his entire life, a style which won him a large and faithful audience. In his avowed concern for writing music that communicates with the listening public, John Corigliano could be seen as an inheritor of Barber's mantle. The Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra is a large-scale work that demonstrates his eclectic style at its finest. Corigli…
Where Home Is: Life In Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati/Crossroads Of The East And West
Life in 19th-Century Cincinnati
The Harmoneion Singers; John Miner, conductor; Peter Basquin, piano and harmonium; Clifford Jackson, baritone; John Aler, tenor
Where Home Is is an anthology of traditional songs of family and religious life coupled with contrasting songs by abolitionists, frontiersmen, and blackfaced minstrels. The explosive mixture of peoples and cultures found in nineteenth-century Cincinnati resulted in the widely disparate musical views represented here by wholesome choral …
Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, John Alden Carpenter, Henry F. Gilbert, Adolph Weiss, John Powell
Orchestral WorksIf diversity and independence are definitive American traits, it would be hard to find four roughly contemporaneous native composers more unmistakably American. Markedly different in personality, each going his own stubbornly separate way, each spoke his uniquely individual dialect. They were born in successive decades (the last four of the nineteenth century) in different regions, and they were even more diverse in their musical training, affinities, and styles, yet they managed to create music…
Rational Melodies
I am particularly pleased, because the result is so different from the solo flute recording of Eberhard Blum and the solo clarinet recording of Roger Heaton. It is not just another interpretation, but a case where interpreters have added so much insight to the music that the music itself has grown. When I was composing this music around 1982, I really thought I was simply writing melodies, but now these little pieces, though remaining melodies, have become something much more, something I…
Come and Trip It-Instrumental Dance Music: 1780s to 1920s
This recording demonstrates some of the major developments in American social dancing and its music from after the Revolution up to the beginning of electrical recording in the mid-1920s. Dances such as the waltz, polka, tango, quadrille, charleston, cakewalk and turkey-trot are still familiar today, their names holding a permanent place in popular culture. The music they were danced to, however, is often forgotten.
This collection of hits, fads and phenomenons from the history of social dancin…
Long Piano
The melodic and, in the case of the solo piano music, timbral materials from which Christian Wolff's (b 1934) music is made are rarely unusual; these are ordinary, everyday things. However, Wolff's rhythmic invention is of great range and variety: complex polyrhythms, speech-like-rhythms, the music flowing at a freely fluctuating rate or proceeding in a plain, straightforward manner, silences. This mix of unusual and ordinary results in a music unlike any other. And, in a piece of such length as…
We, Like Salangan Swallows...: A Choral Gallery of Morton Feldma
The intense individuality of Morton Feldman's (1926?1987) art and its 'painterly' aspect have tended to push his rich output of works into a zone all of their own, surrounded by a moat of stillness. This recording attempts the reverse process -- to bring his choral works (the previously unrecorded Chorus and Instruments, Voices and Instruments 1, Voices and Instruments 2, and The Swallows of Salangan) into a 'gallery' of other choir compositions of his times. Through the interaction with works o…
Don't Give The Name A Bad Place (Types And Stereotypes In American Musical Theater 1870-1900)
In this time of charged debate about immigration and the concomitant stereotyping of minorities, this collection of fourteen songs drawn from musicals and minstrel shows reminds us that the habit of stereotyping has been with us longer than we care to remember. Musical snapshots of prevailing attitudes towards certain minorities at the turn of the century, these songs are revealing in what they say about America then and now.
Edward Harrigan's five songs about the Irish are affectionate, wistful…
Michael Pisaro-Liu: Radiolarians
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 extensive monographs and artful renderings of insects, animals, sea creatures, and embryos. For Radiolarians, Pisaro-Liu creates what he terms “transcriptions” of individual radiolaria species depicted in Haeckel’s drawings. Radiolarians comprises fourtee…
Songs of the Civil War
The Civil War, one of the most deeply felt episodes in America's history, has left a heritage of music that reflects those feelings in the most vivid way. Indeed, this music was so intimately involved with events of the time that it became part of those events. These songs were sung in homes, North and South, at rallies, political gatherings and mass meetings, and on the very battlefields. This selection comprises several of the most popular songs of the era. First recordings from original editi…
On Procedural Grounds
n 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, the results evoke much from European modernism, but realized via idiosyncratic modular forms and process-oriented strategies equally indebted to the New York School and the jazz avant-garde. On Procedural Grounds (2010) is a half-hour work conc…
Works for String Quartet and Percussion
"The evolution of the string quartet repertory has accelerated during the last half of the twentieth-century and beyond as composers from both the mainstream and the avant-garde have mined its seemingly inexhaustible creative resources. This CD features the virtually unprecedented combination of string quartet and percussion. It contains three works by prominent American experimentalist composers from several generations exploring the ensemble's unique sonic resources in diverse stylistic settin…
The Hand That Holds The Bread
Songs of Progress and Protest in the Gilded Age 1865-1893
The Hand That Holds The Bread provides a window onto a particularly turbulent time (1865-1893) in this nation's history-a period of great economic disparity, surging immigration, and rampant government corruption. The accompanying 40-page booklet includes an essay situating the songs in their historical context, complete lyrics and a selected bibliography and discography.
Relative Calm
Jon Gibson (b. 1940) is one of the less frequently mentioned pioneering composers of minimal music and is probably best known as a founding member of the Philip Glass Ensemble. Gibson also holds the unique distinction of having performed with Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young (as a member of the Theatre of Eternal Music), in addition to Glass, the four composers widely regarded as the founding fathers of minimal music. Gibson also has a track record of composing for modern and …
Robert Russell Bennett, Henry Brant, Ross Lee Finney, Vincent Persichetti, Hale Smith, The Northwestern University Symphonic Wind Ensemble, John P. Paynter
Winds Of Change:American Music for Wind Ensemble 1950s-1970sA welcome appearance on disc of some of the finest American music for wind ensemble from the 1950s to the 1970s that demonstrates the evolution of the wind band as a vehicle for “serious” composition. The five compositions represent a wide cross-section of styles and composers. Pageant is a prime example of Vincent Persichetti’s lasting contribution to the genre--a warm, expressive piece written in a rich harmonic idiom. Hale Smith’s Expansions is cut from a decidedly darker cloth, a dark drama …
Sound Forms for Piano: Cage/ Cowell/ Johnston/ Nancarrow
“... 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 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 way.
The disc opens with the eerie, wailing cries of Henry Cowell’s (1897-1965) The Banshee. In order …
I Wants to Be a Actor Lady
The witty and charming selections on this CD are associated with shows that achieved their popularity through long-run productions in New York City from 1860 to 1900. A multitude of musical theater styles flourished in New York because it was the most ethnically diverse city in the country. While the city's population swelled with large numbers of Europeans and former slaves, the professional stage was dominated by immigrant composers and performers. They strongly influenced the melodic and ins…