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…
Gong Gongs
**Warehouse find, still sealed original copies 1987 edition** Gong action suported by catalan fussion percussionist Santi Arisa. Main attraction here is the percussions and electronics piece Secuencia I.
Complete Early Percussion Works
Stockhausen’s early percussion music is among the most visionary of the percussion repertoire. This unique collection features some works which are almost impossible to find elsewhere. Zyklus was not only a novel composition in terms of its treatment of time and structure, it was also the first percussion solo ever performed. Kontakte, a masterpiece for piano and percussion with 4-channel tape, challenges to performers to play together and to make the maximum number of “contacts” with the tape. …
A Cage of saxophones 1
Between 1983 and 1991 John cage wrote three pieces specifically for saxophones, Four5, Five4 and Hymnkus, which are combined here for the first time on CD. In addition, Cage authorized Ulrich Krieger's arrangement for saxophone of Ryoanji. Krieger also made a saxophone arrangement of Five, one of the few compositions from this period performable on any instruments. This unique disc concentrates on Cage's late works for saxophone. A CAGE OF SAXOPHONES VOL.2 (mode 160), features a combination of…
Ascension to Purgatory
This is Pape's third monographic CD with Mode Records. Whereas his last Mode CD ("Electro-acoustic Chamber Works", released in 1998) presented his ground breaking works of 1993-1996, this new CD presents a selection of his more recent pieces composed from 1998 to 2004. While Pape continues his fascination with composing with chaotic sound in Le Fleuve du Désir IV and Weaveworld Prologue, it is his new approach to composing with packets of granular time that predominates on this CD. In La Na…
Music For High Winds
Clarinetist Carol Robinson had the unique opportunity to work directly with Giacinto Scelsi on his music: "I discovered this music in 1981. Captivated, I began including pieces in concerts the following year. A friend of the composer who attended a concert gave him a recording of my performance. As a result, Scelsi invited me to Rome. In his apartment overlooking the Roman forum... On numerous occasions we worked in detail on all his music for clarinet, an instrument particularly important…
Mexico: New Music For Strings
This recording features six of the most inventive younger composers (born between 1957 and 1977) in Mexico's contemporary music scene. Irvine Arditti and the Arditti Quartet gave the first performances of many of these works for string quartet or solo violin. The works were recorded in 2002 during the first Radar festival." Composers featured: Juan Felipe Waller, Hebert Vázquez, Germán Romero, Iván Naranjo, Rogelio Sosa, Hilda Paredes. Recorded at: April 1-3, 2002 (Irvine Arditti) and April 10-1…
Complete Music For Violin & Piano
Here, collected for the first time, are all of Morton Feldman's compositions for violin and piano. It is also a kind of walk through his compositional development, from the Webernesque early Piece for Violin and Piano (1950); through the experiments with graphic notation in Projection 4 (1951); followed by an excursion into the jungle-like density of David Tudor's energy in Extensions 1 (1951); to the cryptic notational riddles of Vertical Thoughts 2 (1963); from the dry carpet-dusting Spring …
Music from the Ether
This disc is full of discoveries, including Martinu's Fantasia, and Grainger's graphically notated Free Music #1, along with other "period" works by Schillinger (known for his writings on music and as a guru to composers from Gershwin to Earle Brown) and Isidor Achron (the accompanist to Heifetz). Modern works are represented by Kavina herself, Brazilian Jorge Antunes (with electronic tape) and Russian Vladimir Komarov, whose work also incorporates the inventor's voice and a rendition of Glinka'…
The Orchestral Works 1: Hymnos, Hurqualia, Konx-Om-Pax
Volume 2 in Mode's Scelsi Edition presents three of his rarely heard and recorded orchestral works, vividly captured in outstanding sound. Hymnos' large orchestra is divided antiphonally into two almost identical groups, symmetrically placed on each side of a central axis made up of the organ, timpani, and percussion. About halfway through the piece, as a result of accumulated pedal tones and their harmonics, the aura of a phantom choir miraculously appears-or so it seems-in a spine-tingli…
The Number Pieces 2: Five³
During the last few years of his life, John Cage wrote many pieces in the same general vein as Five3. They are often referred to as "the number pieces." This references the titles of the pieces, which are all simply the number of the performers. Superscripts are added as necessary to distinguish the individual pieces (this is the third quintet, for example). These works are also called "the time-bracket pieces," a reference to the notation of the pieces. Each event in the piece consists of…
String Quartet No. 1
The Flux Quartet follow their acclaimed, best selling recording of Feldman’s monumental 6-hour String Quartet No. 2 (mode 112, 5-CDs or 1-DVD) with this release, thus completing their cycle of Feldman’s string quartets. String Quartet No. 1 is one of Feldman’s earliest long-scale pieces. Unlike other recordings of String Quartet No.1, the FLUX recording respects Feldman’s tempo and all of the repeats, making it the longest recording of the piece.
The set also contains Feldman’s two quartets f…
Trio
The expansive length of Morton Feldman’s Trio (1 hr., 45 min., 22 sec.) requires a new approach to listening, which takes scale, the physical experience of sound, and novel uses of musical memory into consideration. With his delicate manipulation of musical materials, Feldman blurs the listener’s sense of time as their musical memory struggles to distinguish between past and present sounds - listeners are free to lose themselves in the beauty of each musical moment. Aki Takahashi and Rohan…
The Works for Percussion 2
John Cage’s vision of the future of music was first shaped by an intense creative period from 1935-1942, when he wrote many of the seminal works of percussion chamber music featured here. When he composed these works, the young Cage was basically the same age as the members of Third Coast Percussion. This release includes all three of the groundbreaking Constructions. First Construction (in Metal) utilizes dozens of metal instruments which are beaten, scraped and shaken, creating an other w…
Music in 2 Dimensions – Works for Flute
In honor of the 40th anniversary of great composer/ conductor Bruno Maderna’s (1920-73) death, Mode is pleased to release the first complete CD of Maderna’s music for flute. The flute played an important part in Maderna’s oeuvre due to his friendship with the exceptional flutist Severino Gazzelloni, who had premiered almost all of the flute compositions. Musica su due dimensioni is among the earliest examples to make live music interact with electro-acoustic sounds recorded on tape. There …
Complete Early Works for Percussion
Stockhausen’s early percussion music is among the most visionary of the percussion repertoire. This unique collection features some works which are almost impossible to find elsewhere. Zyklus was not only a novel composition in terms of its treatment of time and structure, it was also the first percussion solo ever performed. Kontakte, a masterpiece for piano and percussion with 4-channel tape, challenges to performers to play together and to make the maximum number of “contacts” with the …
Cage Edition Vol.52 : The Works for Percussion 4
**CD Edition** A Flower; The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs; 51’15.657” for a speaking percussionist (realization Whiting); Music for Two (By One) (realization Whiting) — Bonnie Whiting, voice & percussion + Allen OTTE/John CAGE: Connecting Egypt to Madison through Columbus Ohio, Cage, and the History of the American Labor Movement (realization Otte) — Allen Otte, voice, prepared piano, percussion.
Modern Lied
Sarah Maria Sun (soprano) & Jan Philip Schulze (piano) perform works by Heinz Holliger: Sechs Lieder nach Gedichten von Christian Morgenstern (1956/57); Salvatore Sciarrino: Due Melodie; Helmut Lachenmann: Got Lost; György Kurtag: Requiem po drugu op. 26; Wolfgang Rihm: Ophelia Sings; Bernhard Lang: Wenn die Landschaft aufhört.
Xenakis Edition 15, Orchestral Works
**CD Edition** Metastaseis A (first recording), Orchestra Sinfonica RAI; Terretektorh for 88 musicians dispersed among the public; Nomos Gamma for 98 musicians dispersed among the public — Residentie Orkest The Hague, Arturo Tamayo, conductor.