Pachmann: The Mythic Pianist 1907-1927 Recordings
2001 release ** "From the G&Ts of 1907 to the Victors of 1927 the troublesome genius of Vladimir de Pachmann lives once again in Arbiter’s well-chosen compilation. His vertiginous rise to fame and his equally precipitate decline are the stuff of legend, no less so than his concert antics, his audience-lecturing and indeed record-buying lecturing (one of the famed "music and comment" discs is included here, a late HMV). Pachmann followed such as Anton Rubinstein as one of the titans of the keyboa…
Lower Limit
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 it takes to "answer" the question, expressing all results as efficiently as possible. Winter leaves room for unanticipated results by keeping things open, notably in the instrumentation, which, rather than specifying instruments, tends to designate ce…
Musing And Reminiscence
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 to his unique vision, he made an enormous contribution to modern music. This retrospective spans his entire career, almost fifty years of compositional activity, and is an excellent introduction to his very distinctive sound world. Sims’s lyricism an…
Sonatas
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 written two years before Quartet No. 4 for Strings, The ILLIAC Suite. The second work was written three years into his time as a music professor at the University of Illinois, while the final sonata in this collection was written during his second year at …
Duo, Fives, Quintet, Trio
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 points of interest. He was a profound and original musical thinker who embraced the expressive possibilities of all music, from the Western classics and moderns of his own early education to Indian and Balinese traditions and all manner of contempor…
Clusters: American Piano Explorations
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 between traditional styles and genres. A musical adventurer at heart, Cowal seems drawn to challenging and unusual projects. The eight pieces on this CD reflect this willingness to experiment, to not just play the same old (now canonic) warhorses of the …
Process And Passion
2024 stock. This is a recording that explores the "extra"- ordinary potential of the CD not only as a carrier of traditionally recorded instrumental sound (CD 1), but also offering a different view through binaural encoding of the same materials spatialized (CD 2). - Please note: the binaural recording is only available as part of the 2 cd set. not as a downloadFirst you are presented with two solo compositions-Kokoro and Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward…-and the duo Process and Passio…
Quaderno Di Strada
"Sciarrino is an important, and distinctive, figure in the Italian avant-garde. The present work is a setting of thirteen brief texts (its subtitle is ’12 canti e un proverbio’, twelve songs and a proverb) for baritone and 14 instrumentalists – the booklet notes say fifteen, but only fourteen are named. It puts before its hearer fragmentary, skittering sounds, sudden changes of dynamics, as sounds loom out of silence and disappear just as quickly. There are fluttery, fugitive sounds, repetitive …
Te Deum Per Un Amico
*Includes a 40-page booklet with full text of the work, introductory texts and photos.* Giovanna Marini is an almost unique figure in Italy: a classically trained musician (graduated from the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome, perfected as a guitarist with Maestro Andres Segovia, then a lutenist with Maestro Quaranta's "Concentus Antiqui" ensemble), from the early 1960s she began a work of studying and transcribing songs from the Italian folk oral tradition. Beginning with "Bella Ciao" in 19…
Orchard
*2022 Stock.* “I was born and raised in Kentucky, and for many generations my direct ancestors and extended family have been farmers. So, creating music that is ‘about’ soil, plant life, and the natural world, is my way of honoring that legacy.” Composer Tyler Kline’s tools, though, are not the plow – and vegetables are not the crop – in this collection of brief piano pieces commissioned by and for over a dozen pianists. Instead, Orchard is a celebration of fruit. Each sketch draws on a specific…
Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin
Other Minds is excited and proud to bring you a near-unheard early composition by legendary American Maverick composer Lou Harrison, Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin (1936), performed by our friend Kate Stenberg. This short piece was written by the precocious composer when he was barely out of high school, still a teenager, but already a year deep into studies under Henry Cowell, studies that occurred during Cowell's stint in San Quentin State Prison.
The piece was entirely unheard from its comp…
BFHC
Limited edition of 100 copies. On her second album (first one on Umor Rex), the Minsk born / Paris based artist Lina Filipovich continues her experiments on deconstruction and re-appropriation of classical pieces. BFHC includes seven electronic interpretations of the works of Baroque composers such as Bach, Handel, Frescobaldi, Carleton and Couperin. Inspired by memories of her experience of interpreting Bach's pieces in early childhood, Filipovich explores the desire to push the limits of perfo…
James Tenney
By Zeitkratzer director Reinhold Friedl's personal request now available on vinyl for the first time: Zeitkratzer's critically acclaimed interpretations of groundbreaking compositions by James Tenney.James Tenney (1934 - 2006) was a composer, music theorist and pioneer especially in the field of microtonal music, being an influential part of the so-called New York avantgarde scene (Cage, Feldman). Besides his compositonal work, Tenney was teacher at various universities with students like Charle…
Popol Vuh
"The Popol Vuh- the Book of Counsel“ of the K'iché-Maya belongs to the most important creation myths of the early advanced civilizations in the world. A Maya from the K'iché people, who had learned Spanish during the conquista, wrote down the the texts in K'iché with Latin letters between 1545 and 1555. Before that, the texts were only passed on orally. Father Francisco Ximenéz copied this book and translated it into Spanish. Then he returned the original to the K'iché people. In this way the b…
Nine unfinished Symphonies
The Nine Unfinished Symphonies were conceived as one entity. They are written in my musical native tongue; the musical grammar and idioms with which I have become so familiar that I can converse in them spontaneously, without thinking, so that I can devote my full attention to what I actually want to do. It appears that we need narratives, such as the ‘sacred’ number nine with symphonies, or the concept of the Unfinished, which stands in sharp contrast to the fragmentary or the ‘uncapitalized’ u…
Pathological Curves
To sonically modify sound, not as a composerly or listenerly injunction but as a condition of its possibility: such is the task of Elizabeth Hoffman. Hers is not merely a music of the "verb" - that composers "do" something or "perform" something on the sonic. Hers is an "adverbial" music.
Above all, adverbial music modifies - sound, yes, but more fundamentally the space in which sound appears and the temporality that it solicits as it vanishes, always. Adverbial music, reticently and generously,…
Painted Cakes Are Real, Too
When you are listening to his pieces and are completely at ease, they offer the listener the beauty of pure sound: I believe this also applies to his likeminded friends. Even when and if they are of a continuous narrative type, they just create the right situation to listen to sounds. As the title reveals: Painted cakes are real, too. The beautiful sounds are repeated in order to remain purely sound. This repetition does not build up a narrative, it becomes more complicated and excited not in or…
Der Uhu des Ihi
"Leukert brings back intuition into the computer-mechanical techniques of contemporary classical music. His compositions derive from the hearing experience - he has become a David Lynch for the ‘cinema pour l’oreille’, who is operating with the ironically associative scepticism of Godard. A blessing that Maria De Alvear’s small label ‘World Edition’ now produced eight of Leukert’s audio pieces on CD; among them the enchanting trilogy Wildwechsel" . - Alban Nikolai Herbst
Improvisation
That’s the name of the game... Marco Blaauw plays on a quartertone double bell trumpet, a shell, brought from Madagascar,a slide trumpet, piccolo trumpet, quartertone flugel horneven megaphone and flexible tube. Gijsbrecht Royé plays on a self-made bass-zither. To play on the four groups of bass grandpiano strings, he uses different kinds of sticks; two bows (normally used for double bass), metal strings, nails, brushes, knives, rat-tailed files and metal scouring pads.
Sitting Between Chairs
* 2021 Stock * Metamusic. A suitable term for all these works, if by this we understand that musical aspects are somehow transcended, transgressed.
Sitting between chairs. A transgression which leads, through interactions of materials and intentions, controlled use of randomness or indeterminacy, conceptual game of measurement or definition, to the contemplation of music itself as yet another fragment of the whole, because the sound objects may have a dramatic or musical nature.
How could this w…