Subtle Matters
How many sounds can a piano produce without using the keyboard? Some answers can be found in this recording, where the whole instrument is investigated using different techniques to reveal a world of unexpected richness, textures, and resonances.But it’s not just that: it’s also a journey in what the concept of “piano” became in the imagination of three composers (and a pianist). Each, in fact, gave shape to an original sonorous universe, and the task of reconnecting the subtle threads between c…
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…
World
* 2021 Stock * A sprawling, wandering hourlong geological survey of the composer’s ambitious spiritual world. Her music does not develop; it accumulates. - Bernard Holland, New York Times
The only single, continuous orchestral movement I know of to surpass the finale of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in duration. - Kyle Gann, Village Voice
Hildegard Kleeb - pianoJoseph Kubera - pianoThe Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble Petr Kotik - conductor
Libertad
* 2021 Stock * "There are pieces which must be done. The work Libertad is one of them. Inspired by the lyrics of Tsolagiu M.A. RuizRazo, it is one of those compositions that gave me enormous pleasure while working and that accompanied me with a wave of very great power [...] Perhaps this work [...] is one of those that carry the most power. There is an enormous mysterious protective circle around it. It is one of the works that has given me the most riddles, that contains knowledge that I can on…
Composer-Critics of the New York Herald Tribune
For a brief period between 1940 to 1954, the now-defunct paper The New York Herald Tribune maintained a staff of music critics who were valued for their ability to write about music (especially less accessible modern music) in clear language for a general audience. This groundbreaking department was headed up by composer Virgil Thomson and over the years included John Cage, Paul Bowles, Lou Harrison, and Peggy Glanville-Hicks. Around the same period, Thomson was asked to curate a series of recor…
Lexical Music
When Charles Amirkhanian’s Lexical Music was released on pioneering Bay Area record label 1750 Arch Records in 1980, it was heralded as a masterpiece of the then nascent text-sound poetry scene. The New York Times called Amirkhanian “expert at the sort of things his imitators do not do half so well as he.” Lexical Music is a sort of high water mark for American text-sound poetry; it sounds like nothing before or since.
Single words lose their meaning through repetition; nonsense phrases build in…
A Sweeter Music
Other Minds’ recent release of new works commissioned and performed by pianist Sarah Cahill. A Sweeter Music is a collection of new compositions based on the theme of peace and war.The composers on this disc are Frederic Rzewski, Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, Yoko Ono, The Residents, Phil Kline, Kyle Gann, and Carl Stone (in the entire project there are eighteen composers involved). Sarah commissioned these particular composers because of their commitment as anti-war activists or their strong poli…
Scenes from a New Music Séance
At some point it seemed appropriate that Other Minds honor the deceased progenitors of American experimental music by presenting their music side by side with their spiritual offspring. And thus was born “A New Music Séance.” Other Minds composers are mostly individualists who have forged their own paths that are very personal and that announce their creators as boundary pushers. These individualists flourished because others, equally daring, led the way. The series was subtitled, somewhat tongu…
First Life: The Rare Early Works
Before the premiere of his legendary WPA political musical The Cradle Will Rock, and his opera Regina (based upon Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes), Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) produced striking chamber music that deserves a wider audience. Yet these scores, by the only American to study composition with both Arnold Schoenberg and Nadia Boulanger, remain unpublished and rarely played over the past 80 years. Other Minds is pleased to introduce these forgotten treasures, an unknown aspect of Bli…
Ring of Fire
Home to earthquake swarms and volcanic eruptions, the countries of the Pacific Rim also produce some of the world’s most groundbreaking composers. San Francisco’s Del Sol String Quartet leads an inspiring seven- country tour. 20-page booklet essay by Charles Amirkhanian with photos. Works by: John Adams, Jack Body, Kui Dong, Gabriela Lena Frank, Hyo-shin Na, Peter Sculthorpe, Chinary Ung, and Zhou Long. Performed by the Del Sol String Quartet: Kate Stenberg, Rick Shinozaki, Charlton Lee, and Han…
Songs of Ned Rorem
Originally released on LP by Columbia Records in 1964, this album features some of the most outstanding soloists of the day: Charles Bressler, Phyllis Curtin, Gianna D’Angelo, Donald Gramm, and Regina Sarfaty, accompanied at the piano by the composer, Ned Rorem. The original recordings were digitized and re-mastered on a Sonic Solutions system to minimize tape hiss and other sound artifacts. The resulting clarity and brilliance far surpasses that of the original release offering a fresh look at …
Música Callada / See the Welter
The imagery of musical forms emptied of earthly meaning, of solitude, and of a connection to the divine were irresistible to Federico Mompou. A desire to be alone had shaped Mompou’s early musical direction: as natural shyness ended his ambitions to be piano virtuoso, after studies at the Paris Conservatoire he turned to composition instead. His approach remained introspective – far removed from the overt and public expressions of the avant-garde, both before and after the Second World War – and…
Adagios From The Underground
In the Understage area of the Alexandra Trianti Hall, the musical saw in the hands of Nikos Giousef, and accompanied by piano, samplers and analog synthesizers, is transformed into a voice. 'An otherworldly child's voice', 'a Siren's voice' or 'a castrato voice', as it has been described, it easily climbs to tonic heights that the human voice can only reach with great effort. The pieces chosen for the program reflect this criterion, with works such as the aria 'Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott' from the …
Rise, Follow
* Edition of 200 * A composition for two bass Renaissance flutes. Performed by Mara Winter and Johanna Bartz. Rise, follow is a dialogue of long tones played by two bass Renaissance flutes, featuring subtle but persistent changes over the duration of one hour. It is performed in one sitting without interruption. The composition adopts the principle of instrumental ‘consort-style’ playing in Europe during the 16th century: a family of similarly pitched and constructed instruments performing polyp…
Prisma Interius VII & VIII
* Edition of 500 * In Catherine Lamb's Prisma Interius series the unpredictability of the outside articulates the field of perception through precise bandpass filters, while acoustic instruments and musicians guide the unfolding of its harmonic space. A series of nine pieces exploring the potential of the Secondary Rainbow synthesizer, an instrument developed in 2016-2017 with Bryan Eubanks, that uses the live environment outside the performance space as a noise generator for basic subtractive s…
Vortice Rosso
Putojefe Records is proud to present Vortice Rosso, the first album by Italian composer Flavio Bonometti: a tumultuous journey through the languages of the avant-garde masterfully synthesized in 12 pieces of contemporary classical. After a brilliant career as a violist at La Scala Theatre in Milan and in many other orchestras, Flavio Bonometti gave up the stage to dedicate himself exclusively to his music. The tracks of Vortice Rosso, produced and recorded over the last 10 years, are born from t…