Works for Instruments
Edition RZ presents John McGuire's Works For Instruments. Performers: Ensemble Modern -- Julia Rempe (soprano); Pellegrini-Quartett: Antonio Pellegrini, Thomas Hofer (violin); Fabio Marano (viola); Helmut Menzler (violoncello); musikFabrik: Hermann Kretzschmar, Paulo Alvarez, Irmela Roelcke, Eun-Ju Kim, Ulrich Löffler, Jürgen Kruse (piano), Christine Chapman, Jodie Lawson, Charles Putnam, Rohan Richards (horns), Dirk Rothbrust, Carlos Tarcha (percussion). Each of the compositions of post-minimal…
Music for Merce Cunningham
2008 repress, featuring a 24-bit Hi-Definition remaster; originally released in 1991. Volume 4 in the Music of Cage series. The first audio document between John Cage & Merce Cunningham. It includes a 55-minute piece called "Five Stone Wind" performed by David Tudor (live electronics), Takehisa Kosugi (amplified violin, live electronics, bamboo flute) and Michael Pugliese (clay pots and tapes) as well as a 19-minute version of the classic "Cartridge Music" (same 3 performers, "using phonograph c…
Collected Recordings
The collected Recordings by exceptional Greek composer Jani Christou. Included compositions ranging from the late 1940s until 1968. Each CD comes in a book cover, containing lots of information to each composition. Truly an amazing series of recordingsVolume 1:Phoenix Music for orchestra in five continous movements (1948-49, 11'20'')Six T.S. Eliot Songs for mezzo-soprano and piano (1955, 12'27'')The Strychnine Lady for solo viola (female), five actors, instrumental ensemble, tapes, various sound…
Chromatophore
*In process of stocking. 2022 stock.* Anthony Pateras is a composer/performer based in Melbourne who is as comfortable writing for full orchestra as he is performing in intimate improvisational groupings. Pateras represents the best in the new generation of musicians combining the spontaneity of improvisation with the formal logic of composition and for his second Tzadik CD, he has chosen an eclectic mix of ensemble pieces that blend instrumental virtuosity and electroacoustic sonorities in star…
The revenge of the dead indians: in memoriam John Cage
The Revenge of the Dead Indians: In Memoriam John Cage (1993), a composed film directed by Henning Lohner. Featuring: Gary Burton, John Cage, Noam Chomsky, Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe, Betty Freeman, Frank Gehry, Murray Gell-Mann, Matt Groening, Rutger Hauer, Dennis Hopper, Ellsworth Kelly, Alison Knowles, Raymond Kurzweil, Edward Lorenz, Benoît Mandelbrot, Yehudi Menuhin, Marvin Minsky, Heiner Müller, Jean Nouvel, Yoko Ono, Tomaso Poggio, Richard Serra, Shankar, Giorgio Strehler, Iannis …
The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan
10 years in the making, 2 films by Evans Chan trace the artist's life, career and pianism. Strumming the strings of a grand piano like a harp and performing Beethoven on toy piano are among the surprising scenes in Evans Chan's documentary, Sorceress of the New Piano (2004), which celebrates the trans-cultural career of Singapore-born, New York-based pianist Margaret Leng Tan, hailed by The New Yorker as 'the diva of avant-garde pianism.' Featured performers and critics include Joan LaBarbara, E…
Silenced Voices
The Barton Workshop & others. Frank Denyer & James Fulkerson, music directors. 'Woman, Viola and Crow' (2004) with Elisabeth Smalt, muted viola, voice, percussion sounds. 'Two Beacons' (2005) with Harma Everts, voice; Boris Visser, muted violin; Rozemarie Heggen, muted double-bass; Neil Sorrell, sarangi; Tobias Liebezeit & Juan Martinez Cortès, percussion; Jos Zwaanenburg, Melkorta Olafsdottir, Ayano Akubo, flutes; Joeri de Vente, horn; Yula Andrews, Ella Dangerfield, Catherine Guy, Lucinda Guy,…
Gongs and Bamboo
The first release outside Japan of music by one of the most original and underappreciated composers in contemporary music brings José Maceda's remarkable catalog to international attention. Born in 1900 in the Philippines, Maceda created extraordinary compositions, often for large ensembles of the same instrument, across five decades of creative output. This CD brings together three very different pieces from his enormous catalog, showcasing the breadth and originality of his compositional visio…
Atlas Eclipticalis With Winter Music
Featured compositions: "Atlas Eclipticalis' (1961, for chamber ensemble); "Winter Music" (1957, for 3 pianos); "Atlas Eclipitcalis" (1961, for orchestra); "Winter Music" (1957, for 20 pianos). Cage's relationship with the Cornish Institute in Seattle dates back to the 1930s, when he taught there and performed as accompanist for many dance pieces. Cornish was also the scene of several of his musical discoveries and innovations. Cage's celebrated return to the Cornish Institute in 1983 led to thes…
The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 4
Meticulously remastered from the original mono master tapes! The Bewitched was Harry Partch’s first work solely intended for dance (and mime-dance at that; he was not overly enamored in his lifetime of so-called “modern dance”). Drawing heavily from his deep affection for the music-theatrical performance traditions of Greek theater, as well as those from Africa, Bali, and Chinese opera, Partch conceived of a contemporary American music ritual-theater where musicians not only play, but also funct…
The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 3
The four works on this newly remastered CD are eloquent testimony to Harry Partch’s aesthetic of corporeality. The music he composed for The Dreamer That Remains, for Rotate the Body in All Its Planes, for Windsong, and for Water! Water!, was intended as only one component in the total artistic experience. In these works music joins with drama, with film, with dance, even with gymnastics, as integral parts of the composer’s vision..New World's The Harry Partch Collection, Vol. 3, as was the CRI …
The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 2
Harry Partch’s compositions of the 1940s have remained until recently an unwritten chapter in the history of American music. And yet it was these very pieces—the collection of four works he would later collectively entitle The Wayward—that brought him to the attention of the New York musical world. His concert of these pieces for the League of Composers established for him a small but permanent reputation as a musical maverick who had wandered off well-worn tracks and had developed a sort of lat…
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)…
ShamanSong
Composer/performer Joan La Barbara (b 1947) has been an influential figure in experimental music since the early 1970s. She has devoted her career to the exploration of the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument. Going far beyond traditional boundaries, she has created works for multiple voices, chamber ensembles, music theater, orchestra and interactive technology. ShamanSong features three premieres of vintage La Barbara "sound paintings" of pensive beauty and spiritual resonance.
ShamanSo…
1967-1975
Led by pianist Franco Evangelisti, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza performed as a collective from 65 -71. The focus was to expand both the sonic capabilities of their instruments, but also the sensitivity of each performer within the context of the improvisation. The result(s) remain some of the purist and elevated abstract explorations put to tape retaining both warmth and intelligence. Piano, percussion, double bass, trombone, cello, trumpet, etc are the tools for unparalleled types…
The Marvelous Aphorisms of Gavin Bryars: The Eearly Years
Gavin Bryars' music, post 'The Sinking of the Titanic' and 'Jesus' Blood...', is well known and often performed today. Less known are the earlier works featured on this cd, created during the years 1969-71. At that time, Bryars became associated with Michael Nyman, John Tilbury and Brian Eno - marrying ideas from Cage, Fluxus, free improvisation and experimentalism. Some of the works recorded here appeared on Eno's avant-garde Obscure label in the mid-1970s. In 1, 2, 1-2-3-4, the musicians liste…
Dust
Dust is an opera by Robert Ashley and Yukihiro Yoshihara (video direction) whose imaginary setting is a street corner anywhere in the world, where those who live on the fringes of society gather to talk, to each other and to themselves, about life-changing events, missed opportunities, memory, loss, and regret. Five "street people" recount the memories and experiences of one of their group, a man who has lost his legs in some unnamed war. As part of the experience of losing his legs, he began a …
Yellow Man With Heart With Wings
1990 CD issue of Robert Ashley's 1978 piece for voice and electronics. A two-part composition with narration (part one in Spanish and part two in heavily altered English) commissioned by public radio station KUNM in Albuquerque, this music has a plain, serene beauty. Part one is a narration by Guillermo Grenier in dreamy, flatly inflected Spanish, backed by a four-note synthesizer track, and punctuated by mysterious, heavily processed vocalizations. Ashley throws in extensive sound washes and ot…
First recordings: 1950s
A remarkable discovery of over 75 minutes of Morton Feldman's music. This disc represents 13 unrecorded early works spanning 1950 to 1953, many previously unpublished. Highlights: his only works for magnetic tape, 'Intersection,' realized in 8-channels by Feldman with John Cage and Earle Brown. Considered lost, the work has been restored and presented here for the first time in 40 years. Also: his score for 2 cellos to Hans Namuth's film of Jackson Pollock, presented in its entirety including na…
Michael von Biel
An astonishing CD with the usual RZ deluxe touch by the well-known fluxus related cellist. Michael von Biel (born 30 June 1939 in Hamburg) a German composer, cellist, and graphic artist. Von Biel studied piano, theory, and composition in Toronto (1956–57), Vienna (1958–60), New York (1960, with Morton Feldman, amongst others), London (1960, with Cornelius Cardew), and Cologne (with Karlheinz Stockhausen). From 1961 to 1963 he attended the Darmstadt Vacation Courses for New Music. In 1964 he rec…