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John Cage - a CAGE of saxophones, Vols. 3 & 4 - Indeterminacy

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 24 Jul 2022 05:19:23 | Comments : 7 |
John Cage - a CAGE of saxophones, Vols. 3 & 4 - Indeterminacy

John Cage - a CAGE of saxophones, Vols. 3 & 4 - Indeterminacy
Avant-Garde | EAC (APE+CUE+LOG) | 2 CDs / 480 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2010 | Complete Scans
Ulrich Krieger • intersax and other musicians

“Art, at its best, is a reflection of the "core of the present" filtered through the subject of the artist. But beyond that, "timeless" art has the ability to conceive a vision for the future which reaches beyond the snapshot of the moment. Very early on Cage said goodbye to the traditional classical, dramatic, and semantic developmental structures that are still typical for post-serial new music in favor of an art which has nature as its model (star maps, streets, gardens, etc). Instead of linear and narrative compositions, multidimensional networks and proliferations of independent voices with mutual and indirect influences emerge. These are non-hierarchical, self-organizing, chaotic systems which can be presented and developed differently with each performance, but nevertheless have a general mood and structure - each performance is a snapshot of a possible state of the piece. It is like an intersection of streets which is always the same, but each time you pass it, it is different.
- Ulrich Krieger, liner notes
”
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Virgil Thomson - Mostly About Love: Songs and Vocal Works (1994)

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 26 May 2022 05:48:50 | Comments : 2 |
Virgil Thomson - Mostly About Love: Songs and Vocal Works

Virgil Thomson - Mostly About Love: Songs and Vocal Works (1994)
Classical | EAC (APE+CUE+LOG) | 290 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | Complete Artwork
Nancy Armstrong, sop. • D'Anna Fortunato, mezzo • Anthony Tommasini, piano, etc.

“The neglect of Thomson's vocal works is inexplicable. There are close to 100 works - songs, duets, quartets, even a complete mass setting for solo voice. In the best of these, including those presented on this disc, the music is clear-headed, unmannered and direct. When the emotional content heats up, as in his proclamatory setting of Bossuet's Oraison funèbre, it never boils over, restrained by the French sensibility that Thomson, from his many years living in Paris, adopted into his own aesthetic. He selected literate, witty texts and set them with scrupulous clarity and conversational naturalness. In this way his vocal music is unabashedly American. European Romance languages have lilting sounds and long-short rhythms. English, particularly American English, is all jerky and asymmetrical. Thomson gloried in setting it just that way.
- Anthony Tommasini, liner notes
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Christian Wolff - Long Piano

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 04 Mar 2022 05:09:42 | Comments : 3 |
Christian Wolff - Long Piano

Christian Wolff - Long Piano
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 209 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2009 | Complete Scans
Thomas Schultz, piano

“David Tudor, with characteristic perspicacity, noticed the influence of children (of being a parent) in Christian Wolff's music-making. "While working with David Tudor on Burdocks, he said that he could see the results of having small kids around - my music had loosened up." Becoming a parent, bringing a human into the world, makes one more aware of ideological constraints and pressures. A domestic culture vies with a prevailing dominant culture which is predatory, aggressive, and individualistic, a day-to-day confrontation of irreconcilable attitudes . . . Music is an integral part of the fabric of our social existence. In the early Seventies raising a family coincided with a political involvement, expressed unequivocally in Wolff's music, moving (ideologically) from what he characterized as democratic libertarianism (anarchism) toward democratic socialism, which in one way or another was supported and promoted by the use of political songs and texts . . . Wolff criticized his own (earlier) music for being esoteric, too "introverted"; it did not address social reality. Above all, he tried in various ways to make his new, political music more accessible. "But my notion is that music can function better socially if it is more clearly identified with what most people recognize as music, which is not a question of liking or disliking, but of social identity." . . . Hanns Eisler discussed the subject with characteristic candor and insight. One of his favorite quotes was from The Damnation of Music by the philosopher Me-Ti, 600 years BC:

"If the nobles of the country really have the welfare of the people at heart, they should prevent and forbid music wherever it makes an appearance. For the fact that the people practise music has four disadvantages. The hungry are not fed, the cold are not clothed, the homeless are not sheltered and the desperate find no consolation."
- John Tilbury, liner notes
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Peter Ablinger - Voices and Piano

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 03 Mar 2022 17:13:42 | Comments : 6 |
Peter Ablinger - Voices and Piano

Peter Ablinger - Voices and Piano
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 290 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2010 | Scans
Nicolas Hodges, piano • Recorded: 28-31 March 2005

“Voices and Piano, written for Nicolas Hodges, is an extensive cycle of pieces, each for a single recorded voice, mostly of a well-known celebrity, and piano. The cycle is still in progress and should eventually include about 80 pieces/voices (around 4 hours of music). The work is always meant to occur as a selection from the whole. At present I like to write works where the whole should not be presented at once. The whole should remain the whole, and what we hear is just a part of it.

I like to think about Voices and Piano as my song-cycle, though nobody is singing in it: the voices are all spoken statements from speeches, interviews or readings. And the piano is not really accompanying the voices: the relation of the two is more a competition or comparison. Speech and music is compared. We can also say: reality and perception. Reality/speech is continuous, perception/music is a grid which tries to approach the first. Actually the piano part is the temporal and spectral scan of the respective voice, something like a coarse gridded photograph. Actually the piano part is the analysis of the voice. Music analyses reality.
- Peter Ablinger, liner notes
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Christian Weber - 3 Suits & A Violin

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 28 Feb 2022 07:32:59 | Comments : 3 |
Christian Weber - 3 Suits & A Violin

Christian Weber - 3 Suits & A Violin
Free Improv/Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 237 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2006 | Complete Scans
Recorded at DRS Radio Studio 2 on September 13th & 14th, 2002 by Andy Neresheimer

“What Christian Weber and Co. have achieved on 3 Suits & A Violin is a music that eschews formulaic approaches and instead temper their group sound in dense laminations of texture and sonic residue. The result is an arresting music which combines elements of group-improvised minimalism, electro-acoustic improvisation and avant-garde chamber music into a texturally rich exploration of detailed noise texture... In Christian Weber's work noise has become closely connected to the repertoire, that his music sits very comfortably within this, as if to question if, then, noise has such a natural and reflexive occurrence on the instrumental practice, so then, he constructs pieces which are bathed in these static residues and phantom details.
- Dean M. Roberts, liner notes
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Russ Lossing - All Things Arise

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 27 Feb 2022 08:24:18 | Comments : 5 |
Russ Lossing - All Things Arise

Russ Lossing - All Things Arise
Jazz/Free Improvisation | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 192 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2006 | Complete Scans
Digital recording on June 13, 2022 at Charlestown Road Studio, Hampton N.J.

“For Lossing, improvisation is clearly a special act, a study in transparence and transformation, a creative exchange among the elements. One hears fresh relations of time and space. His acute sense of time connects inevitably to its absence. Space is heard in his sense of density, the room he can make around a note even at high speed, the contrasts between counterpoint and elegant strings of simple notes. Space is also vertical in Lossing's music - in the ways that wide and tight intervals interact in his chords. This solo CD seems almost two-sided, like the LP of tradition. There is a side of free improvisation followed by treatments of largely familiar themes. We might think of it as a voyage inward and a voyage outward; a journey forward followed by one into the past.
- Stuart Broomer, liner notes
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Stefan Wolpe - Enactments

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 26 Feb 2022 23:42:44 | Comments : 4 |
Stefan Wolpe - Enactments

Stefan Wolpe - Enactments
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 217 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2005 | Complete Scans
performers include Josef Christof, Steffen Schleiermacher, & others

“Walter Benjamin said, "I have nothing to say: only to show." For Wolpe, too, montage was the form that counteracts the illusions of progress and development. While giving a lecture on his early years, Wolpe played a recording of the first movement of 'Enactments'. He described the music as a panorama or landscape of multiple simultaneities and unforeseeable, non-directed events. The situations are highly calculated, but you cannot explain or infer what is going to happen: curves hugely expanding, curves enormously contracting, new curves, a sound, a hit, a tone, a silence.... Every event is so freshly invented, so newly born that it has almost no history in the piece itself but its own actual presence. It has its presence, its now situation, and then the now situation is joined with another, with the next now - an unfoldment of nows. "Lecture on Dada."
- Austin Clarkson, liner notes
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Diego Minciacchi - Piano Works 1

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 07 Feb 2022 23:19:17 | Comments : 11 |
Diego Minciacchi - Piano Works 1

Diego Minciacchi - Piano Works 1
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 236 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2005 | Cover
James Clapperton, piano

“Composer and neurologist Diego Minciacchi is as likely to publish a paper on motor skills as he is to compose music that mixes scientific and poetic ideas; yet this fact should not intimidate listeners new to his work, who might worry that the compositions on this 2005 release from Col Legno are too cerebral or complicated to appreciate. What they should know upfront, however, is that Minciacchi is a product of the generation of composers who absorbed the lessons of the 1960s and '70s avant-garde in their formative years, but instead of turning to neo-Romanticism, minimalism, or eclecticism in the 1990s, pushed the experimental envelope even further. Minciacchi studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Horaţiu Rădulescu, among other teachers, and much of their hardcore modernist influence is apparent in this collection of piano works, composed between 1979 and 2003. Indeed, the use of the term Klavierstück seems intended to invoke the spirit of Stockhausen, rather more than Liszt or Schumann, and the fairly cryptic subtitles of these pieces may suggest a connection to Rădulescu's mystifying practice, notably in his Lao Tzu Sonatas for piano, which are also allusively subtitled.
- AMG
”
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Morton Feldman - The Late Piano Works, Vol. 3

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 07 Feb 2022 09:28:01 | Comments : 3 |
Morton Feldman - The Late Piano Works, Vol. 3

Morton Feldman - The Late Piano Works, Vol. 3
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 99.1 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2010 | Cover
Steffen Schleiermacher

“Although his late piano pieces (Triadic Memories or in particual [sic] For Bunita Marcus) are much longer than Piano, they still seem more one-dimensional: Occasional single notes are perpetually modified in their order, rhythm and their "orchestration". They seem first to linger then slowly fade away thus creating an atmosphere of calmness and seemingly infinite time. In contrast Piano comes across as a dramatic piece: each section is clearly defined, choral units alternate with unisonous sequences, partly set in the extreme ranges of the piano. And, completely out of the ordinary, Feldman's music suddenly becomes very loud . . . Compared to his other late compositions, Palais de Mari is rather short. And it has an air of "easy listening": consonant intervals dominate, the patterns used are simple and straightforward. Palais de Mari lacks the strange brittleness that is characteristic for For Bunita Marcus as well as the artful permutation in Triadic Memories, nor does it have the dramatic impact of Piano. Is Palais de Mari therefore the resigned produce of an aged artist?
- S. Schleiermacher, liner notes
”
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Arthur Berger - The Complete Orchestral Music

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 16 Jan 2022 23:36:38 | Comments : 5 |
Arthur Berger - The Complete Orchestral Music

Arthur Berger - The Complete Orchestral Music
Avant-Garde/Classical | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | WinRAR (233 MB - 3% Rec.) | 2003 | Liner notes inside
Boston Modern Orchestra Project • Gil Rose, conductor

“There may come a day when Arthur Berger, with his twin talents as composer and critic, will be regarded as his generation’s Robert Schumann, who likewise excelled at both. Their impact on the music and thought of their respective eras is similar. Both have composed works of great beauty, while maintaining a keen ear for the musical achievements of others—Schumann instrumental in Brahms’s success, Berger championing the work of Ives, Copland, and many others.

These compositions span five decades, yet Berger’s language has an unmistakable underlying consistency. Two identifiable ingredients characterize these symphonic works: beautiful surface textures juxtaposed with adventurous rhythmic and harmonic experimentation. The former make each work compelling from the first listen; the latter reward careful study and reveal the depth of Berger’s craft. The difficulties lie mainly in the lack of repeated material, and impetuously brief development. One early reviewer wrote that in Berger’s music “there are no filler parts, few silences, no obvious sequences or repetitions where the mind can momentarily rest and re-gather its powers of concentration.”
- liner notes
”
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John Cage - Cage Edition Vol. 15: The Lost Works

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 27 Nov 2021 05:08:33 | Comments : 1 |
John Cage - Cage Edition Vol. 15: The Lost Works

John Cage - Cage Edition Vol. 15: The Lost Works
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG+M3U) | 223 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 1996
Essential Music • John Kennedy & Charles Wood, artistic directors

“"This wonderfully imaginative, surreal, and entertaining radio piece for percussion, sound effects, and voices, with a text by Kenneth Patchen, was originally presented as part of a Columbia Workshop (CBS Radio) program on May 31, 2022 (and recently re-released on the organ of corti label). It is re-created on this Mode recording by the talented Essential Music group with 14 voices and a five-person "sound orchestra," with the whole ensemble directed by John Kennedy and Charles Wood. The orchestra includes tin cans, muted gongs, woodblocks, alarm bells, oxen bells, temple gongs, water gong (a gong slowly dipped in water, resulting in sweeping harmonics), tamtam, bass drum, Chinese tomtom, bongos, cowbells, maracas, claves, marimbula, Chinese and Turkish cymbals, steel coil, washboard, ratchet, pod rattle, whistles, automobile horn, foghorn, metronome, steel pipes, music stands, thundersheet, string piano, telephone, buzzer, and the recorded sounds of an automobile, airplane, rain, wind, variable oscillator frequencies, a baby's cries, and the ocean. There are also bits of music interwoven into sounds of daily life: someone whistles My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean, and there's boogie woogie in the nightclub scene. Essential Music realizes these parts with vigor, taste, and more than a bit of droll humor. Patchen's text is surreal but normal, slangy, and "average American" in style. The main character, known simply as The Voice, has odd precognitive abilities and wanders through discontinuous situations that come straight out of a film noir B-movie. This part is perfectly realized by Paul Schmidt. The final scene on the rocks in the sea is particularly heartfelt."
- AMG
”
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V/A - Asia Piano Avantgarde • Indonesia

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 22 Nov 2021 09:29:34 | Comments : 6 |
V/A - Asia Piano Avantgarde • Indonesia

V/A - Asia Piano Avantgarde • Indonesia
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG+M3U) | 155 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2005
Steffen Schleiermacher

“From its date of composition and erratic gestures, one may readily accept Soegijo's 'Klavierstudie' as an example of the late avant-garde's pointillistic and fragmentary keyboard style. But the remaining pieces on the program are much less gestural and disjointed, and rather more even in tone, smooth in technique, and almost meditative in feeling. Sjukur's 'Svara' and 'Yu Taha' are spare and austere, though the harmonic language is paradoxically rich in thirds, sixths, and octaves, and the music at times seems almost Impressionistic in its veiled quality. Asmara's two short selections ... somewhat reminiscent of Morton Feldman's subdued piano music. The soft pitches and long-held silences of Marching's 'Kenang' are even more like Feldman, and the fairly static harmonic structures and repetitive motives of Ekagustiman's 'Langendria' may also bring Olivier Messiaen to mind. Yet the quiet ambience and poetic mood of this album make it seem less like experimental music and more reflective of the homogenization of styles that came at the end of the twentieth century, which still seems a dominant factor in the early twenty-first. Schleiermacher, as a product of the avant-garde of the late '70s and early '80s, may read into these contemporary works some hopeful signs of a new movement, but what appears instead to be the case is a consolidation of past gains, not an exploration of new possibilities. That said, Schleiermacher's sympathetic performances are evocative and atmospheric, and MDG's unprocessed sound is clean and natural, so these composers and their music are at least presented well, even if they aren't accurately represented as a vanguard.”
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V/A - Music of Ostrava Days Live 2009 Festival

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 21 Nov 2021 10:17:36 | Comments : 6 |
V/A - Music of Ostrava Days Live 2009 Festival

V/A - Music of Ostrava Days Live 2009 Festival
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG+M3U) | 2 CDs / 618 MB (WinRAR - 3% Rec.) | 2009
feat. music by M. Feldman, P. Kotík, G. Ligeti, L. Nono, L. Berio & more

“Ostrava Center for New Music (OCNM) was founded in 2000 with the mission to produce the Ostrava Days New Music Institute and Festival. The three-week Ostrava Days Institute creates a working environment with a focus on works for orchestra. There are two resident orchestras, the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra and Ostravská banda. The biennial Ostrava Days, held in 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009, has included over the years 116 emerging composers and musicians from 27 countries, including 8 students from the Czech Republic. Lecturers at Ostrava Days have included Muhal Richard Abrams, Louis Andriessen, Jean-Yves Bosseur, Petr Kotík, Alvin Lucier, Roscoe Mitchell, Tristan Murail, Phill Niblock, Kaija Saariaho, Somei Satoh, Rebeca Saunders, Martin Smolka, and Christian Wolff, among others.”
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Posted by :: Alex | Date :: Aug 20, 2021 19:05:00 | [ 34 comments ]


John Cage - Bird Cage

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 17 Nov 2021 04:42:00 | Comments : 3 |
John Cage - Bird Cage

John Cage - Bird Cage
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG+M3U) | 313 MB (WinRAR - 3% Recovery) | 2000 | Covers
performance by William Blakeney

“
"Twelve tapes, to be distributed by a single performer in a space where people are free to move and birds to fly."

Cage arrived in Albany on a Monday night with Hans Helms, a German music critic and film director, and a film and audio crew of three people from the WDR. Hans had been commissioned to do a film of John composing the piece. John also brought three groups of prerecorded tapes: Group "A", we'll call it, was of singing birds that he had recorded in aviaries during the previous two weeks. Group "B" was recordings of John singing his own 'Mureau' (an earlier piece based on Thoreau's writings) in a chanting voice (as he observed: "It makes the birds seem less ridiculous"). And Group "C" was environmental sounds (the "wildtrack," as filmmakers call it).		”
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John Cage - Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras • Music for Piano

Posted By : CioCio | Date : 24 Aug 2021 23:43:50 | Comments : 6 |
John Cage - Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras • Music for Piano

John Cage - Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras • Music for Piano
Avant-Garde | EAC (FLAC+CUE+LOG) | 219 MB (WinRAR - 3% Recovery) | 2001 | Cover
Savaria Symphony Orchestra

“"Just as his poetry had done, Cage's work in the visual arts had its effect on his musical works. An early and direct example of this is Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras. The compositional process here was derived from the method used in the On the Surface etchings. A piece of cardboard the size of one score page was cut up at random, producing a large number of unique templates, much like the copper plates of On the Surface. Holes were then punched at chance-determined locations in these templates. A different set of templates was made for each of the five independent orchestral groups. For each of the thirty pieces, the I Ching was used, as it was in the etchings, to determine which of these templates would be used and in what positions. The notes of the piece were then inscribed through the holes of the templates. No "horizon" line was used here - such a purely visual element would be inappropriate - but a similar effect was produced by distinguishing between those templates that lay wholly within the space of the page and those that extended outside it. The notes of these latter templates were added together to form a single chord, and this chord was then repeated in a randomly-derived ostinato pattern. The notes produced by the other templates were given randomly-chosen durations, pitch inflections, dynamics, vibrato, and so forth. The result of this is that within each piece, there are free curves and outbursts, distinctive and unique, set against the grid of the irregularly repeated sonorities."
- James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage
”

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