hat(now)ART 101
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati
Graphic Music
Are we improvising? Good question. I think not. These scores are a wealth of wonderful graphic images which beg to be heard. During the process of studying them, I found myself aligning sounds with images, performance gestures with graphic gestures, shapes (graphic) with shapes (musical) with shapes (physical). As Eberhard, Iven and I worked together, elements which could be attributed to the realm of improvisation became fixed at the macro level while remaining significantly less so at the micro level.
hat(now)ART 102 / SOLD OUT
Morton Feldman
Neither
Neither has been identified by some as an opera (it was commissioned by the Rome Opera) but it makes use of none of the conventions of traditional opera. There is no story, no mise-en-scene. The intensity results from emotional/aesthetic tension, not plot manipulation or character confrontation. The music does not attempt to accompany or depict the text in the usual fashion; instead Feldman has created a kind of musical equivalent to the environment that Beckett's words suggest, invoking the same atmosphere and sharing a similar vision.
hat(now)ART 103 / SOLD OUT
Japan
Piano 1996
"Ink on rice paper is music," wrote Robert Motherwell, who found many self-defining parallels in Japanese philosophy and art, among them the suggestion that the transformational qualities of art derive from the process the artist undergoes during the creative act, which originates in his innermost nature and adapts itself according to the relationship one has with one's material. Motherwell felt that a painting's content is dependent not upon its subject matter but its "rhythms and proportions," and that "...if the amounts...are right, they will have condensed into quality, into feeling."
hat(now) ART 104
Soviet Avant-Garde 1
Lourié, Mossolov, Protopopov, Roslavetz
Beautiful, bold, striking piano music – as new a sound as any music hidden, forgotten, or forbidden; as traditional a blast as a stiff shot of vodka. But it is also a reminder that the red flag, once a symbol of insurrection and disobedience, has not all-of-a-sudden turned white.
hat(now)ART 105
Lou Harrison
Labrynth
Lou Harrison composed all the works recorded on this CD between 1938 and 1942. They offer the listener a rare opportunity to hear, on one CD, a large sampling of seminal 20th century works for the percussion ensemble. ... I think that the collective enthusiasm and energy that the young performers on these recordings bring to each piece confirms my long-held opinion that these pieces continue to speak powerfully to every generation of listener and performer and that they certainly deserve a much wider audience. These works broke ground then and they still challenge and delight. Thank you Lou!
hat(now)ART 106 / SOLD OUT
Japan
Flute 1997
My first encounter with Japanese music came in 1962 during the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt. In his flute course that summer Severino Gazzelloni presented Kazuo Fukushima's work Mei, and the composer himself spoke about its origins and the process of its composition. This all left a deep impression on me. Later, other works by Japanese composers were added to this repertoire and gradually Japanese music came to form a regular part of my concert programs.
hat(now)ART 107 / SOLD OUT
Ars Subtilior
Xasax
The echo begins with the first sound, and shadows it. Music became an essential part of life when man realized sound as an idea, and not an accident. Ideas are echoes that ricochet without regard for time, space, or place. They are transcendental, transportational, transformational. Echoes haunt this program, this music—four contemporary compositions separated by three transmissions from the past.
hat(now)ART 108 / SOLD OUT
Anthony Braxton
Composition No. 10 And No. 16 (+101)
The performances on this CD give insight into three very different compositions. What we have here is a 'global phenomenon' that transcends idiomatic 'certainty' and instead gives hints of the profound undercurrents that will define the vibrational platform of the coming millennium. I learn something 'fresh' about these works with every hearing.
hat(now)ART 109 / SOLD OUT
Ernstalbrecht Stiebler
...Im Klang...
When music gives us space, leaves us time, we notice how our perception of music changes. A sensitization to music is formed through differentiated, repeated structures that do not force the listener to mere rehearsal of the composer's preconceptions but rather allow the listener the possibility to participate, to bring about resonance in the fullest sense.
hat(now)ART 110
Jo Kondo
Chamber MusicEnsemble l'art pour l'art
Each sound must have its own entity and life. What I am doing in my compositions is to create a web of intertonal relationships, while trying to safeguard the possibility of aurally perceiving the individual entity and life of every single tone in that relationship.
hat(now)ART 111
James Tenney
The Solo Works For Percussion
Matthias Kaul
Tenney's percussion pieces could be regarded as a veritable collection of topoi of the American experimental tradition. Central ideas of the U.S. avant-garde—the reduction of complexity, the use of space and room resonance as musical parameters, re-definition of the use of technology, re-integration of the roles of composer and performer, indeterminacy and non-subjectivity, liberation of silence from its traditional subordinate role in music—are adapted and transformed in concise and creative ways.
hat(now)ART 112
Polwechsel
Even music evolving from a background like this finds its place in an historical development, although music history hasn't been densely inhabited by musicians and composers who are working towards a productive tension between the poles of improvisation and composition. And the selection becomes even more narrow when restricting the search onto groups of musicians who, in more heroic times, were quick to be named a "collective."
hat(now)ART 113
Udo Kasemets
Pythagoras Tree
Works For Piano
Estonian-born (1919), Canadian-naturalized composer Udo Kasemets was a pupil of Hermann Scherchen and Ernst Krenek during his studies in Stuttgart and Darmstadt, and took from them a healthy eclecticism and questioning of conventions. Symbolically, these scores for solo piano can be seen as Kasemets' equivalent of architectural drawing, focusing on specific designs of micro-detail with an intimacy of expression that suggests his vision of an "open and unknowable horizon" on the path towards discovering "the universal concepts embracing all life, not just music."
hat(now)ART 114
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati
Concerto A Tre
Ensemble Recherche
A fragile, transparent, fine network constitutes the vanishing point in Roman Haubenstock-Ramati's creations. That is why his chamber music pieces do not merely result from daily compositional exercises, but are the virtual essence of his life's work.
hat(now)ART 115
Soviet Avant-Garde 2
Lourié, Mossolov, Polovinkin, Roslavetz
That at the beginning of this century many an impulse for the development of fine arts, as well as literature, came from the Russian Empire—soon the Soviet Union—is no longer a mystery. And that there were in Moscow and St. Petersburg such developments, inventions, and ideas as far as music was concerned has also become common knowledge in recent years—and equally known is how most of these Russian/Soviet protagonists of a new art had to suffer for their ideas.
hat(now)ART 116 / SOLD OUT
Morton Feldman
Atlantis
As we relate to music in an on-going condition of becoming, and not (like painting) a state of being, we're able to experience these works much as Morton Feldman did, as they happen, with an equal sense of wonder and delight.
hat(now)ART 117 / SOLD OUT
Giacinto Scelsi
Kya
Scelsi found his means of entry by focusing on the point of origin of all music—the sound itself. Inherent in the nature of every sound is its vibrational identity, which can be reduced down to microscopic details in particular patterns, like atomic particles consisting of a nucleus surrounded by moving electrons. ... In this way, Scelsi understood the necessity to make a music of essence rather than ornament ... As the music changes, it changes us.
hat(now)ART 118
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati
Mobile For Shakespeare
These four examples from Haubenstock-Ramati's impressive oeuvre may convey an idea of the composer's inventiveness in finding ever-new ways of creating "dynamic-closed forms", one common trait links these (and many other) pieces: a penchant for small, fragile, filigree structures, for sonic miniatures.
hat(now)ART 119
Polwechsel 2
... a shot / of loud yellow ringed with red / just a shape in empty space echoes / edges neither real no time opaque / as sin every pause a place electronic / hum heard as blur of blue-grey eyes / evaporates a dream soft as long / dry as hard smooth as friction solid / as mist recognize how sound becomes / everything only momentarily ...
hat(now)ART 120
James Tenney
Music For Violin & Piano
Shape, balance, reference, distance, equilibrium, symmetry, contrast, form. These are the particulars of a creative approach that reconstructs its own relationship to the traditional values of classicism, one which brings a mathematical conscience to free will, explores the transformation from conception to perception, and celebrates the dialectical tension that results. This is James Tenney's music.
hat(now)ART 121
Enfants Terribles
Tom Johnson, Sven Åke Johansson, Nicolaus Richter de Vroe, Steffen Schleiermacher, John Zorn
When is someone considered to be an "enfant terrible"? Or a "bad boy"? What characterizes an "enfant terrible", what distinguishes a "bad boy" from others, from normal ones (?!)? Are they within music composers/musicians who go their own way unwaveringly, who support their ideas, regardless if others think it amateurish, simplistic, bad, eccentric or whatever?
hat(now)ART 2-122 / SOLD OUT
Cornelius Cardew
Treatise
Music with a spine. A score with backbone. Vertebrae: a composite line around which the body's extremities congregate. Spinal column: the concrete concept on which the slipped (compact?) disc is founded. Or, if not absolutely ossified into the bony hardness of subphylum Vertebrata's prime organizing architecture, perhaps Cardew's Treatise is equipped with the mutable structuring agent of the phylum Chordata: the notochord. What is Treatise? Well, it's a noto chord ...
hat(now)ART 123
Aldo Clementi
Madrigale
We know the mantra all too well: If I love it, what can I do but repeat it? If I repeat it, what can I do but get bored with it? One answer might be (must be): to make out of its repetition something infinitely variable. This Clementi has done for the last twenty years. He has found a technician's answer to the familiar question of what to do, musically, with the compulsive nature of memory, the obstinate tenacity of the Proustian 'petite phase'. Beethoven and Brahms exorcised this power, this compulsion to repeat, through variations. Clementi constructs canons.
hat(now)ART 124 / SOLD OUT
Morton Feldman
For John Cage
Typically, as is the case in For John Cage, Feldman presents a pattern (or sequence) of notes and/or chords, and may repeat them an unpredictable and asymmetrical number of times, until they are succeeded by the next pattern, but the pattern is never developed, reorganized, or manipulated in any conventional fashion. Thus successive patterns are linked (or woven) together in an ongoing fabric of music ...
hat(now)ART 125
Arnold Schönberg
Works for Piano
For two Hands
It may seem daring to compare Schönberg's piano works in their significance with Beethoven's. Compared with the immense number of 32 piano sonatas there are just six opera of Schönberg's which what is more, often are hardly longer than a few minutes. And still the compositional evolution of this great innovator of the music of our century is mirrored within these little piano pieces which, within the oeuvre of Schönberg, play a similarly important role as Beethoven's great sonatas ...
hat(now)ART 126
Clarence Barlow
Musica Derivata
Though seeming to face the same existential wall as John Cage and other post-WWII composers, Clarence Barlow, like Beethoven and Ives before him, actually builds his own labyrinths, brick by brick, and then searches for an escape. To do so he devises various elaborate conceptual or mathematical guises to circumvent the traps of Time, tonality, and style.
hat(now)ART 2-127
James Tenney
FORM 1-4
In Memoriam Varese, Cage, Wolpe, Feldman
What James Tenney does have in common with the composers to whom he has dedicated his FORMs, however, is not a specific approach to dynamics, but to sound. And precisely this inquiring interest in sound, both as a physical phenomenon and as regards its perception, was a constant leitmotif that pervaded the whole American avant-garde in the 20th century. To a certain extent, it could even be seen as a decisive characteristic distinguishing the American avant-garde from its European counterpart, which was more structurally and historically oriented.
hat(now)ART 128 / SOLD OUT
Morton Feldman
Piano and String Quartet
Feldman wanted his music to be heard, and he believed in the idea of the masterwork when everybody else was talking about open forms or multiple versions. In a way Morton Feldman was indeed, as he once insisted, the last Western composer, although his way of paying hommage to Bach, Schubert and Brahms was to compose music that, on the surface, seemed to renounce the great tradition of Western composition. His disguise was near-perfect. And yet, in its manifest love of pure piano and string sonorities, of subtle sonic differences, in its insistence on the listener's undivided concentration, its power to draw him into the sonic world of the quintet, Piano and String Quartet is Chamber Music with capital letters. Old-World-music in the vestige of the New World avantgarde.
hat(now)ART 129
Fritz Hauser
Solodrumming
If, as John Ruskin said, architecture is frozen music, perhaps Solodrumming insinuates music as liquid architecture. The space (Martin-Gropius-Bau) in which these sounds originated influences their aural characteristics; clarity of articulation/gesture, exquisite resonance, delay, decay, ambiance, added to Hauser's crisp technique, his formal concerns, his zen conception, create new definitions of those areas we occupy in mind and body.
hat(now)ART 130
Matthias Kaul
Solopercussion
Imagine a young boy walking past an iron railing, a stick in his hand, exploring the various timbres of the resonating metal. Imagine the same boy riding his bicycle at full speed, discovering the sound produced by the airstream when he opens his mouth, relishing in the multitude of overtones resulting when he changes the shape of his oral cavity. ...The solo rectital on this CD is a vivid proof of such multi-faceted creativity, a good hour of music rich in musical adventureand rich in subtexts well beyond the confines of contemporary music, rich in musical allusions and illusions.
hat(now)ART 131
Teodoro Anzellotti
Push Pull
Compositions such as these unquestionably go a long way in re-defining the accordion, in liberating it from its relatively short, but heavily cliché-ridden history. In a way, the accordion's role may be compared with that of the saxophone:both children of the industrialisation of musical instrument, both aesthetically defined by certain popular idioms, both re-discovered and re-defined by the composers of New Music. These (and other) new works for accordion have enriched the sound world of the accordion immensely, and I hope that you will share my sense of discovery.
hat(now)ART 132
Peter Ablinger (1959)
Grisailles (1-100) für drei Klaviere (1991-93)
The throbbing standstill as changing tinge of light, as a slow change (of light and therefore of space and time), fifty minutes long. Grisailles 1-100 for three pianos consists of various levels of overlapping sound-layers. Repeated octaves and small, barely audible sounds made by fingers darting across the keys seem to be two of these levels. Peter Ablinger composed twenty-four layers to start with—each one following its own time and structure—, before these were being combined in a preliminary score.
hat(now)ART 133 / SOLD OUT
John Cage
Music of Changes
The title is a double pun. The score is the first that John Cage devised allowing the hexagrams of the I Ching to fully determine how the music would proceed, event by event, gesture by gesture—the musical details (pitch, duration, dynamics, density, tempi) being painstakingly, albeit fortuitously, derived through point-by-point consultation from charts of possibilities designed by the composer. (Christian Wolff, Cage's young friend and musical associate, had presented Cage with a copy of the book, which had been published by his father, Kurt Wolff. IChing = Book of Changes = Music of Changes.) Too, the music, as an entity, is constantly changing. There is no guiding sense of continuity of line, rhythm, speed, or texture. The relationship between events—the glue—which holds the music together can be neither tonally nor structurally defined. Change appears to be its only unchanging characteristic, its ultimate identity.
hat(now)ART 134
Guillermo Gregorio
Degrees Of Iconicity
Much more directly than, for example, Webern, Feldman, or Tristano, who have often been cited as
influencing my work, I think that the most important elements acting on my music come from the visual arts—more specifically, from the so-called "constructive" tendencies of 20th century art, namely, some varieties of Constructivism and Concrete Art.
hat(now)ART 135
Jo Kondo
Works For Piano
The nine pieces recorded in this CD are all that I have written so far for solo piano. Until this recording project was proposed to me, I had been unaware of having written so many pieces for piano solo, enough to fill a whole CD. Although the piano is one of my favorite instruments, which I use almost constantly in my chamber works, I never thought the solo piano could become a major medium for my music. In fact, composition for any solo instrument has not interested me too much, probably because of my proclivity to write music for instrumental ensembles, where interrelationships among the parts (or the members of the ensemble) play a crucial role. This may somehow explain the fact that the first two pieces on this CD, Sight Rhythmics and Walk, were not originally written for solo piano.
hat(now)ART 136
Counterpoise
Accanto & Xasax
It's interesting to note that the title chosen for this carefully plotted program of works, Counterpoise, refers to equivalent powers set in opposition creating a state of balance, and appears in the dictionary in between the words "counterpoint" and "counterpose." There is certainly a measured balance in the interrelated and contrasting material presented here, as well as in the personalities of the composers represented. Moreover, there is a palpable sense of poise (that is, equilibrium, assurance, and tact) in the music itself, which accounts for the equal degrees of spontaneity and inevitability-highlighting the counter-effect of creative tension-that result.
hat(now)ART 2-137 / SOLD OUT
Morton Feldman
Violin & String Quartet
On the bottom right hand corner of page 54 of the manuscript score there is a date...6-7-85, indicating an abrupt end to the composition, though there is no logical reason why the music should stop. Listening to the flow of sound itself, there's no sense of closure, or resolution, not a conclusion, hardly even a cessation. It's more an interruption, a tear in the fabric. How was it decided? Probably simply through intuition. Note: intuition, however, is anything but simple, especially in Feldman's case where it is acutely, painstakingly, thoroughly...and personally reasoned.
hat(now)ART 138
Morton Feldman
Early Piano Works
"For each ecstatic instant / We must an anguish pay / In keen and quivering ratio / To the ecstasy."
It almost seems as if Emily Dickinson could have been describing the early piano music of Morton Feldman when she wrote those lines nearly one-hundred-and-fifty years ago. Certainly, the uncommonly short, acutely concentrated, unadorned and vulnerable pieces Feldman composed between 1950 and 1964 each span just an “ecstatic instant”
hat(now)ART 139
Four Generations
Wolpe, Feldman, Zimmermann, Seel
It is only fitting that the coda to this recital of most demanding 20th century piano music should only be a quiet epilogue, a sparse and subtle probing of single piano sonorities, but also a creation of the brillant young pianist who manages to do justice to music as different as those of Wolpe, Feldman and Zimmermann. For Daniel N. Seel is not only a of renown, but a prodigious composer, whose oeuvre includes, apart from numerous piano pieces, orchestral music, an opera, scores of various instrumental groupings and performance-oriented pieces. And since Seel is a former student of Walter Zimmermann, this pianissimo finale is also another link in the many aestethic and biographical strands joining Stefan Wolpe, Morton Feldman, Walter Zimmermann and Daniel N. Seel, in spite of all obvious differences between those representatives of four musical generations.
hat(now)ART 140
Dane Rudhyar (1895–1985)
Works For Piano
This is sonic music, not to be analyzed and thought about, but to feel and surrender to in direct experience. It is some of the most spiritual music of the last 100 years, important not only to the progression of the American avant-garde, but to the history of occultism. It is high time we restore it to the place of honor it deserves.
hat(now)ART 142
Morton Feldman
For Samuel Beckett (1987)
Ensemble Modern
For Samuel Beckett is a late (1987) work, rich in detail and lush in sound (especially in relation to so many of his more «austere» pieces, early and late), but troubling, obsessed, claustrophobic in spite of its scope. Given their shared attraction to shadow (Feldman’s music uses chiaroscuro in the way Beckett meticulously exploited darkness and light and the moods in between on the stage and on the page), it’s perhaps surprising that Feldman’s dedication didn’t involve the starker textures of solo piano—an individual surrounded by ... nothing. In any case, this is not dazzling, but muted, orchestration; instrumental timbres and tonal colors emerge as if by chance and quickly disappear.
hat(now)ART 143
Ivan Wyschnegradsky
Quarter-Tone Pieces
Josef Christof & Steffen Schleiermacher
Wyschnegradsky saw microtonality as a mystical impulse, a metaphysical method of transcendence; not so for the pragmatic Ives, whose father invented instruments and playfully experimented with twisted tonalities and microtonal singing. For Ives, microtonality was another technique (along with his fistful-of-notes clusters, collisions of keys, out-of-tune quotations, and multiple marching band allusions) toward the ultimate acceptance of all conceivable dissonances. Today, Ives’ and Wyschnegradsky’s time has finally come. For 21 years there has been a Festival of Microtonal Music in New York, attracting ever younger generations of composers; for over a decade now electronic musicians engaged in ambient, trance, dance, and improvisational idioms are using the kind of free frequency sonorities that Wyschnegradsky idealized. In his rare essay «Some ‹Quarter-Tone› Impressions,» Ives wondered «How much of a fight will the ears have to put up?» For more listeners than ever before, the fight is nearly over.
hat(now)ART 4-144
Morton Feldman (1926-1987)
STRING QUARTET (II)
The complexity of Feldman's assemblage assures unfamiliarity and initial discomfort on the part of the listener. If we're not meant to hear continuity, or structure, or order, what can we hear? The answer depends, more than ever, on individual perception. There is movement, and stasis. Lines are drawn, thicken, thin out, and disappear. Phrases stretch like taffy. Shapes congeal, morph, and dissolve. Threads tangle and untangle. Sections are joined into blocks of fabric, then are cut into new blocks. Episodes, or fragments, appear, are abandoned, reappear. Notes breathe in and out, or push and pull like brush strokes. The sound creates its own form, its own metaphors, its own meaning. What are they? That's your job. How, and why, they got that way is another story.
hat(now)ART 145
John Cage (1912–1992)
Imaginary Landscapes
Improvising guitarist Derek Bailey has expressed the belief that «If you’re going to explore uncharted territory, it’s okay to carry a compass, but not a map.» It’s obvious; if you know where you’re going and have plotted the most efficient or scenic course to get there, you may arrive without mishap but deprived of much of the drama, the danger, the unpredictable uniqueness of the journey. In the years following 1950, John Cage walked these paths of musical uncertainty, providing performers with a sense of direction but without indicating a final goal or
specifying the sights one would encounter along the way. By attempting to emulate Nature in its own manner of operation, Cage sought to erase what he felt were the artificial boundaries of conventional form, escape the clichés of familiarity, and make each musical experience a discovery of detail and destination – for himself, the performer, and listener alike.
