hat(now)ART 101 / SOLD OUT
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 / SOLD OUT
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 / SOLD OUT
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 / SOLD OUT
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 / SOLD OUT
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 / SOLD OUT
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 / SOLD OUT
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 / SOLD OUT
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 / SOLD OUT
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 / SOLD OUT
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”
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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.
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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 141
Chritian Wolff
Early Piano Pieces
Steffen Schleiermacher
For Prepared Piano (1951) was my first experiment with John Cage’s invention (putting various objects into the piano strings to produce percussive or non-specifically pitched sounds) and a continuation of interest in percussion as such. I had been a friend of John’s, after a brief time as a student, for about a year. But I’d known about the prepared piano earlier from scores in Henry Cowell’s New Music Publications.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Guillermo Gregorio
Faktura
"Faktura is consciously to select material and use it expediently without halting the movement of the construction or limiting its tectonic."
hat(now)ART 147
Richard Rijnvos
Block Beuys
Ives Ensemble
In 1990 Richard Rijnvos was invited to the German city of Darmstadt to be a guest composer at the new music summer courses held there every two years. During a free moment he escaped from the courses and discovered one of Darmstadt's greatest treasures, the installation in the Hessisches Landesmuseum known as the 'Block Beuys'.
This collection of work by the German visual artist Joseph Beuys (1921-86) consists of about 270 objects arranged in seven rooms of varying sizes, and contains most of the forms and materials which Beuys habitually used
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Liza Lim
The Heart's Ear
Ensemble für Neue Musik Zürich
Liza Lim belongs to a new class of composers whose artistic approach is destined to undermine centuries-old Eurocentrism once and for all: though adapting “Western” techniques to a degree, they seek spiritual orientation in other cultures. It is an organic paradigm shift with totally new artistic results. Liza Lim ,too, is well-acquainted with the key European traditions and techniques. She studied with Ton de Leeuw in Amsterdam, is familiar with the scores of a Brian Ferneyhough and attended Summer Courses in Darmstadt, even going on to teach there. But her sources of inspiration and the roots of her musical language are largely Asian. This already becomes clear from the sonorities of her works.
hat(now)ART 149
Transatlantic Swing
John Snijders
Transatlantic Swing is a CD of music rich in elusive connections. Some of the music is ‘transatlantic’ because it’s music by Europeans influenced by the Americas, some because it’s music by an American played by a European. In some way all the music ‘swings’, but no two pieces swing in the same way.There’s also a network of friendships between the composers represented here, although together they don’t represent any one tendency in contemporary musical aesthetics. And there’s a network of shared preoccupations in the music here – the balance between process and fantasy in musical form, the dynamics of sound and silence, the reconfiguration of popular music – but not all these preoccupations occur in every piece.
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Cornelius Cardew
Material
Among the things I find especially attractive
hat(now)ART 151
James Tenney (1934)
Pika-Don
Tenney has often characterized himself as a kind of “tone scientist”, that is, one working on an almost microscopic level with the primary materials of sound in order to expand our knowledge of its properties (what makes it what it is) and perceptual identity (how we respond to it). To do so, he has composed music that isolates the components of sound production into their most basic acoustic phenomena; music that explores and illuminates the subatomic pitch relationships within the harmonic series; music that combines these pitches into complexes motivated by systematic patterns or chance procedures. By thus objectifying music, and consequently rejecting its romanticized “self-expressive” nature, Tenney links composition with phenomenology. “The basic idea in phenomenology”, he told Gayle Young, “is making a more strenuous effort to see things as they are, depending upon whatever one is focusing on. I think the best scientists and the best artists are precisely that – phenomenologists”. – Art Lange
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John Cage
Sonates & Interludes
James Tenney
How rare, and valuable, it is to be able to experience one composer’s masterwork through the sensibility of another significant, stylistically distinct composer – via a performance that reveals unexpected aspects of both. that is to say, an approach to performance not as an act of self-conscious, flamboyant or dramatic interpretation, according to the concerns of technique, expression, and projection that are at the heart of an instrumentalist’s presentation of a musical score to an audience, but something completely different; rather, an examination of the music’s premise and complex details from a contrasting, individual, compositional curiosity.
hat(now)ART 153
John Cage
Ryoanji
The In 1962, John Cage first visited the small, sparse rock and sand garden Ryoan-ji (Peaceful Dragon) in Kyoto. It was by all accounts a profound experience, and he carried away with him more than just a memory of a quiet, contemplative afternoon. If an experience truly transforms an individual, it becomes an idea, which we carry around with us. This idea is now a place – a point of reference – we may revisit at any time. Cage may have thought about Ryoan-ji often; in 1983, he applied an action to his idea.
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Morton Feldman
Clarinet & String Quartet
Perhaps surprisingly, I find that Clarinet And String Quartet and the epicritical, aleatoric (thus the two different versions released here) Two Pieces For Clarinet And String Quartet, composed twenty-three years earlier, have much in common. Both are intimate, introspective, transparent, and concise, and despite the earlier work’s delicacy and brevity, their differences are of surface, not content and certainly not feeling. Though their means are unalike, they illuminate key issues in Feldman’s music: commitment, integrity, and wonder, turning anxiety into discovery, and emotion into art.
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Dieter Ammann (1962)
The Freedom Of Speech
Dieter Ammann says about himself that he works extremely slowly; sometimes he just manages to finish one bar a day, sometimes he isn’t moving ahead at all because he has scruples about putting down the next note. It goes without saying that you can’t do a lot of commissions in this way, and yet Ammann has still created a small, easy-to-grasp and expressive oeuvre over the past twelve years. This slow creative process not only seems to be inconsistent with the very lively and highly gestural musical language at first, on the face of it it also seems to be inconsistent with the background of this composer, who as an active musician grew up with jazz and rock and above all improvised music as well.
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Stefan Wolpe (1902–1972)
Enactments
The piano was Stefan Wolpe’s instrument, the playground of his imagination, and most of his pieces have a part for at least one piano to play.
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Pierre Boulez (1925)
Notations & Piano Sonatas
It is hardly surprising that the significance of the chapters in music history does not depend on their size. But almost never has there been such a concentration of events as in the case of the development, manifestation and overturning of serial music.And what is even more remarkable is that the individual stages of a historical process (post-twelve-tone serialism in our case) can be illustrated with the works of one composer, that is, with the piano pieces of Pierre Boulez. Just one decade passed between the fragile as well as fugitive Douze notations and the prodigious torso of the Third Piano Sonata – between the early work of an unknown composer in his twenties, who was already firm in his resolve not to keep up the tradition he was part of, and the work of the thirty-year-old avant-garde star, who only had to loosen the ties he himself had put on before.
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Noriko Hisada (1963)
Prognostication
Ensemble für Neue Musik Zürich
“I'm Japanese and write music the same way other people do!” she disarmingly remarks as we talk about any possible connections to the Japanese music tradition ... Noriko Hisada does not let herself be pinned down as to whether or not Japanese tradition clashes with the Western dominance of the music establishment. Only the first impression of her music sounds like Western European New Music that does not reject tonality and follows strict methods of musical organisation.
In addition, there is Hisada's predilection for extended as well as microtonal melodic patterns and her antenna for the dramaturgy of extremes.Toru Takemitsu, the most renowned Japanese composer of the 20th century, once took a critical view of the “Japanisation” of the avant-garde and made a statement that could apply to Noriko Hisada too: in the painful tension between East and West all one can do is to find oneself and deal with the irreconcilable by way of one's compositions.
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Earle Brown (1926
Synergy
Ensemble Avantgarde
The question of form is key in the music of Earle Brown, one of the foremost American composers of the past fifty years. It was a certain amount of serendipity and a shared interest in the liberation of musical form which brought Brown to gether, circa 1951, with John Cage, Morto n Feldman, Christian Wolff, and David Tudor, in what was for a time called the New York School. … There was a close identification between these composers and painters at this time, and Feldman and Brown, especially, took vital inspiration from the philosophies and techniques of artists like, respectively, Rothko and Pollock.
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Luc Ferrari (1929-2005)
Piano & Percussion Works
Satoko Inoue is an experienced performer of Ferrari’s works and had a lively exchange of ideas with the composer, who was also present at the recording sessions. No wonder then that precisely those ideas of open work and its “anecdotal” interpretation were the ones that were most important to him – as such sounds were to him always abstract at the core, even if he first illustrated them in a very visual and associative way. Satoko Inoue writes: “We discussed, he explained about each section. Luc had really specific images and meanings of his music materials..."
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George Crumb
Vox Balaenae
Ensemble für Neue Musik Zürich
George Crumb should be seen not as an isolated, iconoclastic voice who emerged unexpectedly in the ‘60s and continues to follow his own separate path, but as another important historical figure in the long line of American maverick composers... As a composer in search of transcendence, think of Ives, Cowell, Morton, Partch, Ellington, Nancarrow, Carter, Cage, Feldman,Tenney, Monk, among others, each in their own way. It is in this company that George Crumb belongs. A company beyond category.
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Morton Feldman
Ives Ensemble
String Quartett
The string quartet has a special place in classical music, second in importance among ensembles only to the orchestra.The string quartet repertoire is rich, ranging from the 18th and 19th century Classicists and Romantics—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert most prominently—to Modernists of the past century—Bartok, Shostakovich, and Milhaud among the most prolific and respected. Even iconoclasts like Schönberg, Berg, Babbitt, and Carter confirmed a connection to the tradition and created works which adhered to the formal logic and dramatic ambience of those of their predecessors while incorporating their own compositional procedures. But there have been exceptions as well, extremist composers who rejected the genre outright, or distorted it beyond recognition. Morton Feldman fits into the latter category...or does he?
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Luciano Berio & Edison Denissow
Works for Voice and Chamber Ensemble
Ensemble für Neue Musik Zürich
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Isaac Babel
The Sin Of Jesus
Transcribing Babel’s text into music, Hans-Peter Frehner followed a rigorous system of rules, with the words generating the melodic lines, and the letters the rhythm and harmony, while the action of the story determines the structure and form. It is an arcane system that becomes sound and music here, and which cannot be recognised simply by the ear. For the rules that determine our action and our longing are not visible on the surface, as we all know.They operate in the depths of our instincts, in our longings and passions – and this is the moral of Babel’s frivolous legend of Jesus – dangerous even for frail angels.
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Makrokosmos Quartet
The idea of an ensemble composed of pianos and percussion instruments first came about in Stravinsky’s The Wedding. Shortly thereafter, Bartok, who frequently emphasized the percussive aspect of the piano, developed this idea in his orchestral works (Piano Concerto No. 1, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta). In his 1937 Sonata for two pianos and percussion, he established a new instrumental archetype which was taken up by subsequent composers, such as the ones represented in this recording. However, for these composers, it isn’t so much the rhythmic and dynamic elements which link the piano to the various percussion instruments, as was the case for Stravinsky and Bartok, but rather the full range of sound possibilities—the set of different colors—provoking the idea of a fusion between the two entities. One of the characteristics of the huge diversity of percussion instruments that have been adopted from around the world during the past hundred or so years, is indeed the extraordinary variety of specific tonal qualities, in which the kinds of attacks and resonances—the way sounds appear, resonate, and disappear—play an important part. The works of Crumb, Gervasoni, and Haas are built upon such a range of sounds requiring new arrangements and new ways of articulation. Each work has its own range of colors which constitutes the basic material of the composition. Far from the intrinsic structures which reached their peak in serialism, the organization of pitches is here subsumed by the originality and combination of sounds as such. The acoustic quality as a structural and sensitive element is not produced exclusively by a combination of pitches whatever the complexity, but by a very thorough analysis of sound and dynamics. In Makrokosmos, George Crumb uses archaic modal structures and tonal music quotes, which also can be found in Georg Friedrich Haas’ second piece, where tonal chords seem to be lost and found objects.
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John Cage
Music Of Changes
David Tudor
The title is a double pun. The score is the first that John Cage devised allowing the hexagrams of the I Ching to fully determin e how the music would procee d, event by event, gesture by gesture—the musical details (pitch, duration, dynamic s, density, tempi) being painstakingly, albeit fortuitously, derived through point-by-point con sultation from charts of possi bilities 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. I Ching = Book of Changes = Music of Changes.) Too, the music, as an entity, is constantly changing. There is no guidin g sense of continuity of line, rhythm, speed, or textur e. The relationship between events—the glue—which holds the music together can be neithe r tonally nor structurally defined. Change appears to be its only un changing characteristic, its ultimate identity.
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Morton Feldman
For Bunita Marcus (1985)
For Bunita Marcus has an aura like that which emanates off Rothko’s greatest paintings, an aura that makes the experience, no less than the creation, more than an act of will, an act of devotion.
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Pierre Boulez & John Cage
Structures & Music for Piano
When the 1925-born Boulez met the 13-year-older John Cage from the New York avant-garde scene, he was just 24. At first glance it is almost inexplicable that what was to emerge out of this encounter was one of the most intense, mutually inspiring composer-friendships of the fifties, since Boulez stands paradigmatically for French “clarté” and “raison” of organisation down to the last parameter, whereas Cage represents an anarchic breach with tradition in the name of chance and unpredictability and hence enmity towards organisation. Nevertheless, Cage was just as thrilled about Boulez’ Second Piano Sonata as Boulez for his part was about Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes, which he considered to be a major piece of music of the future.
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Sergei Prokofiev & Dmitri Shostakovich
Works For 2 Pianists Under Soviet Rule
With Socialist Realism Stalin promulgated and imposed a cultural doctrine which in accordance with the ruling party and ideology demanded of the artist the truthful and positive representation of reality plus it also decreed that art should appeal to the masses, be simple, folkloristic and understandable to all people. The Stalinist cultural campaigns of 1936/38 and 1946/48 enforced the doctrine ruthlessly, among the artists denounced for straying from the official line are Dmitri Shostakovich and – in the last campaign – Sergei Prokofiev.
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Karlheinz Stockhausen
Plus-Minus
Perhaps more than any other composer of his generation, Stockhausen realised that serialism had an expressive potential which went far beyond the method of twelve-tone composition devised by Schoenberg. In these three key works works from the 1950s and early 1960s he found ways of using the serial principle to govern not just pitch, but every aspect of sound-types and their distribution in time and space, culminating in Plus-Minus, a score which specified not sounds but rather a system of organising sounds.
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Galina Ustvolskaya (1919–2006)
Piano Sonatas 1-6
Galina Ustvolskaya's music belongs so utterly to a separate world that all historical echoes, including all those of Satie, can
only be registered as after thoughts. What is most astonishing about these works is how brute dissonance be comes nobly
and intensely expressive, like rough-cut stone metamorphosed into shining marble pillars.
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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-scéne. 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 atmo sphere and sharing a similar vision.
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Makrokosmos
Round Midnight
Round Midnight is dedicated to Thelonious Monk, who is widely recognized for the percussive poetry of his very personal piano style and the unshakable authority of his compositions. The composers that Makrokosmos Quartet commissioned to write the music on this record all hold Monk’s music dear, this pianist-composer-bandleader, but none of them have been swayed by affection to deny their own identity... Makrokosmos’s players don’t play like Monk. But like him, they want to be in that place of boundaries and transitions because in that place, endings are also beginnings, and in beginnings there is new life.
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Women Composers I
Ensemle Für Neue Musik Zürich
If only Fanny Mendelssohn or Clara Schumann had been fortunate enough to have a group like the Ensemble Für Neue Musik Zürich (ENMZ) from Switzerland champion their works! While the days when women composers hovered in the shadow of their male colleagues are thankfully over, the playing field is perhaps not yet entirely even. In the 1980s, the ENMZ (whose members are all men) realized that music by contemporary female composers was not receiving its rightful attention, so they decided to help remedy the situation. For several decades the group has been performing and recording pieces of diverse aesthetic styles by talented women composers, commissioning new works and supporting the women in their artistic endeavors.
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Charles Ives
A Songbook
Sebastian Gottschick’s adaptations of Ives’ songs and short instrumental pieces in this sense not only pay homage to the composer but develop his work further. The multifaceted ensemble and the instrumentation Gottschick chose allow him to be highly differentiated in his approach to the specific Ives sound that oscillates between crude realism and symbolist fragmentation: he either deliberately avoids this sound (for instance by using a vibraphone in Grantchester) or he pushes it to the point of prismatic refraction. Apart from this, Gottschick’s selection proceeds in a continuous, multi-perspective order that can be interpreted as a drama en miniature, a model of an ordinary day from the snatches of dreams in the morning to the falling night, and finally also as the epitome of the diversity of life itself. Behind all that the power and intangible nature of memories, Ives’ lifelong theme, becomes visible and audible.
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Arnold Schönberg
Works for Piano
it may seem daring to compare Schönberg’s piano works in their significance with beethoven’s. compared with the latter's 32 piano sonatas the former wrote only six piano pieces which, moreoever, are often 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:Within them new compositional and technical achievements are being concentrated, which later on also found their way into the great compositions.
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Katharina Rosenberger
Texturen
Wet Ink Ensemble
Texturen is a monumental tour de force with only a defined beginning, but no defined end and an all but continuous, epic musical journey that flows right out of the shrill bending sound of its first electronic notes. the various sections of the suite «each reinforcing the composer’s belief in the interconnectedness of all aspects of sound» are all woven in an endless warp of time.
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John Cage & Domenico Scarlatti
Changes
Surprising encounter between two revolutionary flouters of rules and lateral thinkers. John Cage's, Music of Changes is framed by quicksilver-capricious sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, composed some 200 years earlier. Spontaneity and boldness, delight in experiment and the play of coincidence.
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