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Search Result for Label NEW WORLD RECORDS
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NW 80725CD
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"In his compositions, composer/performer Kyle Bruckmann (b. 1971) seeks to integrate rigor and internal logic with raw immediacy while fully engaging his fellow performers as not simply dutiful interpreters, but creatively invested collaborators. Aesthetically, the results evoke much from European modernism, but realized via idiosyncratic modular forms and process-oriented strategies equally indebted to the New York School and the jazz avant-garde. On Procedural Grounds (2010) is a half-hour work conceived as the framework for a summit between his current Bay Area community and that of Chicago, his former home. The eleven-piece ensemble features his long-standing project Wrack together with boundary-defying West Coast pioneers Rova, Tim Perkis (of the League of Automatic Music Composers and the Hub) and Gino Robair. Orgone Accelerator (2010) was composed for eight-channel sound diffusion, and premiered at the 2011 San Francisco Tape Music Festival. The other two pieces are products of the unique creative environment of sfSound (the collective with which Bruckmann has performed the works of such composers as Braxton, Cardew, Feldman, Ferneyhough, Ligeti, Subotnick and Xenakis) and feature members of that ensemble. Cell Structure (2009) is a duet written for the composer on oboe and Matt Ingalls on clarinet, with an electronic accompaniment realized through modular analog synthesis. Tarpit (2009) is scored for an octet of winds, strings, and percussion with similarly pre-recorded electronics."
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NW 80727CD
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$15.00
NOT IN STOCK, SPECIAL ORDER
"John Bischoff (b. 1949) is an early pioneer of live computer music. He was a founding member of the League of Automatic Music Composers (1978), considered to be the world's first Computer Network Band. His long experience teaching music theory, harmony, and counterpoint is evident in his work: in the elegant balance of elements in his pieces can be heard an intuitive understanding of traditional musical forms expressed in sonic palettes far removed from the ones around which those forms were originally constructed. He describes his work as 'a music built from the intrinsic features of the electronic medium at hand: high definition noise components, tonal edges, digital shading, and non-linear motion, all evolving in the variable context of live performance.' While these features are all prominent, his work can also be considered fundamentally as a form of 'expanded counterpoint,' one in which the juxtaposition of sonic elements and their compositional development is a central concern. His work possesses a clear and intuitive sense of formal clarity combined with a nuanced deployment of audio events and textures. The title of this collection refers most literally to the methods of assembling the elements of Bischoff's work. In one brief phrase it describes both a methodology that is used to build the pieces and the concrete results of that activity. By terming the process combine rather than combination, he focuses on the act and experience of juxtaposing sounds over their semantic results once they are combined. Though some of the processes heard here involve recycling timings or sounds, their deployment is always in the present and they are imbued with a clarity that only listening in the moment can provide. As new combinations and permutations of sonic materials emerge, the perceptual focus is always on the physical sound, whether acoustic or electronic in origin."
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NW 80716CD
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"Peter Garland (b. 1952) studied with Harold Budd and James Tenney at Cal Arts and had long student-mentor friendships with Lou Harrison, Conlon Nancarrow, Paul Bowles and Dane Rudhyar. Like Harrison, Garland has forged his own musical vocabulary as a kind of new indigenous music, celebrating pan-cultural experience and vision, and is unafraid to suggest that music can still give us a glimpse of that which is sacred. Waves Breaking on Rocks (Elegy for All of Us) (2003) is a suite of elegies that was composed for and commissioned by Aki Takahashi, Garland's long-time friend and collaborator. The work's six movements are composed for lost friends or are personal responses to the cycles of life and the recurrence of the seasons. Together, they form a structure for the whole that elegizes both our togetherness and our impermanence. Garland's musical approach to the piano emphasizes resonance, space, and color. The piano is a sculptural whole in this music, in which phrases, melodies, and songs seem to be carved from the keyboard rather than imprinted from without."
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NW 80722CD
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Performed by Robert Black (bass) and John McDonald (piano). "In the twentieth century, a series of instruments and ensembles have found their repertoire expanding exponentially and their place on the classical stage suddenly front and center, instead of accompanying from the wings. The contrabass and viola were the last of the string instruments to make the leap to this prominence, and Robert Black's recital on these discs shows the remarkable emergence of the former as a leading voice for the most intimate and imaginative musings of American composers from the last century. Black's program falls into two parts. Disc 1 features music for bass and piano, Disc 2 the instrument unaccompanied. It also breaks down chronologically, with the former works largely earlier and more traditional in character, the latter later and more experimental/avant-garde. The works for accompanied bass show the first step taken toward instrumental 'equality': it becomes a lyric partner with the piano like any other string instrument. Composers come to realize that the exceptional range of the instrument, combined with its rich and differing timbres from one register to another, make it uniquely expressive. And the bass's importance in jazz is mirrored in a new interest in active rhythms and pizzicato textures. When we move to the unaccompanied works, a new conception of the bass emerges. In the postwar years, a series of factors combined to create a new instrumental practice, one combining elements of theatricality, a concentration of unusual sounds and techniques, and extreme virtuosity." Featured works: Joseph Iadone: Sonata for Double Bass and Piano (1944/1950); Halsey Stevens: Arioso and Etude (1953); Quincy Porter: Lyric Piece for Contrabass and Piano (1950); Jerome Moross: Sonatina (1967); Otto Luening: Suite for Bass and Piano (1958); Johanna Beyer: Movement for Double Bass and Piano (1936); Barney Childs: Sonata for Bass Alone (1960); George Perle: Monody II (1962); William Sydeman: For Double Bass Alone (1959); John Cage: 59 ½" for a String Player (1953); James Tenney: Beast (1971); Jacob Druckman: Valentine (1969).
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NW 80723CD
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Subtitled: 3 Pieces For Percussion And Live Electronics. Performed by William Winant (percussion); Chris Brown (piano and electronics). "Chris Brown's (b. 1953) music has evolved within the intersections of many different traditions and styles. Following early training as a classical pianist, he was influenced by studies of Indonesian, Indian, Afro-American, and Cuban musics, and then took off on branches provided by the American Experimentalists in inventing and building a personal electronic instrumentation. Collaboration and improvisation have been primary in the development of his music for various traditional instruments and interactive electronics. An "iconicity" is the analogy between the form of a sign and its meaning. All three of these pieces are through-composed using simple processes applied to both the sounds of the instruments and their real-time electronic transformations. The players must synchronize exactly with the rhythms produced by these transformations, and together the acoustic and electronic layers of sound create closely interwoven textures that evolve gradually into more complex forms. The acoustic sounds and the patterned variations of their recurrence affect the listener's experience of time, and provide a metaphor for its transcendence. Stupas (2007): A stupa is a Southeast Asian monumental architectural form, which in Buddhism is also viewed as a symbol of enlightened mind and a path to its realization. The form of a stupa, a square base with circular domes rising above it, is used to structure this piece. Gangsa (2010): Gangsa are bronze flat-gongs from the mountainous regions of the northern Philippines played in ensembles in which each player plays one gong of a different pitch. Subtitled Invention #8, this piece is one of a series that focuses on polyrhythmic interaction of performers with electronics. Iceberg (1985): The electronic sounds are all live transformations of the percussion, and the performer plays in time with the automated switching of effects, starting simply, and then playing more complex and syncopated patterns against it."
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NW 80719CD
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"Richard Carrick's (b. 1971) music draws inspiration from his French, North African, and British background, his studies in mathematics and philosophy, interest in psychology, and experience as a performer of notated and improvised music. All of his music stems from his roots in chamber music and musical performance but often branches out into the experimental realm to showcase musicality in other aspects of performance. His chamber pieces ('Duo Flow,' 'a cause du soleil' Flow Trio) explore the evolution of musical threads over time as they are passed from one instrument to the next. His solo works ('in flow', 'Shadow Flow,' 'Moroccan Flow (unfolding from unity') feature virtuosic and intense acrobatics for the soloist. In Carrick's words, 'The cycle as a whole is influenced by Islamic mosaics, Gnawa music of Morocco, Albert Camus' L'Etranger, and the Flow concept of Csikszentmihalyi. One of the goals of this cycle was to write music that was focused yet still expansive, that developed new sounds for string instruments, and featured virtuoso performing to achieve new textures and the evolution of these textures through time.'"
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NW 80718CD
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Performed by Firebird Ensemble. "Donald Crockett's (b. 1951) works are notable, first of all, for their clarity and their immediate impact on the listener. The music could be described as elemental, on several levels- in its sonic tactility, in its use of readily identifiable, almost object-like musical gestures, and in its frequent connections, through poetic and evocative titles, to the lived, physical world. A sense of durability, of ruggedness, abides, even through a delicacy or sweetness that frequently makes itself felt. There is a sense of transparent and flowing, tonally-centered harmonic motion, not ignoring moments of crunchy, high-density dissonance. Above all there is energy, constant energy: the energy of dance and American popular music, even without strong reference to those styles, an energy born of intimacy with the physical nature of performance, like improvisation. The precision talents and eclectic energy of the Boston-based Firebird Ensemble, part of a new breed of chamber ensembles as comfortable playing clubs as concert halls, match up well with Crockett's intricate, entertaining, and intimate music. Years of close collaboration have led to this wonderful recording of four significant chamber works."
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NW 80717CD
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"Anne La Berge (b. 1955) is a pioneer who defies easy categorization. She is a flutist, composer and improviser, often simultaneously; she is also, as this disc demonstrates, a computer musician and a sui generis poet and story-teller. Her performances bring together a ferocious and far-reaching virtuosity, a penchant for improvising delicately spun microtonal textures and melodies, and her wholly unique array of powerfully percussive flute effects, all combined with electronic processing. Many of her compositions involve her own participation, though she has produced works intended solely for other performers, usually involving guided improvisation and text. The concept uniting these five pieces, despite their diversity, is that all involve 'stories' of one kind or another. The textual material is placed in different 'locations' in the pieces, sometimes as foreground and sometimes as middle- or background, so that it forms only one element in the compositions, and is integrated with the instrumental and electronic sounds in the overall musical texture. These pieces are not compositions in the usual sense of the term, and none has anything like a conventional score: she describes the first four as 'guided improvisations,' while the final track was originally part of a joint lecture/performance devised with her scientist father. In all these and other ways, La Berge is a precursor of some of the important things contemporary composition has now come to mean."
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NW 80715CD
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"Lei Liang (b. 1972) is a Chinese-born American composer whose work can be situated within the lineage of the new wave of Chinese composers (such as Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Tan Dun, Bright Sheng), yet whose vivid musical imagination and philosophical interests place him in a league of his own. The distinctiveness of his compositional approach, first and foremost, can be noted in Liang's avoidance of exoticized Chinese elements: one would not find stylized quotations of familiar folksongs or cliched treatment of instruments. Born into the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and denied access to older traditions of art forms in China, Liang considers himself raised in a cultural and spiritual 'ground zero.' Liang's displacement from his homeland has led him to intensify his search for a deeper cultural connection to Asian musical practice and aesthetics at large, as his interests cover the Beijing opera, guqin (Chinese zither), Inner Mongolian music, as well as music of other parts of Asia. In searching for an appropriate framework for transforming these resources, he often embarks on a sonic exploration of a philosophical concept or idea to create music that contains multiple surfaces and trajectories for the listener to decipher. On Milou Liang offers a labyrinth of sounds in musical space, deploying various modernist and avant-garde procedures (post-serial techniques involving canons, indeterminacy, extended techniques for acoustic instruments, spectral analysis) to express music as a form of ritual--its rich layers of meanings to be experienced and deciphered through the act of listening and reflection."
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NW 80711CD
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Subtitled: Johanna Beyer And The Birth Of American Percussion Music. Music by John J. Becker, Johanna Beyer, Henry Cowell, Harold Davidson, Ray Green, Doris Humphrey, and Gerald Strang; performed by Meehan/Perkins Duo & the Baylor Percussion Group. "The radical changes in Western music in the 20th century took many forms. While tonality was recast in the 1920s, it was in the 1930s that a pivotal step in the 'liberation of sound' occurred, with composers experimenting with percussion instruments as if they were a new discovery. A genre was born -- the percussion ensemble -- that by its nature was a pliable idiom, clear and free for exploration. After the premiere of Varèse's Ionisation in New York in 1933, the 'percussion orchestra' became the new avant-garde. Percussion was seen as not only the last frontier of traditional instrumentation, but also as expressive of the machine age and the rhythm of modern life. American composers saw it as especially their own: a music of American energy and experimentation, as well as a revolution in music not derived from European ideas. This historic recording at last presents some of the most overlooked efforts from the early period of percussion music (only Johanna Beyer's IV and Henry Cowell's Return are known to have been previously recorded). All from the 1930s, these works are connected through the activity of Cowell. It spotlights the surprisingly different directions composers took in this new idiom. Some works are overtly programmatic and even satiric (Davidson, Green, and Russell), yet they experiment with unconventional playing techniques, found objects as instruments, and the playful contortion of traditional musical forms. The inclusion of the Humphrey exhibits the beginning of a long relationship between modern dance and percussion, which became furthered in the work of John Cage after he became acquainted with these pieces. Perhaps most striking are the works by Beyer, whose conceptual and process-based aesthetic presaged the most daring American experimental music for years to come. Her complete works for percussion form the core of this collection of seminal works."
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