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CD
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NW 80826CD
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"Through her novel approaches to texture and melody, German-American composer Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888-1944) became one of the most distinctive modernist voices of the mid-20th century. Beyer was the first woman known to have composed for electric instruments (Music of the Spheres, 1938). Her compositions anticipate elements of minimalism, a movement that would manifest two decades after her passing. Beyer was long omitted from the written history of ultra-modernism, but her activities as a composer and pianist in 1930s New York City placed her within the orbits of many important artists. Her mentors, friends, and collaborators included Ruth Crawford, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Otto and Ethel Luening, Marion Bauer, Dane Rudhyar, Percy Grainger, and choreographer Doris Humphrey. At last, in the 21st century, Beyer's name is now invoked alongside these others, as the significance of her music is becoming more widely recognized. Although her works for percussion ensemble, piano, and strings have garnered the most attention, Beyer composed a substantial amount of music for woodwinds. Thirteen solo and chamber works, all written between 1932 and 1943, represent an exceptional contribution to the wind repertoire. Only five pieces involving clarinet and flute have previously been recorded. This album brings to light the rest of Beyer's known chamber music for winds, allowing for a more complete assessment of her achievements. Beyer wrote to Cowell in 1940, 'I am not a set piece of so many molecules. I am an ever changing something.' Nothing truer could be said of Beyer's woodwind music, which reveals a composer in constant search of new approaches and instrumental colors. In little more than a decade of intense creativity, she produced inventive pieces in an ever-unfolding ultra-modernist style. These works, now accessible for performance and study, confirm Johanna Beyer's importance in the canon of 20th-century wind chamber music."
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CD
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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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2CD
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NW 80678CD
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"Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888-1944) was born in Leipzig and moved to the United States sometime around 1924. After studying at various schools in New York, and with composers including Dane Rudhyar, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford, she began a highly-productive and interesting period of composition which lasted from around 1932 to almost 1940. Beyer's music received very few performances and her work was almost completely overlooked during her life and for about 50 years after her death. Even with the tremendous renaissance of interest in the works of historical women composers in the United States, Beyer's work has, until now, been (in her own words) in 'total eclipse.' Beyer is one of the pioneering figures of the experimental strain in contemporary American music. Her work has long lain undiscovered and unperformed because of the lack of adequate performing editions. However, many of her works are now available in authoritative performing editions, making it possible for her music to finally be introduced to the public more than a half-century after they were composed. This 2CD set, featuring world premiere recordings of all the works, is the first-ever devoted entirely to Beyer's music."
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