Category: Tracks

Bridge’s new CD of music by Tom Flaherty was my introduction to this L.A.-based cellist/composer. While the disc offers a variety of chamber music combinations including two duets for two pianos, the piece I find myself coming back to most is his 1991 Trio for Cello and Digital Processor (which should be a duet right?). The Trio, according to the booklet notes, makes references to repertoire as disparate as J.S. Bach’s Es ist Genug and Edgard Varèse’s Poème electronique, but (in a rare non-analytical moment) I was too busy being saturated by the textures to notice or care.

—FJO

A visit to o.blaat’s webpage will point you to a myriad of interesting sites such as WKCR’s Live Construction archive featuring music, sound work, and radio art from every corner of the globe. Visitors are also given the chance to download a handful of MP3s created by the Brooklyn-based sound artist. An MP3 titled tipsooi begins with a benevolent thunder storm or the synchronized humming of a clandestine air conditioner orchestra, then piercing high-pitched stillness punctured by micro-pops which gets harmonized by something resembling the Emergency Broadcast System’s signature sine tones. This crystalline sonic landscape is visited by tiny insect legs that become giant foghorn-gongs as things finally settle into gentle patterns of periodicity. All the different looping textures move independently, sometimes dancing into the foreground as the music simmers away, its seams occasionally exposed by deliberately spliced-in glitches.

—RN

Violists tend to feel like left out like second cousins at the party, but really it seems like the perfect instrument—the soul of the cello with all the portability of a violin. Easley Blackwood is a composer who appears to have relished in what the viola has to offer. Two viola sonatas are presented on this disc, their composition separated by almost 50 years. The first, from 1953, Blackwood wrote to resemble the styles of Berg and Messiaen, and harmonically the piece takes a number of fascinating turns. Hindemith, with whom the composer was studying at the time, was not amused. “He thoroughly disliked the piece, declaring that its style was ‘unnatural’,” writes Blackwood in the disc’s liner notes. “I argued back that all musical styles are basically unnatural, save perhaps for pentatonic monody. Hindemith was not a skilled debater.”

—MS

I’m always lured in by a musical composition that has a forceful opening, especially a piece of music scored for a large orchestra. Even better than the first paragraph of a novel that’s written in such a way that you can’t put it down, the opening measures can focus my attention and keep it there long after the initial jolt fades into more introspective material. Such is the case of Ge Gan-Ru’s Wu for piano and orchestra, which begins with a throbbing prepared bass note on the piano teeming with residual harmonics which from the very first second clearly dominates the rest of the orchestra. Ge’s music has an ideal interpreter in Margaret Leng Tan who has devoted much of her career to promulgating John Cage’s music for prepared piano and is therefore no stranger to playing outside or inside the piano and with or without extra gadgets attached. BIS’s super audio format also greatly enhances the sonic power of Ge’s orchestration, an added bonus on this first-ever all Ge Gan-Ru CD. (My recording trivia is correct this time.)

—FJO

The string of CDs released under Lucky Kitchen’s Sparkling Composers Series implies a global subculture of musicians and audio artists creating electronic music using acoustic means—or the reverse—without prejudice, someplace where “uptown” and “downtown” never even existed. If the 2001 release Monologue with Accompaniment by Aerospace Soundwise (a.k.a. Todd A. Carter) escaped your radar when it was first released, you might want to checkout what you missed. An MP3 featured on Lucky Kitchen’s website (a live excerpt from an Aerospace Soundwise performance recorded in Bilbao) delivers low frequency drones that hit the ear viscerally before slowly morphing into repetitive digital rhythms. The best part is, even with his NASA-like name, Aerospace Soundwise avoids one of the most common computer music pitfalls: excessive complexity. If Aerospace Soundwise’s seamless blend of field recordings and cyber processing whets your appetite, be sure to poke around Lucky Kitchen’s website for more sonic goddies.

—RN

What a melody—or rather, what melodies. Though I’ve never heard a performance of Charles Jones’s Five Melodies for Orchestra, and so cannot make a thorough comparison, I was quite amazed to discover that Five Melodies for Violin and Piano is a reduction of that score. I could not imagine adding or subtracting a note from the piece in its duo form. Curtis Macomber, as I’ve come to expect, turns in a breathtakingly accurate and energized performance. I’ve heard him play some very thorny repertoire in concert as if he were off on holiday. His joie de vivre does not disappoint here.

—MS

One of the most entertaining listens that’s come across my desk in a long time is, believe it or not, a CD of MIDI generated performances by a composer principally known as a music critic. Sound unlikely? Check out Kyle Gann’s Studies for Disklavier hot off the presses on New World. The artistic reward for Gann’s labors on the first book-length study of Conlon Nancarrow, Gann takes that famed ex-patriot’s player piano concept into the 21st century. In so doing, he also harkens back to an earlier barrelhouse past, especially in works like Texarkana, and my personal favorite (for the music as well as the title), Bud Ran Back Out. Here, cycles of 7, 8 and 9 overlap creating bebop beyond the wildest dreams of Bud Powell or Thelonious Monk (whose In Walked Bud would be great to hear back to back with this one). Kyle, thanks for not calling it This Bud’s for You.

—FJO

With an album title that riffs off Wes Craven’s early cult clunker and a map of the Holy Cross Cemetery and Mausoleum superimposed under the track listings, not to mention Eugene Chadbourne’s name attached to the project, I was expecting something, well, a little scary. And like any good horror flick, I was startled. No, nothing jumps out from behind blind corners. Quite the opposite, this is just a mild-mannered jazz album with some trepidacious atmospheres, spooky harmonica playing, and a few grotesque notes thrown in to hatchet things up a bit. Of course, the down-home style of the album is frighteningly infectious.

—RN

A Yellow Rose Petal was Alvin Singleton’s first work for orchestra, commissioned by the Houston Symphony in 1982. The title is a reference to the state flower, though to my ear the musical content in no way connects with any sort of brush clearing, six-gun machismo. Rather, various sections of the orchestra play a sort of symphonic game of cat and mouse, pitting delicate melodies against the bombast of full section playing. The structure of the work gives the listener the sensation of peering through a kaleidoscope, colors recognized but constantly transformed.

The piece, originally recorded in 1988 with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Louis Lane, is here reissued as part of the Santa Fe Music Group’s First Edition Music series. In collaboration with Meet The Composer, tracks are culled from the archive of the Louisville Orchestra’s landmark First Edition Records, remastered, and released on CD.

—MS

I spend so much of my time in Chinatown shopping for groceries that it’s often hard to remember that this hurly-burly of shops and restaurants is also still a large residential neighborhood filled with a zillion personal stories. Chinese-American composer and jazz violinist Jason Kao Hwang has teamed up with librettist Catherine Filloux to fashion an opera out of one family’s legacy whose east-west musical synthesis is as complex as that of many immigrant families from East Asia. Singers mostly coming out of western operatic training are accompanied by an eight piece ensemble mixing traditional Chinese instruments with western sonorities such as accordion, clarinet and percussion which sound more east than west in this context. While in an opera, the singers are usually the focus, the stars for me are Min Xiao Fen’s pipa and Wang Guowei’s assorted two-string fiddles which are rarely far away from center stage.

—FJO