Ivo Malec, "Triola"

Face A
TRIOLA
1. Turpituda 9'30" + long silence
2. Ombra 12'03" + long silence

Face B
TRIOLA
3. Nuda 12'30" + long silence
BIZARRA 7'30"

Dinosaur Jr., "Your Weather"

dj

Igor Stravinsky, "Canticum Sacrum" & "Symphony of Psalms"

Canticum Sacrum



Symphony of Psalms

Todd Snider, "Corpus Christi Bay"

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Arnold Schoenberg, "String Trio"

Whose version of Schoenberg's 'String Trio' is better?
	Los Angeles String Trio
	Trio à Cordes Francais

Deer Tick, "Smith Hill"

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Olan & Miller

-- LINER NOTES --

COMPOSITION FOR CLARINET AND TAPE (1976) 5:35
David Olan
The composer has approved this recording. The work won the 1980 International Clarinet Society Composition Competition.

PIECE FOR CLARINET AND TAPE (1967; rev. 1982) 5:30
Edward Miller
The composer has approved this premiere recording.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DAVID OLAN (b. 1948) attended Columbia University and University of Wisconsin; since 1979 he has taught at the Baruch College of the City University of New York. Olan's works have been performed by such groups as Parnassus, the Group for Contemporary Music, Speculum Musicae, and the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble. His music may also be heard on CRI and New World Records. Olan comments:

"In my Composition for Clarinet and Tape, I wanted to incorporate the unique characteristics of each medium: drawing on the expressivity and fluidity of the clarinet as well as the extremes of speed, register, dynamics and percussiveness which can be achieved only with tape. I meant for this juxtaposition to be felt within a process of accommodation between the two worlds, with each medium having the opportunity to reinforce and support the other. The tape was realized at the Columbia-Princeton Music Center, and employs only electronic sources."

EDWARD MILLER (b. 1930) studied music at the University of Miami and the Hartt College of Music. He has taught composition at the Oberlin Conservatory since 1971. Miller has received many honors, and has had his works performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, and several other major symphonies. Works are also recorded on CRI and Opus One. Miller states:

"Completed April 1, 1967, Piece for Clarinet and Tape was my first attempt at electronic music and the tape part contained many flaws. In this recording Dr. Kireillis uses a new version of the tape part that I finished in January, 1982. I used a Sigma IX computer, a facility of the Music Technology Program at Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. The programming was MPL (Music Program Library), developed by Gary Nelson."

RIP, Michael

Charles Hamm, "Canto"

-- LINER NOTES --

CANTO Charles Hamm (1963) for soprano, speaker & chamber ensemble. Helen Hamm, soprano; Elizabeth Hiller, speaker, The Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Illinois; Jack McKenzie, conductor....6:23

The Studio for Experimental Music at the University of Illinois was established in 1958, and placed under the directorship of Lejaren Hiller, Professor of Music, to provide facilities for the creatin, research and teaching of electronic music techniques, to investigate the application of computers to musical composition, and to encourage original instrument design and construction. These related roles the studio has fulfilled admirably, and from its relatively modest beginnings it has developed into one of the best equipped in the world.

The works on this recording provide a representative selection of the more than forty works which have been composed in the studio since its inception.

CHARLES HAMM (b. 1925), composer and musicologist, studied at the University of Virginia and at Princeton University. His teachers in composition were Randall Thompson, Bohuslav Martinu, and Edward Clone. Prior to his appointment, in 1963, as Professor of Music at the University of Illinois, he taught at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and at Newcomb College, Tulane University. His compositions include six operas, an orchestral work--"Sinfonia 1954"--which was commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony, and numberous chamber, piano, and vocal works. Among his more recent works are "Mobile for Piano and Tape," "Portrait of John Cage" for piano and three tape recorders, and "Round" for unspecified instrumental or vocal ensemble.

CANTO

For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses:
Rain; empty river; a voyage,
Fire from frozen cloud, heavy rain in the twilight
Under the cabin roof was one lantern.
The reeds are heavy; bent;
and the bamboos speak as if weeping.

Autumn moon; hills rise about lakes
against sunset
Evening is like a curtain of cloud,
a blurr above ripples; and through it
sharp long spikes of the cinnamon,
a cold tune amid reeds.
Behind hill the monk's bell
borne on the wind.
Sail passed here in April; may return in October
Boat fades in silver; slowly;
Sun blaze alone on the river.

Where wine flag catches the sunset
Sparse chimneys smoke in the cross light

Comes then snow scur on the river
And a world is covered with jade
Small boat floats like a lanthorn,
The flowing water closts as with cold. And at San Yin
they are a people of leisure.

Wild geese swoop to the sand-bar,
Clouds gather about the hole of the window
Broad water; geese line out with the autumn
Rooks clatter over the fishermen's lanthorns,

A light moves on the north sky line;
where the young boys prod stones for shrimp.
In seventeen hundred came Tsing to these hill lakes.
A light moves on the South sky line.

State by creating riches shd. thereby get into debt?
This is infamy; this is Geryon.
This canal goes still to TenShi
Though the old king built it for pleasure

K E I M E N R A N K E I
K I U M A N M A N K E I
JITSU GETSU K O K W A
T A N FUKU T A N K A I

The Power of Sound

One thing I'll always regret is watching the video of Nicholas Berg being decapitated. It's a horrifying sight, and I couldn't get it out of my head for days afterwards. I still think that watching it rearranged some molecules in my head in a way that will never be the same.

Watching the video of Neda Agha-Soltan die has the same searing effect. As this Gawker contributor put it:

I first saw the video of Neda's death on Sunday afternoon at around 2PM. For the remainder of the day and up to this point, I've failed every effort, and there have been many, to get it out of my head. Even when I went to the gym late in the day, a place of solace where I'm usually able to blast music in my ears while exercising and just forget about everything going on in the outside world, I found myself unable to remove Neda from my mind.

My coping mechanism is analysis. I find solace in deconstructing my reaction to determine what gets me so rattled. I've found that as with Nicholas Berg, it's not the images, it's the sound.

Both videos are the types of gore that we've all seen countless times in horror films or war epics. There's nothing in the images themselves that is any more disturbing than what we see in an Eli Roth or a Steven Spielberg film. Our eyes are accustomed to glossing over such graphic violence, but there's no way to trick the ears. The anguish of Nicholas Berg and Neda's friends is far too real to the ear to dismiss it. The stylized sound of the cinema allows you to wrap up violent images and store them away as fantasy in your mind.

The horror of these clips is driven home by the unmistakable sound of human suffering that no actor or sound designer can ever replicate. We know it's real because we hear it, and that's what makes it so damn hard to shake.

Street Sweeper, "Paper Planes" (LIVE)

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Elvis Costello, "Red Cotton"

ec

Electronic Music from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center

This recording of electronic music presents the works of four authors who come from four different countries with quite varied musical backgrounds. Two of them have considerable knowledge of electronics which stems from a formal engineering training in one case, and from a high degree of practical experience in the other. Diversity of styles is in evidence, as each composer's style is his own concern. The common experience for these composers has been the use of technical resources at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and the investigation of specialized methods for the evolution and transformation of recorded sound materials, conducted in my course at Columbia and further demonstrated in private sessions by technicians. This work is done in Studio 106, located in McMillin Theatre on the campus of Columbia University in the same room where the older Columbia University Tape Studio was housed. The present studio has been considerably expanded in recent years and has become a part of a complex of three studios and a small laboratory established under a Rockefeller Foundation Grant given to Columbia and Princeton Universities in 1959.

With the notable exception of the very unique possibilities offered by the RCA Sound Synthesizer located in Studio 318, the standard and specialized equipment of the Center is devoted to the production of sound materials by "Classical" methods, common to all electronic music studios. Thus, materials (of either purely electronic or non-electronic origin) recorded on tape, may be subjected to manipulation by tape speed variation, electronic filtering, several types of frequency modulation, artificial reverberation, etc. Tape cutting and splicing by hand still occupies a good deal of time in preparing the sound patterns and arranging them in longer sequences. Techniques are available to create certain types of rhythmic patterns and timbre variations by semi-automatic methods, but the materials thus produced are of limited usefulness. Much time in classroom discussion is devoted to the structural considerations which we believe to be quite challenging and of paramount importance in the electronic music medium, rich as it is in unusual timbres and opportunities for the realization of complex rhythms.

It is hard to imagine that there is much occasion any more for claiming that electronic music is "dehumanized" in its content. Electronic music simply undertakes to express, by different means, human situations, ideas, and emotions.

Vladimir Ussachevsky
Professor of Music
Columbia University

SIDE 1

Band 1. Study No. 1
My main objectives in this Study were: 1. to obtain instrument-like sounds, such as the bell-like sonorities of the opening (derived from saw-tooth waves), or those in the epilogue that resemble contrabass pizzicati (derived from sine waves), with a vast range of percussive and plucking sounds in between: and 2. to create tensions and relaxations, the former achieved through complex rhythms, increased densities of tone color, and other similar effects; the latter occurring when a high degree of intensity is diluted by the introduction of "richer" and "more familiar" sounds. The sources are all electronic.

Absolute control has been excercised over the development of component materials and their final mixing, by integrating six channels coming from four precisely synchronized tape recorders. The result is a finished composition originally designed for two-channel reproduction.

Andres Lewin-Richter

SIDE 2

Band 1. Vocalise

Vocalise was composed in the Spring of 1964. Conceived as a study, it is an attempt to create electronic music of an expressive, emotional nature. Two elements are juxtaposed: the human voice (that of Pnina Avni, my wife) and sounds from electronic sources.

These elements are stated at the beginning in a pure and simple form, but later undergo changes and variations through the use of the techniques of the electronic medium.

After the first presentation of the musical material, an elaborate process of development ensues, in which the two elements -- voice and electronic sounds -- are drawn closer and closer together until it sometimes becomes almost impossible to distinguish which is which.

The third section of the work serves as a kind of recapitulation, and the piece ends in the same characteristic lyrical mood as in the beginning.

Tzvi Avni

Band 2. Variations for Flute and Electronic Sound
Band 3. Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers

Since 1954, composers of electronic music have turned their attention to the problem of combining electronic sounds with traditional instruments. The discipline, as well as requiring new compositional skills, calls on a composer's more traditional training in matters of balance and notation, and heightens his sensitivity to the formal problems of composition in general. My pieces on this disk were designed to give the live performer maximum expressive freedom within each tape cue. The cues are not "technical improvisations in sound", but are realizations of a carefully notated score in which both live and taped portions have been composed. A competent musico-technician, once familiar with my notational techniques and compositional style, could produce, from the written score, an electronic performance differing only in interpretation from the sounds heard on this record.

Variations for Flute and Electronic Sound (1964) in contrast to Dialogues, is a very strictly organized set of six variations on an eleven-bar theme stated at the outset by the flute. The first variation is a restatement of the theme (in altered rhythm) to march-like electronic accompaniment. The second is a strict canon in three parts. The third, entirely electronic, burlesques the theme, making free use of octave transposition. The flute re-enters with the fourth variation, a passionate soliloquy with only one brief electronic punctuation. Variation five, a character variation, features rapid alternation between flute and electronic sound, and a distinctive trilling figuration. Variation six, drawn freely on materials from variations one and five, brings the piece to a brisk cadence.

Dialogues for Piano and Two Loudspeakers (1963) is rhapsodic in character, deriving most of its thematic-motivic construction from an ascending series of gradually diminishing intervals, forming an almost-serial basis for the piece. Two of the themes are developed and transformed at some length, i.e., the piano's theme in twelfths at the entrance of the electronic sound, and the rhythmic novelty of a rising and accelerating series of seven eighth-notes, heard in the middle and latter portions of the piece.

Walter Carlos

Sunset Rubdown, "Silver Moons"

sr

1974 ISCM Electronic Music Winners

[In listening to this installment from AGP, I was stunned to hear the opening chords of the Radiohead's "Idioteque" in Paul Lansky's mild und leise @ the 43" mark. It turns out, Jonny Greenwood listened to this LP during the Kid A recording sessions and a couple of samples made their way onto the album.]

-- LINER NOTES --

In the autumn of 1974, the League of Composers-International Society for Contemporary Music, U.S. Section, organized an International Electronic Music Competition, the first undertaken by the organization. Tapes of electronic music compositions were solicited from composers and electronic music studios all over the world. A distinguished panel agreed to select the winners.

The judges were:

Bulent Arel, composer and Professor of Music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Mario Davidovsky, Pulitzer prizewinning composer, Co-Director of the Electronic Music Center of Columbia and Princeton Universities, and Professor of Music at City College of New York. Jean Eichelberger Ivey, composer and teacher of composition and electronic music at Peabody Conservatory of Music. J. K. Randall, composer and Professor of Music at Princeton University.

129 tapes representing composers from 15 countries were entered in the competition. Each judge listened to each tape individually, and then the judges met as a group to make their final selections. During the entire judging process, the tapes were placed in unlabeled boxes and identified only by numbers.

The winning compositions are presented in this album. It should be noted that no distinctions were made between the winning compositions, and that the order of works presented on the recording does not signify a ranking.

Program notes and biographical material have been provided by the composers.

As President of the League-ISCM and coordinator of the International Electronic Music Competition, I feel that these works, besides being excellent pieces of music, represent a wide spectrum of approaches, attitudes, styles, and technical procedures that will give the listener much enjoyment and, also, an understanding of the breadth and sophistication of current electronic music. -- Hubert S. Howe, Jr.

Maurice Wright:
Electronic Composition (1973)

Electronic Composition was completed in the spring of 1973. The piece is centered on the pitch Middle C. The timbre space is created by assigning component musical lines to various synthetic "instruments" that are comprised of simple combinations of oscillators and amplifiers and then recording these lines with careful control of reverberation and phase. Certain elements of the piece, namely the sounds that some listeners have compared to "a distant chorus," or "a mutant brass band," as well as the time-pointed clip-clop of electronically pitched horses' hooves in the brief Coda, are developed further in Cantata, a composition for tenor, percussion, and synthesized voices and instruments. -- Maurice Wright

Maurice Wright was born in Front Royal, Virginia. He was a Mary Duke Biddle Scholar at Duke University and Presidents' Fellow at Columbia University. He has studied composition with Jack Besson, Chou Wen-Chung. Paul Earls, lain Hamilton, Jacques Monod: and Charles Wuorinen; computer music and synthetic speech with Charles Dodge. He received a master's degree in 1974 from Columbia University, where he teaches Music Theory. He received the Henry Schuman Prize for Music from Duke University in 1972 and the Joseph Bearns Prize for Music from Columbia University in 1974.

Menachem Zur:
Chants, for magnetic tape (1974)

Chants, for magnetic tape was realized in the electronic studio of Columbia University in March 1974. The work is shaped by a series of phrases divided by small pauses, somewhat resembling a Gregorian chant. The pitches are organized around a nine-tone series: F Bb G, A D B, C# F# D#. The main melodic cell is the figure F ascending to Bb and descending to G. -- Menachem Zur

Menachem Zur was born in 1942 in Tel Aviv, Israel. He studied theory at the College for Teachers for Music in Tel Aviv and in the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. In 1969 he came up to New York to complete his B.M. degree in Composition at the Mannes College of Music. Mr. Zur received his M.F.A. degree in Composition at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. His master's thesis in Composition was a piece for choir, magnetic tape, brass quartet, and percussion that won first prize in a contest in Jerusalem in 1973. He is currently completing his D.M.A. degree at Columbia University in New York City, and teaches music at Queens College, City University of New York.

Side 2
Richard Cann: Bonnylee (1972)

(This song was sung by an IBM 360 model 91)


Paul Lansky: mild und leise (1973/74)

mild und leise was written and synthesized during 1973-74 using the IBM 360/91 computer at Princeton University and the Music 360 synthesis program written by Barry Vercoe. I want to thank my former student Richard Cann, composer of Bonnylee, for his help in learning how to use this program, and the Princeton University Computer Center for its generous allocation of computer time. This work is dedicated to Godfrey Winham.

I would like to advise the listener to:
listen easily and slowly--this
work takes its time,
listen to changing timbres,
to chaning chords,
to changing timres within chords,
to changing chords within timbres,
listen to repetition,
to changes within repetition,
to increasinly more complex forms of the same under repetition,
listen to different ways of doing things,
to linear shapes,
to repeated chords,
--spreading out, and contracting, registrally, to simple rhythms,
--becoming complex rhythms,
listen to combinations of different ways of doing things,
listen to starts and stops as breathing points and places where new twists begin an old material,
listen to each part of the piece as an evolving growing, and more complicated form of earlier parts of the piece,
--as a way of doing things which has only gradually become possible.
listen carefully, and easily.

-- Paul Lansky

Black Eyed Peas, "Rock That Body"

Jacob Druckman, "Animus I"

-- LINER NOTES --

Animus I for trombone and tape was composed in 1966 in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. The larger formal aspects of the work are concerned with the relationship between live player and the tape: man and the machine which he created in his own image. In concert performance the trombone player presents certain dramatic-theatrical elements. After the first splitting off of the tape and the ensuing dialogue the player sits while the electronic sounds move too quickly for him to compete. The man begins again with angrier, more animal-like material, the tape again enters in imitation but this time overwhelming him and driving him off the stage. The tape exhausts itself, the man reenters, the two finish in a tenuous balance.

Jacob Druckman was born in 1928 in Philadelphia. His musical studies were at Juilliard, at Tanglewood with Aaron Copland and at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. In 1954 he received a Fulbright Grant for study in France and in 1956 a Guggenheim Grant in composition. Works have been commissioned by: Lado (String Quartet No. 2, for the Juilliard Quartet, 1966); Walter M. Naumburg Foundation (The Sound of Time, 1964); Juilliard (ballet music for Jose Limon, 1960); Berkshire Music Festival, Tanglewood (Violin Concerto, for Jascha Heifetz Award, 1955) and others. Mr. Druckman is the recipient of the 1967 publication award from the Society for the Publication of American Music for his Dark Upon The Harp which is recorded by C.R.I. He is a member of the faculty of the Juillard School of Music.

Animus I is published by MCA Music, New York.

Andre Smith, trombonist, was a member of Leopold Stokowski's American Symphony Orchestra for several seasons and is now with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra. He's a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music.

McGinty & White

Ward White has teamed up with Joe McGinty on a new album. You don't usually hear the word 'beautiful' associated with a male singer, but Ward's got a beautiful voice.

When I have time to check out one of the albums submitted to ANABlog, my usual method is to put it on while I do something else. If a track makes my ears perk up, I give it a second listen, and if I dig it, I post it.

Ward & Joe have made the kind of album that you can't help but listen to closely. I kept trying to put it on in the background, but I repeatedly failed to do anything except listen to the gorgeous songs. "I'm So Tired" is a fine case in point, and the whole album is streaming at their website. Though it's titled McGinty & White Sing Selections from the McGinty & White Songbook, it does close with a wonderful cover of "Wichita Lineman" which you should totally check out.

1970 Dartmouth Electronic Music Competition

-- LINER NOTES --

For the last three years, Dartmouth College has held an annual competition for electronic music. The winners and finalists' works from the first competition were released by Vox two years ago and we at Dartmouth felt gratified by the warm critical response to the recording. We were also pleased that the competition gave the public an opportunity to hear some of the best works by new and younger composers.

The judges for the second competition were Lars-Gunnar Bodin from Sweden, Charles Dodge and Pril Smiley from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and Kenneth Gaburo from the University of California, San Diego. They chose the winning works anonymously after listening to nearly one hundred different entries. The winning composers were Peter Glushanok, an experienced film maker who has a small electronic music studio in his home, and Peter Klausmeer, a graduate student at the University of Michigan. The two finalists were Walter Kimmel,who is director of the electronic music studio at Moorhead State College,and Raymond Moore, who is a recording engineer for a large record company.

There were over two hundred entries in the 1970 competition which meant nearly a week of listening for judges Sal Martriano from the University of Illinois, Francois Bayle of France and James K. Randall of Princeton University. Again the prize was divided between one of Chile's leading composers, Jose Vicente Asuar and Richard A. Robinson, the director of the Atlanta Electronic Music Center. The finalists were Jean-Claude Risset who works in Marseille, France, but who realized his work at the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey,and Jonathan Weiss, a Composer in his early twenties who is in residence at the R.A. Moog Co. in Trumansberg, New York.

The listener to this album will hear enormous diversity in the approach used by the different composers. The following comments about the works were written by the composers themselves.

Jon H. Appleton, Director
Dartmouth Electronic Music Studio

Side I - 22:53 Min.

IN MEMORIAM FOR MY FRIEND HENRY SAIA - 10:35 Min.
Completed in early 1969, this piece was begun as an experiment in textures from concrete sources, and was developed as an elegy in memory of my friend Henry Saia who died by suicide just a few months before.

Henry's transient and restless quality, seen through the eyes of his friends who discussed him interminably; his depressions lightened by a sense of humor, and his life which ended without hope despite the jokes and the friends, broke traumatically into our unawareness. -- Peter Glushanok

CAMBRIAN SEA - 6:18 Min.
This piece was put together in the University of Michigan Electronic Music Studio in January, 1968. There is nothing particularly complicated about the material used; all the sounds are electronic in origin.

White noise formed the basis of the first couple of minutes of the piece. The signal was into several components, filtered through two Krohnhite band-pass filters, re-mixed and shaped by a Moog envelope generator-voltage controlled amplifier combination.

The "metal" sounds were made by modulating a mixture of three sine waves with a white noise signal whose short attack & decay envelope came from the Moog equipment mentioned above. An old tube-type balanced modulator was used here. The "belch" sounds were made in a fashion similar to that of the metallic sounds, except that a very low sawtooth wave was the modulating signal instead of the white noise, the frequency of one of the sine generators being altered by hand during the decay of the envelope.

With the return of the sea sounds at the end, the piece is closed off in the age-old, time-tested A-B-A fashion. -- Peter Klausmeyer

"TRIP THROUGH THE MILKY WAY - AN ELECTRONIC PANORAMA" - 5:57 Min.
The three basic motives of "Trip Through the Milky Way - An Electronic Panorama" are: a twenty-three-note row in which the interval of a fourth appears thirteen times; a series of thirteen fourths; and a sine wave glide tone whose ups and downs are governed by the interval of a fourth. All of the motives were created with a sine wave oscillator.

Several one-voice lines were created from these three basic motives. They in turn were copied - halving or doubling the tape speed, and hence creating a building block - i.e., a four-voice unit.

These building blocks were then combined so that in the middle of the composition there are sixteen distinct lines on each stereo channel and thirty-two in the center (Two channel version). . .. ...

Hence, "Trip Through the Milky Way - An Electronic Panorama" is a multi-voiced (64) canon at the octave.

The composition was not a planned trip through the Milky Way but rather after the fact. When it was finished (March 1969), the structure and contour of its sound densities and intensities were not unlike a sound picture (or, if you will, Panorama - in the four channel version) of a trip through the Milky Way.

Since April 1969, there have been performances of the "Trip...." in Sweden by the Fylkingen, and Rikskonserter groups, by the Swedish Radio and at the opening of the United States Cultural Center, Stockholm, Sweden, in the music-light-dance festival "Action Center U.S.A." In the July 1970 issue of High Fidelity, "Trip Through the Milky Way" was awarded Honorable Mention in its Electronic Music Contest of August 1969. -- Raymond Moore

Side II - 24:00 Min.

DIVERTIMENTO - 7:05 Min.

In works such as "Serenade para mi Voz" (1962) and "Divertimento" (1968), I've tried to bring back, using the electronic medium, recollections of the chamber music of the 18th century not by pretending to revive the classical form but by taking a thought or an idea that could have inspired music at that time and could also do it in our age. The elegance of the classical Divertimento has always interested me for within the Suite form can be outlined the "Variation", the "Dance" or the "Reprise", all in an extroverted mood, full of virtuosity and good humor.

The realization of my Divertimento is wholly electronic while its organization is greatly dependent on mathematics and biology. A kind of bio-chemistry which consists of transforming sound molecules into cells, tissues, organs, and bodies, and feeding them from the same vital tension that gives energy to the whole as well as to each one of its parts. In this way, the composition laws of the sonorous unifying elements have been the determining factor in the structure of the work, since I believe that through electronic music we can establish space-time-structure relations that can be projected in the micro form as well as in longer time lapses with the same degree of significance. In other words, I believe that the unifying factor of the form-matter (energy-matter) which has been lost, acoustically speaking, in our present-day instrumental music can be found again in the electronic medium, and this is, for me, the main reason for working out the musical-technical problems that are inherent in this form of communication. -- Jose Vicente Amar

AMBIENCE - 6:23 Min.

The source material for Ambience was produced on an "instrument" consisting of three electric bass guitar strings strung lengthwise across a long board, with a bridge and a small magnetic guitar pickup at each end. Two modes of sound production were used. One, in which transversely placed metal pipes were rolled up and down the length of the strings, of multiple glissandi. A second, predominant texture was produced by causing a number lengths to "oscillate" or rock across the strings (rather than to roll lengthwise).

This basic recorded material was then extensively transformed electronically by filtering, heterodyning, ring modulation, speed changes, etc., an 6' finally an overall structure was composed of variously complex superimpositions and juxtapositions of the two basic textural types. A light controlled channel-speaker distributing device used in the original qaudrasonic version further emphasizes this textural contrast in that gliding textures have a predominantly circling movement around the listening area, while the more active, rhythmic textures move disjunctly.

The intention of the piece, originally conceived for performance with the Atlanta Contemporary Dance Group, is to create an impression of actually being swept up in a familiar yet mysterious sound-atmosphere or ambience - perhaps somewhat like the experience of driving alone in a car at night - a sense of increasing absorption and identity with the surrounding sounds - the motor, rushing air, tires on pavement, vibrations, etc. -- Richard Allan Robinson

A Breeze

Last May, I sent Brian Sacawa the score for Mauricio Kagel's A Breeze (Ein Brise). I couldn't think of a better mashup of his twin passions: new music & cycling. He thanked me for turning him on to the score, and Mobtown Modern is performing it next month in Baltimore.

As fun as it would be to perform the piece, I think I'd rather be in the audience. Kagel's score immediately sparked my interest when I found it in the stacks at the NYPL. The mass of people coming at you and the sudden increase in sound pressure would be wondrous. I wish I could be in Baltimore for the performance. If you can, they're looking for performers, and you don't need to be a musician!

Mauricio Kagel
1996

A BREEZE
Transient Action for 111 cyclists

• Each of the 111 bicycles has a bell or a horn.
• Streets with little traffic are preferable.
• Young people prone to childish behaviour should not really take part.
• As the layout sketch indicates, the distance between the bicycles should remain the same (c. 1.50 meters in front and behind, and to either side).

Procedures

A. The spectators are assembled at one point. The course for the bicycle contingent is short: the cyclists come round the corner, swish past the spectators, and disapear round the next corner:

or B. The cohort approaches along a straight line, and turns off at the first opportunity:

or C. The cyclists come round the corner and leave the location along a straight line:

All three procedures can be executed the other way round.

Five materials are available to the participants:

1. Three bell- or horn-sounds of different lengths:
2. Three long, high whistled notes (tied):
3. Three long, high sung notes (always with a short pause after the fermata):
4. Four long, high fluttertongue sounds:
5. Imitation of gusts of wind:

Sequence of Sound Events

1. Approaching the spectators: ring bells or sound horns
2. Just before the spectators: whistling and singing (divisi)
3. While driving by: fluttertonge sounds, imitating gusts of wind
4. Drawing away from the spectators: ring bells or sound horns

• A repetition of the action would be possible so long as another course is chosen - maybe in the opposite direction. The pause between the two procedures would have to be short and the sequence of the sound events remains the same.
• It is conceivable that this fleeting action could be performed within a closed space. In this case it would perhaps be desirable to reduce the number of cyclists taking part.
• Duration: 60-90 seconds.

Set up

[Yeah, that's right. You get 111 volunteer cyclists together and the whole piece lasts 90 seconds! That's why I always thought it would be best to pair it with other works for bicycles like Godfried-Willem Raes' Second Symphony. Seems a pity to let all those cyclists go after just a minute and a half of music...]

The Real Legacy of Hillarycare

The standard takeaway from the Hillarycare debacle is that such a large scale policy can't originate from behind closed doors in the White House. By not consulting with the Hill and throwing elbows to anyone who interfered, Hillary doomed her bill to failure.

It's a good theory, but Dick Cheney, who's got the sharpest elbows in Washington, did the same thing with Bush II's energy policy and got what he wanted. Closed doors and cronyism are well nigh best practices in D.C.

Unfortunately, Obama's let Congress take the lead on the bill, priding himself on having learned from Hillarycare's defeat. This has set him up for another debacle, like the stimulus bill. As Camille Paglia put it this morning:

...the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo. All the backtracking and spin doctoring in the world will not erase that major blunder, which made the new president seem reckless, naive and out of control of his own party, which was in effect dictating to him from Capitol Hill.

When you let Congress draft a bill of this magnitude, you are ceding your mandate to a sea of micro-constituencies that have no vested interest in genuine reform. The real problem, however, is the notion that a massive bill is needed in the first place.

That's the real legacy of Hillarycare: maximalism doesn't work.

Passing a bill that would provide the massive overhaul that our health care system needs would require a mandate far greater than Obama will ever have. The best approach would be the incremental one. Pass an insurance requirement. Build on the electronic records initiative championed by both Hillary and Newt. Create stronger consumer protections. Take baby steps, and we'll all end up in a better place than where we are now.

All Obama has to do is look back 4 months to see what a gargantuan bill generated by Pelosi's Congress will do for him.

Pril Smiley & William Hellermann

-- LINER NOTES --

PRIL SMILEY (b. 1943)
ECLIPSE (1967) * 1st Finalist *
(Realized in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center)
Eclipse was originally composed for four separate tracks, the composer having worked with a specifically-structured antiphonal distribution of compositional material to be heard from four corners of a room or other appropriate space. This record necessarily represents a reduced two-track version of the piece, and hence (from the composer's point of view) the piece loses some part of its structural significance. Some sections of Eclipse are semi-improvisatory; by and large, the piece was worked out via many sketches and preliminary experiments on tape: all elements such as rhythm, timbre, loudness, and duration of each note were very precisely determined and controlled.

In many ways, the structure of Eclipse is related to the composer's use of timbre. There are basically two kinds of sounds in the piece: the low, sustained gong-like sounds (always either increasing or decreasing in loudness) and the short more percussive sounds, which can be thought of as metallic, glassy, or wooden in character. These different kinds of timbres are usually used in contrast to one another, sometimes being set end to end so that one kind of sound interrupts another, and sometimes being dovetailed so that one timbre appears to emerge out of or from beneath another. Eighty-five percent of the sounds are electronic in origin; the non-electronic sounds are mainly pre-recorded percussion sounds-but subsequently electronically modified so that they are not always recognizable. By Pril Smiley

WILLIAM HELLERMANN (b. 1939)
ARIEL (1967) * 4th Finalist *
(Realized in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center)
The name Ariel is related to Shakespeare's character in The Tempest: the music isn't. I chose this name for my piece only because it sounded appropriate to the music. Not because the music was especially poetic or playful, but because Ariel suggests to me a transformation of spirit, the ability to change shape at will.

In listening to Ariel, it might also be helpful to know that it was not designed to illustrate any technical process or aesthetic dogma; nor was it intended to create any visual images. It is a composed performance, not a composition. A performance, because all its events are the result of live operations in real time, not the result of careful measuring and splicing. Composed, because many separate performances were then transformed, made to have new significance, by being placed in relation to each other. The performing medium was an electronic music studio: the basic sound source was a gong. By William Hellermann

* It's on days like these when living in New York feels like being held hostage.

Chickenfoot, "Learning To Fall"

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Olly Wilson, "Cetus"

On April 5, 1968 composers Milton Babbitt, Vladimir Ussachevsky and George Balch Wilson came to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire to judge the first competition devoted to electronic music. The Dartmouth Arts Council had made available a five hundred dollar prize which was awarded to Olly W. Wilson for his composition "Cetus." Babbitt, Ussachevsky (Directors of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center) and Wilson (Director of the University of Michigan Electronic Music Studio) singled out five other works which they felt were significant compositions. Over one huindred entries were received front studios around the world and the judges listened to more than sixty of these before selecting the finalists whose works are presented here for the first time. The judging was anonymous and it was a mere coincidence that two of the finalists should have come from the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and two from the Experimental Studio of the Polish Radio.

This recording is, in one sense, an historic document for it testifies to the breadth of interest in electronic music by composers and the new audiences. It is also significant that these works will reach that audience through this recording and not the concert hall. The following notes were written by the composers themselves.

Jon H. Appleton
Director, Electronic Music Studio
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire

OLLY W. WILSON (b. 1937)
CETUS (1967) * Winner *
(Realized in the Studio for Experimental Music of the University of Illinois)

Cetus was completed during the summer of 1967 at the studio for Experimental Music of the University of Illinois. The title refers to an equatorial constellation whose arch-like configuration was suggested to the composer's mind by the form of the work. This musical structure is the result of an evolutionary process in which basically simple timbres, textural combinations, and rhythmic events become more complex before ultimately returning to simpler relationships. For example, the basic timbre of the first selection was produced by amplitude modulation of a single sine wave which evolves into a combination of modulated sound sources, the sum of which is then modulated.

The compositional process characteristic of the "classical tape studio" (the mutation of a few basic electronic signals by means of filters, signal modifiers, and recording processes) was employed in the realization of this work and was enhanced by means of certain instruments which permit improvisation by synthesized sound. Cetus contains passages which were improvised by the composer as well as sections realized by classical tape studio procedures. The master of this work was prepared on a two channel tape. Under the ideal circumstances it should be performed with multiple speakers surrounding the auditor. By Olly Wilson

RIP, Koko

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Daria Semegen, "Arc: Music for Dancers"

I. ARC: MUSIC FOR DANCERS
(By Daria Semegen; Time: 13:40)

The music was composed following the choreographer's detailed graph-diagram indicating each beat of the dance and descriptions of dancers' motions on stage, combined with a plan of synchronous stage lighting effects. The dance itself does not suggest a specific programmatic idea throughout, but each section of its arc pattern seems to feature motivic gestures ranging from slow, graceful movements to rapid motions involving solo, duet, and trio combinations of the seven clmcers. Sometimes, the lighting effects themselves are featured in precise synchronization with the music, and create elaborate silhouette designs as they play across symmetrical groups of stationary dancers. The piece consists of five parts whose themes, tempos, and "orchestrations" are arranged in the shape of an arc (A B C B A). Each section is itself divided into a smaller arc (a b a ). After a brief introduction of phrases in groups of three beats each, the first prt begins with two motivic elements arranged in a simple question-answer idea: lower range sounds on the beat, and contrasting high echoed flourishes in alternation. Section B introduces both a new tempo and "orchestration" or sound texture, as well as a new motive featuringa tremolo effect on harsh sounds alternated in various patterns from one channel to the other. A six note ostinato appears toward the middle of this section and is gradually integrated into a polyphonic pasage. Section C's theme resembles an orchestral "tutti" and is followed by a variation of the tremolo idea and echo figurations heard previously. Although the music is essentially tonal and establishes various temporary tonal centers throughout, microtones and the characteristically rich textures of electronic sound sources provide dissonant impressions counterbalancing the tonal aspects.

The work was composed using a Buchla series 200 synthesizer and classic studio techniques. The music tape was synchronized at Bell Telephone Labs with the program of the Mimi Garrard Dance Theatre's portable computer-controlled lighting system by Mimi Ganard and James Seawright in preparation for Arc's first presentation in May of 1977.

Daria Semegen (b. 1946, Bamberg, Germany) studied at the Eastman School of Music, Yale and Columbia Universities, and in Warsaw, Poland as a Fulbriiht Scholar. Her composition teachers include Samuel H. Adler, Robert Gauldin, Bunill Phillips, Witold Lutoslmki, Biilent Arel, and Vladimir Ussachevsky. She has received numerous awards in composition including two BMI Awards, Chautauqua, MacDowell Colony, and Tanglewood fellowship, Fulbright Grant, two National Endowment for the Arts commissions, prizes from Yale University, Mu Phi Epsilon, and the ISCM Int'l. Electronic Music Competition for her work Electronic Composition # I. She is author of instrumental and electronic music and has published articleson electronic music in the Music Journal. Since 1972, she was on the teaching staff of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and & worked as technical assistant to V Ussachevsky and Otto Luening. In January 1974, she joined the Dept of Music of the State University of New York at Stony Brook where she is Asst Professor and Associate Director of the Elecrronic Music Studios.

How To Take The Cake:

From The Economist's review of Barry Seldes' Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician:

Bernstein died two years later, his lifelong wish to complete “That One Important Piece”, as he described it in his final letter to his business manager, left as unfulfilled as his longing to see liberal democracy flourish in America.

Why did the popular, powerful and prodigiously gifted Bernstein never compose that masterpiece? This is the central question Barry Seldes asks in his new political biography. The usual answer turns on the suggestion that Bernstein’s talents were overstretched by his heavy conducting, recording and publicity schedules. Critics also like to carp, pointing out that, although he was a brilliant musician, Bernstein somehow lacked the depth of thought and vision necessary to produce a genuine masterpiece.

Mr Seldes’s answer is different. Bernstein, he says, never wrote “That One Important Piece” because the only audience for which he could have written it—an American citizenry united by progressive liberalism—failed to materialise.

That's all kinds of crazy. So crazy it makes me want to read the book.

Diane Thome, "Anais"

-- LINER NOTES --

DIANE THOME
ANAIS
Diane Thome, piano; Michael Finckel, cello; tape part realized at the SUNY, Binghamton electronic music studio

DIANE THOME (b. Pearl River, New York, 1942) received her musical education at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, where she was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in Music. Among her teachers were Dorothy Taubman in piano, and Robert Strassburg, Darius Milhaud, Roy Harris, Alexander Urijah Boscovich and Milton Babbitt in composition. Her compositions have been presented in Europe and throughout the United States under important auspices. Her collaborative works include Night Passage, an environmental theatre piece, as well as compositions for dance and film. She has received many grants and awards including one from the National Society of Arts and Letters and two from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a member of the National Council of the American Society of University Composers and Co-chairperson of the Northwest Region. She has taught at Rutgers University, the State University of New York at Binghamton and is currently (1980) on the faculty of the University of Washington School of Music in Seattle.

ANAIS, for tape, violoncello and piano, was composed at the invitation of cellist Michael Finckel during the summer of 1976. The tape portion of the work was synthesized in the analog studio at the State University of New York in Binghamton while Thome was working under a SUNY Research Grant. The piece is dedicated to the memory of the writer Anais Nin, who died shortly before its premiere in March, 1977, in Los Angeles.

Positively Precious

One of the downsides of opening your mouth to express a negative opinion is that someone, somewhere is gonna get hurt. Most of the reviews that are ever published about anything are positive. Sure, there are bad reviews out there for movies or books, but for the most part, whether you are thumbing through Rolling Stone's CD reviews or reading the Book Review, most of what you read falls down on the plus side. We're hard wired to expect good reviews.

One of the upsides of the blogosphere is the freedom to write about what you want. We do a bit of that here every now and then, but a guy like Nico Muhly does it on every engaging, meandering post. His hobbyhorses are food and grammar, and he's usually a good read. Until recently though, I hadn't noticed how flat out honest he was being. He's received a lifetime of press in the past few years, and almost all of it has been glowing. When he got a bad review from Pitchfork, he blogged about how deeply it got under his skin and confessed to the fact that the review hit the mark.

Over the weekend, Nico reacted to a negative review of a Grizzly Bear concert in the Times with what, for him, counts as a blistering attack on the reviewer. I find his warts and all approach refreshing. He could be posting 50 words about going into the studio with (uber-hip band) and how he can't wait for their show at (major venue). Instead of blasé blasts of self-promotion, we get the genuine, conflicted thoughts of a young, working composer.

Regarding the Times review, Nico suggested that there was no alternative to the description of Grizzly Bear's music as 'precious'. He found it to be coded, something that was irrefutable because it only had meaning to the reviewer who invoked it (Sort of like how Dick Cheney can keep insisting that those memos that Obama won't release prove torture worked). I pointed out in a comment that 'precious' does have an alternative, however. It's 'careless'.

There is a common usage of precious which means that something is too affected, but the more damaging meaning is when something is too closely held. Think Gollum and his ring:





The relationship between Gollum and his ring is so precious that it clouds out all other things. Neither the ring, nor Gollum, have a life outside of each other. In his adoration for the ring, Gollum keeps both it and him from actualization. A surfeit of care stifles anything.

Nico came back with this comparison:






Precious? “Everything Bagel” from WD-50


Sloppy? Not Precious?


Exactly. I'd be happy to eat both of those plates. The first is richly attended to, while the second is just meat on a plate. These are two very different experiences, and neither is inherently negative.

Returning to the Times' review, it touches on the only negative thing that's being said about Veckatimest, which is that its preciousness makes it dull. The musical analogy to those dueling plates that I'd offer is Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks" versus Queen's "Love of My Life". Both come from richly detailed albums (A Night At the Opera remains the standard bearer for obsessively inventive studio wizardry). Both songs are beautiful on their surface and full of swooning, complex textures.

"Two Weeks" leaves it at that, however. That's largely due to the length of it. If it simply ended at 2'30", it would be a gem of a song, but by repeating its form and texture without major development, it frosts over. It becomes remote.

"Love of My Life" is as immediate as a dog licking your face. There's no distance between you and Freddie as he sings to his lover. In fact, it's so easy to think he's singing directly to you that the song became his in-concert lullaby to his audience for a decade.

Both songs are highly refined studio creations. The former remains self-contained, while the other sprawls in the ear. There are legitimate reasons to love and hate both songs. Calling 'Two Weeks' precious is just one way of describing it. For me, it's not a dismissal of it. It's just a helpful description of one of its flaws, which brings me back to my original thought.

Negative criticism often prompts people to throw the baby out with the bathwater. After reading my thoughts about Up, my wife assumed I hated it, even though she'd seen it with me and knew that I enjoyed it. Within minutes of saying that the wordless opening of Wall-E was overscripted, a fan of the movie wrote to cry foul, saying that I'd 'trashed' it, but I liked that movie too. Maybe in another post, I'll go on about the merits of those films. As Nico said, "This is what the internet is for."

Elias Tanenbaum, "Contradictions"

ELlAS TANENBAUM
CONTRADICTIONS (1974)
Tape realized at the electronic music studio of the Manhattan School of Music

ELlAS TANENBAUM (b. 1924, Brooklyn) studied trumpet at an early age. His first musical experiences were in the field of jazz, and his music reflects the openness and spontaneity of the jazz experience. After serving in World War II, he entered the Juilliard School of Music; upon graduation as a trumpet major his interests turned to composition. He studied privately with Dante Fiorillo, Bohuslav Martinu, Otto Luening and Wallingford Riegger.

Tanenbaum, who has composed extensively in all mediums, is the recipient of many prizes and awards. He is the director of the electronic music studio, a member of the composition.faculty, and conductor ofthe Composers' Improvisation Ensemble at the Manhattan School of Music. He writes:

"The material used in CONTRADICTIONS is varied. There are both electronically generated and concrete sounds. The work opens with a man's voice saying, 'Sounds are.' That phrase expresses my feelings about this work; sounds are whatever they are and stand by themselves."

AMERICAN COMPOSERS ALLIANCE
Each year, the American Composers Alliance chooses several member composers to receive the ACA Recording Award. These awards are given either to stimulate the career of a talented young composer or to call attention to the recognized achievement of a mature musician. Occasionally, the birthday of an outstanding composer is celebrated with the Award. In all cases, the selection is made by a jury of the composer's peers, whose principal criterion is artistic excellence.

Frank Wigglesworth
President

This record was made possible by a grant from the American Composers Alliance.

Producer: Carter Harman
Associate Producer: Carolyn Sachs,
Art Director: Judith Lerner
Cover Judith Lerner 1982
LC#: 82-74331 2
1982 Composers Recordings, Inc.

THIS IS A COMPOSER-SUPERVISED RECORDING
Printed in the U.S.A.
CRI
WRITE FOR A COMPLETE LISTING OF ALBUMS ON CRI
COMPOSERS RECORDINGS, INC.
170 WEST 74TH STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10023
A NOT-FOR-PROFIT. TAX-EXEMPT CORPORATION

Coldplay, "Glass of Water" (Live)

Grab the full live album here. You don't need to give a legit email, either.

William Matthews, "Field Guide" & "Aurora, A Waltz"

-- LINER NOTES --

WILLIAM MATTHEWS
FlELD GUIDE
Tape realized at the Institute of Sonology; Utrecht. Holland

WILLIAM MATTHEWS (b. 1950) is a flutist and conductor, as well as a composer. He studied at the Oberlin Conservatory and at the University of lowa, and is currently (1977) working with Jacob Druckman at the Yale School of Music. In 1972,1973 and 1974, he received BMI Awards to Student Composers, and in 1976 received a Charles lves Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

From 1974 to 1976, he worked at the lnstituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht, Holland, using the computer facilities there to produce several works, including FlELD GUIDE on this album. He writes:

"In FlELD GUIDE, for computer-synthesized electronic sound, the composer and computer wander together through a 'field' of 103 different sound events. The program for the piece calls upon the composer to decide which general direction the music should take during the course of performance, while the computer is allowed to decide the details. Listening to FlELD GUIDE is a bit like walking through a woods in which each species of flora is found only in its particular habitat, while interloping fauna are more free to put in surprising appearances here and there."

--------------
WILLIAM MATHEWS
AURORA, A WALTZ (1981)
Tape realized using computer music equipment of the Structured Sound Synthesis Project at the University of Toronto

WILLIAM MATTHEWS (b. 1950, Toledo) studied composition at Oberlin, the University of Iowa, the Institute for Sonologie in Holland, and the Yale School of Music. His principal teachers include Richard Hervig, Gottfried Michael Koenig, and Jacob Druckman. Among his awards and prizes are three BMI Awards to Student Composers, several grants for study abroad, a Charles E. lves Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, two ACA recording awards, and a composer-fellowship from the NEA. He has composed music of several types, including solos, orchestral, electronic and chamber music, as well as music for the theater. Since 1978 he has taught at Bates College in Maine. He writes:

"AURORA, A WALTZ, uses a few distinctly electronic timbres, but mostly uses sounds with sharp attacks and immediate decays, similar to those of the piano. These sounds were chosen to emphasize the energetic rhythmic life of the musical structures employed.

"I would like to express my gratitude to William Buxton, the Director of the SSSP in Toronto, for the invitation to work there and for technical assistance."

Pixar At the Crossroads

Somewhere back in its early days, Pixar had to have struck a devil's deal which insured glowing press for its films. There's just no other way to figure how something like Up could be received with such breathless criticism. It's being hailed as the 'best film of the year'. It's not even the best film released this month.

The Wall Street Journal pinpointed its central weakness as a lack of coherence. There's far too much weight placed on the back story of the old man. The montage which summarizes his marriage to his childhood sweetheart is told through a series of pictures. (BTW, am I the only one who gets creeped out when movie romances start in early childhood? These kids are six or seven years old when they meet!)

This montage has been as warmly received as the wordless opening of Wall-E. From the same WSJ review:

"It's the essence of daring, the sort of thing that only Pixar would try to do, let alone do wondrously well."

That's funny, because Zach Snyder dared to do the exact same thing a few months back to relate the back story of Watchmen. These montages are never silent, either. Dylan blared over Watchmen, and an extra syrupy Chaplinesque waltz is drizzled all over Up. For some reason, when it comes to Pixar, critics are not only quick to reach for their superlatives, they are also more than eager to abandon any grasp they ever had on film history. Pixar is seemingly the first and best to do anything.

The wordless sequence is now shtick for Pixar. Wall-E's opening sequence, which apparently broke all kinds of new ground, was actually, if anything, over-scripted. Not a second goes by that the little robot doesn't tweet or whir in a way that's adorable, and whenever you slap giant expressive eyes on anything, it becomes infinitely more likable. Whatever emoting is not done by Wall-E's sound design is ably picked up by his ever changing eyes. There's probably a snowball's chance in hell that human beings would design a robotic trash compactor with such adorable eyes. But then again, what are the odds that an alien from Brodo Asogi would have ginormous blue eyes?

To me, both E.T. and Wall-E would have resonated more if they were more alien to us. But if I were tasked with creating a blockbuster family film, I'd use googly eyes and sound cues too. With Up, it's just not clear what purpose is served by the heavy handed approach to the old man's marriage. The purpose of talking, adorable dogs is quite obvious, even though it's just as transparent a manipulation as the montage. The whole film feels like an endless series of pokes at your emotional buttons. Most of them provoke the desired response, but the feeling you're left with after all that button pushing stops is fairly hollow. The whole film is like a sugar rush, just a lot of empty calories.

You can skip the premium for 3D, too. The most eye-popping things in 3D are the fabrics of ties and curtains, actually. Everything else is barely an advance over Jaws 3. It's just an endless search for excuses to have things zoom straight at the camera. If this is the 3D that James Cameron has been working on, I might have to stop looking forward to Avatar.

This 3D is not much of an advance over stereoscopes. A few items are rendered in sharp focus in the foreground, and everything else is rendered in slightly less focus in the background. It's a neat effect, but it mainly feels like you're looking at a diorama. No matter where you look, there's still a 2D backstop to the visual. There's a struggle atop a dirigible at the end of the film which had a very real sense of danger to it because the 3D so effectively characterized the altitude of the action. I actually got a bit of vertigo, but for the most part, the 3D wasn't worth the extra $5.

Ramon Zupko, "Fixations" & "Fluxus I"

RAMON ZUPKO

FIXATIONS (1974)
Nancy Elan, violin; Barbara Bogatin, cello; Andrew Thomas, piano; tape; Harvey Sollberger, conductor

FLUXUS l
Electronic tape realized at the Western Michigan University Electronic Music Studio

RAMON ZUPKO (b. 1932, Pittsburgh) started learning the piano from his mother, a good pop pianist, at the age of 8, and started to compose at about the same time. His talent for composition was encouraged in high school, in Ohio, and he went on to study with Vincent Persichetti (at the Juilliard School) and later in Vienna on a Fulbright Fellowship and at Columbia University. He lived in Europe from 1962 to 1966, studying at the Darmstadt Summer Courses and taking courses in electronic music at Bilthoven, Holland. Back in the U.S.A., he lived for a year on a Ford Foundation grant and then became Director of the Electronic Music Laboratory at Roosevelt University, Chicago. Since 1971 he has held a similar position at Western Michigan University, where he also teaches composition and theory and directs the New Music Ensemble. In 1970 his work for soprano and chamber ensemble, La Guene was chosen to represent the U.S. at the festival of the ISCM in Basel, Switzerland.

He has written the following about his music on this record:
"explore obsession
"-focus (out of chaos)
"-set in time (tradition persists)
"frozen movement-change without change . . .
"fixations
"Since about 1970 1 have been concerned with four areas of expression in my music in varying degrees of emphasis: space, timbre, expanded tonality, and theatre. FIXATIONS deals in one way or another with each of these, the last one of course being apparent only in live performance. Spatial characteristics are enhanced in live pefformance through the placement of the speakers for the tape part behind the audience. The sounds of the tape part are electronically modified and de-synthesized versions of several of the live instrumental sounds, relating-to the latter as extended timbres and dimensions of them. The pitch and rhythmic structure is derived entirely from the two hexachords and rhythmic cells of the first dozen bars, and each section of the piece deals with a fixed harmonic field, which creates its own tonal hierarchy. There are ten continuous sections within the single movement, four of which are rhythmically freer cadenzas for each of the three solo instruments, as well as the tape.

"FLUXUS I for electronic sounds (1977) is in many ways an alternate solution, employing completely different materials, to the stylistic approach developed in FIXATIONS. It was realized on the Moog synthesizer of Western Michigan University, and employs as raw material four parallel seventh chords, and pitch sequences derived from them. These are subjected to a wide ,variety of controlled manipulations, creating within the basic drone character of the piece a constant state of flux between density and transparency, simple and complex timbres, foreground and background, tonal progression and stasis, rapid and slow spatial movement, regular and irregular rhythms, dramatic declamation and reverie."

JAMES DIXON, a protege of Dimitri Mitropoulos, has established a reputation as one ot the most conscientious and musical of all conductors of new music. He is in residence at the University of lowa, and makes guest appearances in major centers. He has appeared on several CRI records.

HARVEY SOLLBERGER, flutist extraordinary, is as distinguished as a composer and conductor. He is co-director of the Group for Contemporary Music at the Manhattan School of Music and a frequent participant in CRI recordings.

This recording was made possible by a grant from the American Composers Alliance.

Produced by Carter Harman
Cover by Judith Lerner
LETTERS FROM HOME: 12'35"
Recorded by Lowell Cross, April 1977
FIXATIONS: 15'30"
Recorded by David Hancock, March 1977
FlELD GUIDE: 7'55"
FLUXUS 1: 6 min.
All ACA (BMI)
LC# MATHEWS 77-750619, ZUPKO 77-750620
1977 Composers Recordings, Inc.
THIS IS A COMPOSER-SUPERVISED RECORDING
Printed in the U.S.A.

Russ Irwin, "My Heart Belongs To You"

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Ramon Zupko, "Masques", "Nocturnes, "Fluxus II"

MASQUES (1973-78)
Western Brass Quintet (Donald Bullock and
Stephen Jones, trumpets; Neill Sanders, horn;
Russell Brown, trombone; Robert Whaley, tuba);
Phyllis Rappeport, piano

NOCTURNES: 1-3, 4-6 (1977)
Abraham and Arlene Stokman, pianos

FLUXUS II (1978)
Abraham Stokman, piano

RAMON ZUPKO (b. 1932, Pittsburgh) is the director of the Studio for Electronic Music and the New Music Ensemble at Western Michigan University, where he also teaches composition, music theory, and acoustics. He began his musical studies at an early age, eventually receiving composition degrees from Juilliard. He studied further at Columbia, and in Europe, where he lived for several years. His principal composition teacher was Vincent Persichetti.

Many of his works make use of the electronic medium, as well as theatrical elements. His awards include grants from the Fulbright Commission, the Ford Foundation CMP Project, the Fromm Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund. Several of his works have been published, including the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1962) which was awarded first prize in the "Premio Citta di Trieste," and FIXATIONS for Piano, Violin, Cello, and Tape (1974), which received a 1977 ACA Recording Award (CRI SD 375). His orchestral works have been performed by the Detroit, St. Louis, and Indianapolis Symphonies. He writes:

"As is the case with most of my works, those recorded here received'their initial impetus from either poetic sources or dramatic-theatrical conceptions. Each of them deals with a re-interpretation of the resources and techniques of the past, with special attention focused on the elements of timbre, space,and an expanded concept of tonality.

MASQUES
play minstrels!
begin your journey
in sound and in motion
unfold your theatre -
allow us an image
of free spirits!

"As the title implies, this is an entertainment piece which combines music with ritual and pageantry. In live performance the musicians, who are costumed uniformly, move about the stage in specified patterns, creating a constantly changing visual as well as aural perspective. The 1978 version includes a number of modifications in order to render the work more suitable as a purely audible experience on disc. This recording attempts to preserve some of the sonic spatiality which one would experience if hearing the work live. Formally, the piece is a series of static sound blocks within a single movement, each one a 'disguised' version of one or more of the others. All of the pitch material is an outgrowth of a single five-note cluster: B, C, D, E, and F, and the sound 'metamorphosis' of the piece is from pitch-oriented to noise-oriented sound, then abruptly back again for the last segment.

"MASQUES was premiered by the artists on this recording on February 15, 1974, on the campus of Western Michigan University.

"NOCTURNES was written during September and October of 1977, and received its premiere by the Stokmans at the University of Chicago on January 20, 1978. Although there are six separate pieces here they form an entity. Each of them is tied to the others through its timbral, melodic, and rhythmic materials, but especially through the harmonic elements, all of which are permutations of a polychordal structure consisting of three major triads a half-step apart. The homage to Chopin is apparent throughout, as is the tone-picture quality of each of the pieces, inspired as they were by the following Haiku:

1. (Calmato)
autumn evening;
a crow perched
on a withered bough (Basho)

2. (Bizzarramente)
the sound of dancing dies;
wind among the pine trees,
insect cries (Sogetsu)

3. (Freddamente)
icy the moonshine;
shadow of a tombstone
shadow of a pine (Shiki)

4. (Ardente)
a lightening gleam
into darkness travels
a night-heron's scream (Basho)

5. (Affabile)
the water-fowl
pecks and shivers -
the moon on the waves (Zuiryu)

6. (Lontano) the bell from far away -
how it moves along in its coming
through the spring haze! (Onitsura)

"FLUXUS II was composed between February and April, 1978, and is dedicated to Abraham Stokman, who premiered the work at Alice Tully Hall on January 20, 1979. The expressive and dramatic flow of the work was strongly influenced by a poem of Dylan Thomas entitled In the Beginning, the poet's personal expression of the story of Genesis. Musically the work is concerned with Baroque and Classical keyboard embellishment, Romantic keyboard figuration and bravura, and with the relationships among static tonal centers. The piece derives its form from the melodic growth and expansion of a three-note cell. It approaches the piano as a polyphonic 'color' instrument, with many gradations of attack and dynamic, 'orchestrated' textures with foreground accompanied by one or more layers of background, various 'echo' effects and the rapid alternation of differing textures and shapes."

ABRAHAM STOKMAN was born in Israel, where he began his piano studies at the age of six. Later he came to the Juilliard School to study with Edward Steuermann, receiving his B.S. and M.S. degrees in piano. Since taking up his residency in Chicago several years ago, he has performed often as soloist with the Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago, members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in chamber music concerts, and most recently as soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the Bach D Minor Concerto. He has had compositions written for him by Ralph Shapey, Robert Lombardo, and John Austin. In addition to activities as performer, piano teacher, accompanist, arranger and composer, Mr. Stokman improvises in the manner of the 19th century pianists.

ARLENE GATILAO STOKMAN is a native of the Philippines. After she received her B.S. degree from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, she came to the Chicago Musical College of Roosevelt University, where she received the Rudolph Ganz Piano Award. She has performed frequently with her husband as a piano duo.

PHYLLIS RAPPEPORT is Professor of Music and head of the piano department at Western Michigan University. She holds degrees from Queens College and the University of Illinois, where she was a member of the Contemporary Chamber Players. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, and has been active throughout the country as accompanist and ensemble performer.

THE WESTERN BRASS QUINTET was founded in 1966 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Its members are professors of music at Western Michigan University. It has performed throughout the country, including performances for the Composer's Forum on NPR, the Composer's Forum in New York, invitational performances for the Tuba Universal Brotherhood Association and the International Trumpet Guild, and at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. The ensemble has premiered numerous works which were written for it, including the work on this album, 'Nodding Music' by Elgar Howarth, and LANDSCAPES by Pulitzer composer Karel Husa, a work commissioned by the Quintet, and recorded by them on CRI 192 (78).

This record was funded in part by a grant from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, Inc.

Musical production by composer
Produced by Carter Harman
Cover art Judith Lerner 1979
FLUXUS II - ACA (BMI): 13'50"
NOCTURNES - ACA (BMI): 17'45"
MASQUES - ACA (BMI): 13 min.
LC#: 79-750595
1979 Composers Recordings, Inc.
THIS IS A COMPOSER-SUPERVISED RECORDING
Printed in the U.S.A.

Henry Mancini, "It Had Better Be Tonight (Meglio Stasera)"

Ramon Zupko, "Noosphere"

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award Record

Ramon Zupko
Noosphere (1980)

New World Ouartet
(Curtis J. Macomber and William Patterson, violins; Robert Dan, viola; Ross T. Harbaugh, cello)

Ramon Zupko (b. 1932, Pittsburgh, PA) is Professor of Composition at Western Michigan University, where he also directs the Studio for Electronic Music. He began his musical studies at an early age, and studied at Juilliard, Columbia, and in Europe, where he lived for several years. His principal composition teacher was Vincent Persichetti.

He has composed more than 100 works, many of which include the electronic medium, as well as theatrical elements. His more than forty composition awards include a Guggenheim, a Koussevitzky Foundation Award, a Kennedy-Friedheim Award, an American Composers Alliance Recording Award, a Berkshire Music Center Commission, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was named a Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Western Michigan University for 1983-84.

Zupko's compositions have been performed in New York and at various festivals and college campuses throughout the country, as well as in Europe. His orchestral works have been performed by the Detroit, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Kalamazoo, Curtis, and Tanglewood Festival Orchestras. His compositions appear on CRI 375 and 425.

Zupko has become concerned with a more ecumenical approach to musical materials, which endeavors to synthesize the spectrum of contemporary compositional techniques with those of the past, as well as those of other, non-Western cultures. This approach is supported philosophically by the writings of various 20th century thinkers whose conclusions have to do with the essence of our survival as a species, particularly: the acceptance of the multiplicity of experience, and the evolution of the network of human consciousness. He writes:

"Noosphere is an interpretation, in musical terms, of the substantive elements of the philosophy of the Jesuit priest-paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. It was Chardin's vision that the 'Noosphere,' the network of communication, information, and personal aspiration that embraces the universe, is evolving into a collective mind and soul, in which all humans participate.

"The three movements of the quartet express this evolutionary process through the incorporation of various folk songs and chants which represent most of the major world cultures. The same material is employed in all three movements.

"In the first movement, 'Alpha,' the primordial state is represented: independent, elementary energies, in search of unification. The second movement, 'Convergence,' exoloits the effects of unification, creating an increased interaction and inter-dependence among the materials, resulting in higher and more complex levels of organization. The third movement, 'Omega,' the ultimate state of convergence, brings the total inter-meshing of the materials to the forefront. While still maintaining their identities, their main focus becomes interaction with one another, in order to achieve an intensely unified 'hyperpersonal' organization, what Chardin describes as the 'Cosmic Omega.'

"This work was written under a Faculty Research fellowship from Western Michigan University."

IN MEMORIAM R. DOUGLAS

The New World String Quartet, with a repertoire ranging from the standard quartet literature to premieres of contemporary American works, has been acclaimed as one of America's most prominent young ensembles. Formed in 1977, the quartet has appeared at major halls in major cities and universities. It is currently Ouartet-in-Residence at Harvard University. It also appears on CRI SO 497.

This recording was made possible by grants from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Each year, this organization awards four prizes to composers of outstanding accomplishment during the preceding year. The prize consists of a cash award and a recording on CRI. Thomas McKinley was a winner in 1983 and Ramon Zupko in 1982.

Charles Dodge, "Changes"

-- LINER NOTES --

Charles Dodge received his early musical training in Ames, lowa, where he was born in 1942. During his years as a composition student (at the University of lowa with Philip Bezonson ond Richard Hervig, at Tanglewood with Gunther Schuller and Arthur Berger, and at Columbia University with Jack Beeson, Chou Wen-chung, and Otto Luening), many of his works were awarded composition prizes. Since then, in addition to teaching in the music departments of Columbia and Princeton Universities, he has conducted reseorch in computer sound synthesis at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center and lectured on the subject for musicians, scientists, and engineers at various colleges and universities.

Concerning his work, Mr. Dodge writes: "Changes was commissioned by the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation for performance at the Library of Congress. The texture of the composition comprises the same three elements throughout: lines, chords, and percussion; and each textural element delineates a different aspect of the composition's pitch structure. The chords play segments (3 to 6 notes) of the twelve-tone set that forms the basis of the work. In the course of the work the chords sound all 48 forms of the set. The lines play six note segments of the set which are related to the original by rotation. The percussion duplicates the pitch-class content of the chords (i.e., the percussion linearizes the pitches of the chords).

"For the computer performance I designed an 'orchestra' of 'instruments' that emphasize the different types of pitch-delineation. For the lines, a family of registral instruments was created which consist of a pulse generator (of the type used in speech synthesis) which is fed into multiple banks of filters in series. As the amplitude of the banks of filters is varied, the timbre of the note changes.

Further, the center-frequency settings of the filters are changed with each chord change, so that the timbre change itself changes as a function of the chord changes, which are themselves a function of the rate at which the lines sound all twelve tones. As the work progresses, each note in the lines incorporates more and more timbre changes, so that at the end each note changes timbre six times. All of the 'percussion' sounds entail a timbre-change which is the result of different components decaying at different rates."

Charles Ives, "Concord Sonata"

-- LINER NOTES --

Produced by Leroy Perkins

Side 1
IVES: SECOND PIANO SONATA:
"Concord, Mass., 1840-60" (Beginning)
I-Emerson (13:35)
II-Hawthorne (10:02)

Side 2
SECOND PIANO SONATA:
"Concord, Mass. 1840-60" (Conclusion)
III-The Alcotts (4:40)
IV-Thoreau (9:38)

People often ask why this performance of Concord differs so from the published second edition. The only answer is to tell how the various versions grew.

It all started in 1904 when Ives sketched an Orchard House Overture (the Alcott house), of which only a half line survives, quoting Charles Zeuner's hymn Missionary Chant ("Ye Christian heralds, go proclaim..."). In 1907 Ives projected a series of Men of Literature overtures, the one on Emerson as a piano concerto--"the orchestra was the world and people hearing the piano...was Emerson." The overtures on Hawthorne (1909, for pianos) and on Thoreau (strings with flute and horn) were hardly more than imagined.

But in September 1911, "I got the idea of a Concord sonata, and...took the common themes from the Alcott overture and 'Fate knocking'" (the two themes common to all four movements: one Ives called "that human faith melody"--the other is a complex of Zeuner's hymn and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony). Hawthorne was finished that October, Emerson in 1912, and The Alcotts and Thoreau enough so that, later in 1912, "I played the whole sonata...though Thoreau I played partly from the sketch and with a few improvisations." By 1915 The Alcotts and Thoreau were also finished.

Parts of the sonata were simpler than the prototypes, and shorty after 1915 Ives made the beginning of Emerson into a separate piece more like the overture (the first of the Four Transcriptions From Emerson). In 1916 he used Hawthorne as the nucleus of the second movement of his Fourth Symphony and later reworked both into a piano fantasy, The Celestial Railroad.

In October 1918, Ives suffered his first heart attack, and during the long convalescence he wrote out the clear ink copy of Concord and finished the Essays Before a Sonata. No sooner were these privately printed, in 1919-20, than Ives again regretted some of his simplifications and excerpted three more transcriptions from Emerson. For many years he kept filling various copies of the first edition and of the transcriptions with pencil revisions. Every time he played any of it, he improvised new variants--"and I don't know as I ever shall write them out, as it may take away the daily pleasure of...seeing it grow."

In 1927 I saw a copy of Concord and was told to write Ives, and he sent me the sonata and the Essays. Penetration was gradual: In '32 I played The Alcotts, in '35 Emerson. Not having met Ives, I wrote him a questionnaire and he sent many explanations and photostats, saying "the printed movement is nearer Emerson...and I think you are right in keeping to that. The transcriptions seem to grow away from Emerson in some places...However, do whatever seems natural or best to you, though not necessarily the same way each time."

In '37 I finally met Ives, and while I could ask him things, I soon learned how he hated to be pinned down to a definite answer, preferring to make every thought a springboard. For instance, the one time I started to play Concord for him, hoping for criticism, all he wanted to do was to play me other pieces based on the same material--The Anti-Abolitionist Riots, bits of Hawthorne and The Celestial Railroad, etc.--and I never regained the piano stool.

By '38 I was playing the whole sonata, and Lawrence Gilman's review of '39--"the greatest music composed by an American"--helped to spread a contagious enthusiasm. Ives asked me to supervise the second edition, but being still mystified by many of his revisions, I procrastinated, and he did it all himself, helped by George Robert's clear copies of patches. After many proofs, it appeared in '47.

All this time I was understanding more and more of the revisions--Mrs. Ives had brought me an extra set of the third proofs--so that, whereas in the 30's I had modified the first edition with some of the revisions, by the 50's it was the other way around. Then when Ives died in '54, and it was my privilege to sort his manuscripts, the enormous extent of the source materials for Concord finally came to light. Every time I take it up again, some choices change.

Nearly all details of this performance that differ from the second edition are from one source or another--for instance: in Emerson, the fugato (pp.13-15) and the climax before the coda (bottom of p. 17) from the first edition; in Hawthorne, the hovering thirds above the second hymn (p. 34) from a sketch, the roll-off ending the march (p. 36) and the canon on "Three cheers for the Red, White and Blue" (p. 46) from the way I heard Ives play them; in Thoreau, the expanding wedge after the chords rolled inward (p. 65) from a patch, the omission of four beats two lines later from Ive's indication in several copies to do so, the flute passage as a fresh arrangement keeping the flute an octave higher (as Ives begins the piano solo version on p. 67). The march in Hawthorne (p. 35) has some naturals instead of flats which I once thought Ives might have meant that way (knowing how inconsistent his accidentals could be)--and even though the later proofs contradicted me, I still think Ives would have liked those naturals, as he liked the engraver's mistake in Thoreau (5th chord in the bottom staff of p. 61). He loved to surprise people, and it often struck his funnybone to be surprised himself.

An important distinction in the first edition became a footnote in the second: most of Emerson is labeled "(prose)" except the second theme (both times, p. 5 and p. 16) and the variations (pp. 8-11, corresponding to the scherzo movement of the overture), which are labeled "(verse)." Ives explained the prose as "not to be evenly played...the tempo is not precise"--and about Hawthorne, "it is not intended that the metrical relation 2:1 be held too literally." If this may seem to invite rhythmic chaos, it is more than offset by the way the rich logic of thematic transformation throughout the sonata requires a tightly organic integration. -- John Kirkpatrick

The cover photo of The Old Manse in Concord, Mass., is by Daniel and Juanita Farber. The house was built in 1769 by Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandfather, and Emerson wrote most of his first book there. In 1842, the house was leased to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who gave it its name and wrote much of his "Mosses From an Old Manse" there.

Engineering: Fred Plaut, Milt Cherin

Other recordings of the works of Charles Ives:
Three Places in New England (The Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, Conductor)...MS 6684
Symphony No. 3 ("The Camp Meeting"); Decoration Day; The Unanswered Question (New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, Conductor)...MS 6843
"Holidays" Symphony (New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, Conductor)...MS 7147
Sonata No. 1 for Piano (William Masselos)...Odyssey 32 18 0059

COLUMBIA STEREO RECORDS CAN BE PLAYED ON TODAY'S MONO RECORDS WITH EXCELLENT RESULTS. THEY WILL LAST AS LONG AS MONO RECORDS PLAYED ON THE SAME EQUIPMENT, YET WILL REVEAL FULL STEREO SOUND WHEN PLAYED ON STEREO RECORD PLAYERS.

Charles Dodge, "Folia" & "Extensions"

-- LINER NOTES --

CHARLES DODGE

FOLlA
Jeanne Benjamin, Michele Gallien, David Gilbert, Allen Blustine, George Haas, Donald Butterfield, Robert Miller, Raymond DesRoches, Richard Fitz; conducted by Jacques-Louis Monod

EXTENSIONS FOR TRUMPET AND TAPE
Ronald Anderson, trumpet; tape computed at the Columbia University Computer Center

CHARLES DODGE (b. Ames, lowa, 1942) studied composition at the University of lowa, Aspen, Tanglewood and Columbia University. He numbers among his teachers Philip Bezanson, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Berger, Gunther Schuller, Chou Wen-chung, Jack Beeson and Otto Luening. He studied electronic music with Vladimir Ussachevsky and computer music with Godfrey Winham.

Mr. Dodge won his first (of four) BMI Student Composer Awards and his first (of two) Bearns Prizes while still an undergraduate. In 1970, with his mastery of computer music already well along, he became assistant professor of music at Columbia University, and the same year his Changes and Earth's Magnetic Field appeared on Nonesuch Records. In 1971, he began research in computer-synthesized speech and vocal sounds at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and continued to work there in 1972-3 on a Guggenheim Fellowship. In February 1974 he was visiting research musician at the University of California (San Diego) Center for Music Experiment.

FOLlA was commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation and was premiered under Melvin Strauss at the Berkshire Music Center in 1965; it is dedicated to Paul Fromm. It has also been conducted by Ralph Shapey with the Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago, and by Mr. Dodge with New York's Group for Contemporary Music.

Mr. Dodge writes:

"After an initial flurry of activity in the piano and percussion, FOLlA begins its evolution from a unified texture of sustained tones into extended solo and ensemble passages. In these, the possible diversities (of length-of-note, timbre, articulation, register and varieties of pitch and non- and almost-pitch) are balanced with the possible unities within these sonic dimensions. The title, meaning layers, refers to the resulting texture. The tracing of paths back and forth between unity and diversity results in a series of ever heightened climaxes, and then in the music that leads from the final climax to the end of the work."

EXTENSIONS FOR TRUMPET AND TAPE was commissioned by and dedicated to Ronald Anderson, and was first performed by him at a concert of the Group for Contemporary Music in the spring of 1973. Mr. Dodge writes:

"The material for the trumpet and tape share a simple concept -equal interval divisions of pitch space - but diverge in their sonic surfaces. The trumpet part was freely composed with lyrical intent, using the pitch space of the octave and emphasizing its equal-interval divisions: tritones, thirds and seconds.

"The pitch space of the tape part is the continuum between 30 and 12,000 hz. The tape part, which consists entirely of sine-wave glissandos, begins with 16 equalinterval divisions of the pitch space. The sine-tones forming these divisions glissand to the intervallic mid-point of the pitch range, where the direction of the glissando is changed. With each change of direction, the number of tones (and thus the number of equal-interval divisions of the pitch-space) is doubled, until the last glissando, when the tape comprises 1024 tones.

"The trumpet and tape begin with successive solo statements of their respective materials. As the work evolves they overlap and the music ends as it began, with solo trumpet.
- - -
"The electronic portion was computed at the Columbia University Computer Center, using the Music 360 language, with digital-to-analogue conversion at the Nevis Laboratories."

This recording of FOLlA was made possible by grants from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music, Inc., the Fromm Music Foundation, the Contemporary Music Society and Joseph Machlis. The recordings of EXTENSIONS, MlMlANA II and GROUP VARIATIONS were made possible by grants from the American Composers Alliance.

Sinéad O'Connor, "Sacrifice"

sc

Charles Dodge, "Cascando"

CASCANDO
REALIZATION OF SAMUEL BECKETT'S RADIO PLAY BY CHARLES DODGE

CAST OF CHARACTERS
Opener - John Nesci
Voice - Computer synthesis based on a reading by Steven Cilborn
Music - Computer synthesis based on Voice

Realization made at the computer centers of Columbia University and the City University of New York and the Center for Computer Music at Brooklyn College.

CHARLES DODGE
CASCANDO
realization made at the computer centers of Columbia University and the City University of New York and the Center for Computer Music at Brooklyn College

CHARLES DODGE (b. 1942, Ames, lowa) has long been recognized as an accomplished composer of computer music. He was one of the first composers to use computer speech and speech music synthesis in composition. He studied composition at the University of lowa, Aspen, Tanglewood and Columbia University. Among his teachers were Richard Hewig, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Berger, Gunther Schuller, Jack Beeson, Chou Wen-chung and Otto Luening. He studied electronic music with Vladimir Ussachevsky and computer music with Godfrey Winham and has done research in computer music at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. He was Visiting Research Musician at the University of California at San Diego, and he has been Visiting Composer-in-Residence at the M.I.T. summer course in computer music on several occasions. Most of his works since 1970 have been recorded, including those on CRI SD 300 and 348. In 1980, he became Professor of Music at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York where he is director of the Center for Computer Music and Coordinator of Undergraduate and Graduate Programs in Composition. CASCANDO is dedicated to his wife, Katharine Schlefer Dodge.

CASCANDO is Charles Dodge's realization of Samuel Beckett's radio play of 1963. Like Beckett's Words and Music, Cascando has three characters: Opener ("Dry as dust"), Voice ("low, panting"), and Music. "Music" is not characterized by Beckett, but he indicates very precisely in the published play (with rows of dots) where it is to "speak" alone, sound together with Voice, or be overlaid with a comment from Opener. Thus, as Vivian Mercer has remarked in her BeckettBeckett, Cascando could be described as a kind of libretto, and it and Words and Music "inaugurate a new genre-invisible opera."

This "libretto" attracted Dodge when, finishing his Speech Songs (CRI SD 348) in 1972, he began looking for other material for his "pitched speech" composition. At first the Beckett play seemed too long for the purpose, but Dodge ended up using it entirely, word for word, (plus, of course, music for Music). He worked at it, off and on, for more than five years. Beckett gave Dodge permission to "musicalize" Cascando, but initially withheld rights to public presentation. However, on receiving a copy of the finished tape in the spring of 1978, he wrote, "Dear Mr. Dodge: Thank you for your letter of April with the tape of your CASCANDO. Okay for public performance." (Dodge finds the "your" flattering, and we shall see presently how accurate it is.)

There are about as many interpretations of the meaning of Beckett's drama as there have been interpreters of it. Perhaps the narrative Voice is that of Opener himself, the former trying desperately to tell the very last story-to "finish it ... then sleep ... no more stories ... no more words."-while the latter (austere, confident, presiding) opens and closes the bits of story and music, aware (as Hugh Kenner says in A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett) that he is "incomprehensible to censorious folk called 'they"':

They say, That is not his life, he does not live on that. They
don't see me, they don't see what my life is, they don't
see what I live on, and they say, That is not his life, he
does not live on that.
Pause.
I have lived on it. . . pretty long.

The story that Voice tries to tell is about a man called Woburn, going out at night on a familiar search ("same old coat ... same old stick"), who keeps falling (=cascando) "...on purpose or not ... can't see ... he's down ... that's what counts," in mud, in sand, in stones, finally in the bilge of an oarless, tillerless boat "heading out ... vast deep ... no more land." Voice breathlessly follows Woburn, dying to end his story ("...to see him ... say him"), hoping that "this time ... it's the right one." Music is with Voice in this quest; Opener comments, pehaps with wonderment, "From one world to another, it's as though they drew together." But, at the close, although Woburn clings on (to the boat? to the narrating Voice which cries "come on ... come on" together with Music?), there is only extinction. (The last word of the play, a direction, is "Silence.")

The three characters of the drama are realized by Dodge in three different ways: Opener is represented by a normal speaking voice (that of actor John Nesci); Voice is represented by synthesized pitched speech derived from a reading of the part by another actor (Steven Gilborn); Music is represented electronically, but it is derived from, and relates directly to, the opening speech of Voice. It may be useful to describe the various steps along the way to the final composition, partly to insist on the close relationship between computer-aided synthesis of sound (as Charles Dodge does it) and traditional ways of composing-to insist, that is, on the profound musicality of Dodge's CASCANDO.

Dodge began by composing the basic part for Voice, from start to finish. Both rhythm and pitch are notated conventionally, but Separately. Both were arrived at empirically, not according to any "system." The rhythms are close to natural speech rhythms. The pitch-successions are freely chromatic but not twelve-tone; they were chosen, says Dodge, "to capture the spirit of what I thought the Voice was like." Also, Beckett's many repetitions of words and phrases-but in many different contexts-were taken into account: "I tried to use the same pitch successions for the same words, when they recur. The problem became how to compose a pitch-pattern for a particular word that would be suitable in all of the contexts in which it occurs." The pitch-patterns of individual words, then, became recognizable musical motifs, and their recurrence is a significant factor in the integration of the work.

The separation of rhythm and pitch components facilitated things at the next stage of composition. Steven Gilborn recorded the Voice part, reading it in the rhythms Dodge had given it but not attempting to reproduce the pitch-patterns. That recording was run through a computer, programmed so as to convert it from analog to digital state-to a stream of numbers- and to analyze the material on the tape in infinitesimal detail: the computer analysis is of some 24 attributes of sound, of which four are printed out: (1) high frequency amplitude; (2) low frequency amplitude; (3) ERRN, a relationship between (1) and (2) which helps distinguish between voiced and unvoiced phonemes; and (4) the average pitch, expressed in cycles per second. The print-out consists of pages and pages of lines of "frame numbers," each line representing the four attributes at 11120 of a second. The beginning (only) of the sound of the "c" in Voice's first line, ("if you could finish it"), for example, looks like this in the computer analysis of Gilborn's reading:



With the print-out of the computer analysis, Dodge had a finely detailed picture of the Voice part, with the rhythmic component more or less as he wished it. Next came a re-synthesis of Voice, based on the Gilborn reading as analyzed by the computer (and the analysis studied by Dodge) but now introducing the desired pitch-successions and the quality of the sound. The latter, Dodge had decided, was to-have both pitch and noise components in about equal measure, "as though you made simultaneously a pitched voice and a whispered voice!' This resulted poignant, too.

Now the synthesized Voice was re-converted to analog tape, and, with razor blade and splicing tape. Dodge went to work editing it, to make sure that all the timings were just the way he wanted them. This, then, was the Voice part.

In Dodge's realization of Cascando. Opener's part is left unmusicalized: it is simply a recording of an actual human voice. This was taped separately, the actor who read it going through the part a few times, Dodge choosing the best take of each passage. The parts for Voice and Music, however, are musicalized. There are eight "solos" for each, alternating as the piece unfolds, and at times they engage in "duets:' Having finished the composition of the Voice, and the tape-editing of the Opener, Dodge turned to Music. How was it to relate to Voice (if at all), and how were the two to interrelate (if at all) during the duets?

Dodge decided to relate Music's quality of sound to that of Voice by having it, too, consist in equal-mixture pitch and noise, and he decided that the pitch-succession of the two would also be related:

What I finally settled on was that the sound-quality of Music would be directly derived from the recording of Voice by feeding the synthesized Voice back into the computer and doing further operations on it to eliminate its intelligibility but to magnify its pitch-and-noise quality-its musicality. It was to be almost as if you trained on the Voice a microscope so powerful that the larger patterns, forming words, would be imperceptible; only the microscopic details would be apparent. Or as if you took a magnifying glass to a photo in a newspaper and viewed the individual dots, all of varying shades of grey.

Also, the pitch-patterns of Music, I decided, would be related directly to those of Voice's opening speech, but greatly elongated.

The latter relationship-between the pitch-patterns of Music and those of Voice-is based on an inversion of the latter. However, each of the pitches thus derived is greatly protracted, and there are many overlappings of pitches, so that, to the ear, the derivation of Music from the opening speech of Voice is hardly perceptible.

On the relationship between Voice and Music in their duets (of which there are five): Throughout the play, Voice is very fragmentary; it constantly starts and stops. Says Dodge:

I wanted to capture something of that in the music, but not to have the music starting and stopping. So what I did was to "track," in the computer, the way Voice starts and stops. When the voice is "on"--that is when the computer, in "reading" the Voice parts, finds that there is sound--it emphasizes pitch qualities. When it finds that there is silence, it emphasizes noise qualities.

Another kind of relationship between Voice and Music in the duets was derived from the fact that speech has two kinds of syllables, voiced and unvoiced. The word "story:' for example, consists of two voiced syllables ("0-ry") preceded by an unvoiced one ("st-"). The predominance of noise or pitch at any given moment in Music's part was partly determined by the nature of Voice's syllables at that moment, and by the order of voiced vs. unvoiced syllables. In short, Voice "triggers" Music, which is why in the duets Music often seems to well up shortly following Voice: there is a tiny time-lag.

The actual mixing of the Voice/Music duets was done in the computer, as the last pre-editing act. Then came the job of putting everything together: spoken voice (Opener), synthesized voice (Voice), synthesized music (Music), and the duets. By January 1983, Dodge's CASCANDO ("your" Cascando, said Beckett) was complete. -- H. Wiley Hitchcock, Director, Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College

STEVEN GILBORN is a professional actor whose favorite medium is the stage. He has performed leading roles at regional theaters all around the country: among those roles are Prospero, Brutus, Malvolio, and Benedick. He has also worked extensively in radio, television and film, his most recent movie appearances being in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute and Vamping. CASCANDO is his third collaboration with Charles Dodge. JOHN NESCl has worked with Charles Dodge on recordings of Richard Kostelanetz's He Met Her in the Park and the radio serial Lights from Below. Nesci has appeared in films and on television and the stage. His work includes productions with Mabou Mines, La Mama Etc., Sam Shepard and Robert Wilson. Originally from Chicago, Nesci lives and works in New York City.

CRl's Board of Trustees wishes to express its gratitude to the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation and the Norman and Rosita Winston Foundation for support during 1982-83.

This recording was made possible by grants from the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University.
Liner: 1983 Composers Recordings, Inc.
FOR CRI
Producer: Carter Harman
Product Manager: Michael Bennett
Cover: Judith Lerner 1983
LC#: 83-7431 93
1983 Composers Recordings, Inc.
THIS IS A COMPOSER-SUPERVISED RECORDING

Chrisette Michelle, "Mr. Right"

cm

Francois Bayle, "Vibrations Composees"

Vibrations Composees
35'58 -- 1973

First series rosace 1 -- respiration -- rosace 2 -- texture -- rosace 3
Second series rosace 4 -- polyrythmy -- small polyphony -- rosace 5



Some motions of vibrations can be organically linked to produce compositions of forces, morphodynamic singularities beneath the threshold of the audible. There results from this a special, intense type of audition which attends carefully to the palpitations of the material, its emotivity, its "respiration", its "texture", the movement of its patterns. This is the basis of the progression, an increasing step by step richness, of the short compositions called "rosaces". In effect it is a matter of attaining, through successive stages of auditive adaptation, the central experience of the last "rosace" -- the fifth -- which presents itself as the core of the composition, the heart of the organism. Meanwhile various interjected digressions and departures offer us imaginary breathings, textures, polyrhythms, small polyphonies.
One gets a sense of perspective: the trajectory is temporarily suspended at the center of its spiral (rosace 5).
Beyond, for a later time, a larger polyphony...
(There is now a distance between the two separate pieces, which were formerly joined: they must be visited separately).
The listener is urged to pick out the vocabulary of "dynams".
* The two pieces share a repertory consisting of:
isolated instrumental notes or sound objects linear extensions of thin sounds -- lines deployed in fanlike or whiplike formations
* as opposed to more elaborate formations:
colored masses of rustlings -- muted or scanning rhythms -- veiled songs - chaotic fragments that gradually become organized or, on the contrary, stuck regularities that dissolve into drifting smoke - streams of points that wrap themselves around motifs.

First series premiered on February 12, 1974 at the Espace Cardin in Paris. The full composition
premiered on october 15, 1974 in the main amphitheatre of the Sorbonne in Paris.

Gomez, "Airstream Driver"

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Francois Bayle, "Grande Polyphonie"

Grande Polyphonie
36'22 -- 1974

appel 0'46

polyphonies:

1...aux lignes actives 4'20

2...aux notes repetees 2'51

3...au jardin 5'13

4...figures doubles 5'14

5 ou grande polyphonie: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 16'20

rappel 1'42

Call...
Polyphony: 1...with active lines
The simplest concrete element, the line, thin and melodic arrives fastest at an abstraction of qualities. Active, passive, or intermediate, the true line is, according to Klee, the line subjected to a strong tension.
2...with repeated notes
Brief, equal, clear values scrabled by the patter of bells emitting call signals. Rigid, transposed, very tense repetition. Followed by a third, deep, abbreviated repetition. Transition, interrupted rubato.
3...with garden
A polyphony of space and colors. Contrast between very brief, delicate fragments--dry versus fluid - and ample quivering sheets having harmonic colors - static versus moving.
4...double figures
Combination of symmetries. Two contrasting parts - like male and female - organized in series of paired cells. These are varied up to the eighth repetition, where the first element is then brought to a completion. The mirror-repeats are enriched with successive transformations through added harmonics.
Then a new, very dynamic element appears - a man's mask bringing tidings...
5...large polyphony
A brief moment in the guise of a preface prepares the final "recall". Seven interconnected sections - though it is not immediately clear how they are related. Various sound signals are heard at frequent intervals, making it manifest that the role of the previous polyphonies was to lead up to the final combination. This makes it possible to listen in a musical way with a great deal of freedom, independence, superposing different voices. All the sound spaces used here resemble each other, from the more artificial and abstract ones to the totally concrete ones, which range from bird calls and songs to human calls and songs.
And finally, the initial call signal dissolves in a long breath,
recall...

Premiered on Radio France in Paris on April 7, 1975
Concert for the 18 Nations of the European Broadcasting Union

Jim Croce, "A Long Time Ago"

jc

Mel Powell

-- LINER NOTES --

EVENTS for tape recorder
Voices: Mildred Dunnock, Martha Scott, Lee Bowman

IMPROVISATION
Ward Davenny, piano; Keith Wilson, clarinef; David Schwarfz, viola

SECOND ELECTRONIC SETTING

TWO PRAYER SETTINGS
New York Chamber Soloists; Charles Bressler, tenor; Melvin Kaplan, conductor

MEL POWELL (b. 1923) is Chairman of the composition faculty and Director of the Electronic Music Studio at Yale. His music is characterized by a delicate lyricism that never descends to mere preciosity, and by a passion for clarity and immediacy that illumines even his most complex works.

EVENTS (1963) uses three pre-recorded voices and electronically-generated sounds. Each of the actors was asked to read Hart Crane's "Legend." The recorded voices were then treated exactly like the electronic sounds, and their overlappings and transformations result in a poem-collage. The simultaneities, and the returns and repeats of isolated phrases and words create a number of subsidiary meanings and associations, thus "interpreting" the poem. Intertwined with the poem-collage, and interacting with it, are the electronic sounds, and the interaction makes EVENTS Powell's most overtly dramatic piece.

IMPROVISATION (1962), a commission of the Yale University Summer School of Music, and TWO PRAYER SETTINGS (1963), written for the New York Chamber Soloists, make use of tightly controlled polyphonic webs which nevertheless allow each performer considerable freedom. The controls tend to create harmonic areas with clearly delimited interval content which often coincide with and unify motivic groups, as well control of the directional thrusts of the groups and their manner of attack. At times the tempo indication requires that each player perform as fast as possible without regard for the vertical correlation of the parts.

In IMPROVISATION the fluctuations of the tempo and the relatively complex writing in the strictly ensemble sections obscure the division between these and the freer sections, creating a continuum from one to the other.

In the TWO PRAYER SETTINGS, the strings are treated as a single polyphonic instrument and set against the oboe and the voice. The work is so rooted in the delivery of the texts that often they can be understood as normal discourse. Thus, the most complex passages occur when the voice is silent as, for example, at the opening of the second setting. The words of the first setting are by Paul Goodman, those of the second are attributed to Gregory the Great.

The SECOND ELECTRONIC SETTING (1962) contrasts sharply with EVENTS. Its divertimento-like surface and straight-forward structure make apparent the amazing technical virtuosity of the work. The individuality of the parts is made explicit by their own registral, timbral and rhythmic characteristics; thus the SETTING carries to the electronic medium some of Powell's attitudes towards instrumental music. However, like every true virtuoso performance, the piece can be enjoyed for its sheer engaging sound by listeners who do not care how it was put together.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters and its parent organization, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, are honorary societies with a distinguished membership of creative artists. They are chartered by an act of Congress and are devoted to the furtherance of the arts in the United States.

Through joint committees of selection, these societies every year award fifteen grants to young artists in recognition of distinction and promise. Four of these awards go annually to composers, in addition to the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award given every third year to an established composer of distinction.

In the spring an exhibition of the works of award winners in painting and sculpture is held at the Academy building. In 1956, it was decided to inaugurate a series of recordings with the similar purpose of calling attention to the works of award winners in music. This release, presented in collaboration with Composers Recordings, Inc. offers works by 1963 award winners, Vladimir Ussachevsky and Mel Powell.

This recording has been processed in Unlversal Stereo. For best results It should be played on stereophonic equipment, but it may also be played on modern monaural machines.

St. Vincent, "Actor Out of Work"

sv

Bulent Arel, "Mimiana III: Six & Seven"

Mimiana III: Six & Seven (12:23)

The music is buoyant in nature and was composed following a list of various rhythms and tempos previously designed by the choreographer Mimi Garrard. The dance consists of a total of seven dancers, numerically identified by changeable neon-light number displays on the helmets of their costumes, and grouped into a set of six against the single seventh dancer. Throughout the dance, the six reject the seventh dancer by either ganging up on, or retreating from her. The music opens with an exposition of the numbers from 1 through 7. As # 1 appears, the single basic beat is heard in the music. When #2 and # 3 arrive, the beat is subdivided into two and three (triplet) pulses respectiveIy. So it continues, in the manner of an inventory of the numbers through the introduction of the work. When a certain number is highlighted in the dance, its musical motive reappears. This beginning section uses overlapping phrases of these subdivisions forming smooth layers of sounds. The music progresses toward a gradually introduced double-bass type sound which outlines each beat clearly and dominates the ending section of the work. In the end, as the seventh dancer finally expires, repetitions of a high seven-tone ostinato are heard, as the music erds by gradually fading away.

Mimiana III was composed using electronic sounds including the Buchla synthesizer as an elaborate source material generator in combination with tape mixing and editing techniques.

Yusuf, "Be What You Must"

Bulent Arel, "Mimiana II: Frieze"

-- LINER NOTES --

MIMIANA 11: FRIEZE
(By Bulent Arel; Time: 13:02)

The choreography for Frieze was completed some time before the musical score was composed. After seeing the dance, the composer's general impression was that of early Egyptian reliefs in which the human faces are seen in profile, while their torsos are facing outward. The dance suggested a feeling of a completely ritualistic procession consisting of slow and deliberate movements of the dancers. Except for a few contrasting short bursts of fast, active sequences, the dance never lost its hypnotic character.

In the musical score, all sounds are electronically produced and, coincidentally, the work reflects some tonal feelings. From the middle part of the score, where "pure sounds" or sine waves x e used, microtones are introduced and begin to give a descending character to the previously existing- pitches by gradually shifting the pitch structure downward-creating an intentionally blurred pitch relation. The sound colors and articulations are restricted only to those which seemed to best reflect the feeling of the dance.

BULENT AREL (b. Istanbul, Turkey, 1919) graduated from the State Conservatory of Ankara, with a diploma in composition, piano, and conducting. He taught harmony and counterpoint in the same conservatory and piano and history of music at the Teacher's College in Ankara. He was one of the founders of the Helikon Society of Contemporary Arts, and was the regular conductor of !he Helikon Chamber Orchestra for four years.

He studied sound engineering in Ankara under Joze Bernard and Willfried Garret of the Radio Diffusion Francaise, both members of the Club d'Essai of Paris. This collaboration marked the start of his interest in musique concrete, which later led him to electronic music. From 1951 until 1959 he worked at Radio Ankara as recording engineer and then as the Musical Director. In 1958 he pioneered in the field of electronic music combined with conventional instruments, with Music for String Quartet and Oscillator.

In 1959 he came to the United States as the recipient of a Rockefeller Research Grant for work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and in 1961 worked as an assistant to Vladimir Ussachevsky. The next year, he was lecturer at Yale University, where he installed an electronic music studio. Back in Turkey between 1963 and 1965, he composed the score for a musical which ran in Istanbul for over a year. In 1969 he was appointed Associate Professor and Director of the Electronic Music Studio at Yale and in September 1971, he became Professor of Music and Director of the Electronic Music Studio at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

In 1974 he was completing a work for viols and electronic sounds commissioned by the New York Consort of Viols under a New York State Council of the Arts grant. He also received a National Endowment of the Arts grant in 1974, for completion of a large-scale piano work for pianist, Robert Miller.

He has composed symphonic works, chamber music, including For Violin and Piano (1966) recorded on CRI SD 264, and music for solo instruments. Of his many electronic works is Stereo Electronic Music No. 2 recorded on CRI SD 268.

The composer writes:

"Mimiana 11: Frieze was commissioned by the Mimi.Garrard Dance Company. The choreography was completed some time before the musical score was composed. My general impression of the dance was of early Egyptian reliefs in which the human faces are seen in profile, while their torsos are facing outward. The dance gave me the feeling of a completely ritualistic procession consisting of slow and deliberate dancers' movements. Except for a few contrasting short bursts of fast, active sequences, the dance never lost its hypnotic character.

"In the musical score, all the sounds are electronically produced. Coincidently, the composition reflects some tonal feelings. From the middle part of the score, where the 'pure sounds' or sine waves are used, micro-tones are introduced and begin to give a descending character to the previously existing pitches by very gradually shifting the pitch structure downward - creating an intentionally blurred pitch relation.

"I restricted my sound colors and articulations only to those which would reflect the feeling of the dance. The MlMlANA II: FRIEZE musical score was composed and realized at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1969."

The Shaggs, "I'm So Happy When You're Near"

ts

Bulent Arel, "Mimiana I: Flux"

-- LINER NOTES --

The myriad, diverse sonorities, expressions, and articulations of the electronic music medium provide a remarkable array of musical colors especially suitable for combination with the visual medium of dance.

The electronic music works on this recording were composed expressly for modern dance and were commissioned by choreographer Mimi Garrard in the spac of nearly a decade. Each individual musical work is uniquely related to its own choreography. Collectively, the compositions reflect varying degrees of complexity and diversity of both an aesthetic and technical nature, and a wide range of emotional expression.

In creating a dance work, often the choreographer may chart out a meticulously detailed plan of action on stage, including each beat or count of the dance in exact tempos, descriptions of dancers' movements which may form essential and recurring motives in the dance, and elaborate lighting effects. Then, the musical score is composed to synchronize with these aspects of the choreography. The dancers, in turn, synchronize their own movements to the music throughout the choreography, and the composer's musical score must be lucid, technically precise, as well as a sensitive aesthetic interpretation of the dance. Sometimes, the situation is reversed and the choreography is based on an already composed, previously commissioned electronic work, perhaps itself based on an overall expression or programmatic idea suggested by the choreographer, or else created by the composer as a work purely abstract in nature. In any event, the composer's intention is to create a work which complements the dance and is one of its essential components, and which can exist also as a complete musical work in its own right

In this recording, the composers' virtuosity and musical mastery of the medium is unmistakably evident in these singular and engaging works of electronic music for dance. Bulent Arel's series of Mimianas was produced at the Columbia-Princeton E!ecmnic Music Center, and Daria Semegen's Arc: Music for Dancers was realized at the Electronic Music Studios at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island. The complete works combining choreography, music, and lighting images have been performed by the Mimi Garrard Dance Theatre initially in New York City and subsequently on' tour.

MIMIANA 1: Flux
(By Bulent Arel; Time: 10:40)

The dance work includes a film which projects changing colors, patterns, and numbers on the dancers, creating continuously changing abstract designs. This first electronic music score of the Mimiana series was composed after the choreography was completed, and consists of purely electronic sound phrases which parallel the overall gestures of the dancers, without indicating any specific beats or metric patterns, as such.

Eminem, "Underground"

(It's not often that you get a rap song in 5/8)

e

Bulent Arel, "Stereo Electronic Music No. 1"

BULENT AREL (Turkey) has taught, and composed symphonies, ballets, and chamber and theatre music. Until recently, he was a research assistant at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, having come there on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. STEREO ELECTRONIC MUSIC NO. I, composed of sounds completely derived from electronic sources, is conceived in two general sound groups: undifferentiated continuous sound texture as background, contrasted with more clearly articulated signals. Throughout the work, the motifderived texture remains as a constant, while the articulated signals are developed and expanded by a process which the composer likens to the growth of the branches of a tree.

Manchester Orchestra, "The Only One"

mo

Bulent Arel, "Electronic Music No. 1"

-- LINER NOTES --

ELECTRONIC MUSIC NO. 1 (1960)

The music on this record was produced at the original Columbia University Tape Music Studio and its successor, the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and at the University of Illinois Electronic Music Studio. It includes some of the earliest electronic music released on commercial records, and is reissued by CRI after its deletion on the Son Nova and Heliodor labels. The tapes used in this reissue are all freshly mixed from the original materials.

Three fundamental types of electronic music are represented: (1) tape music composed from materials created from 'natural' (concrete) sounds such as gongs, voices, and instruments; (2) tape music composed from sounds which were generated by electronic instruments such as audio oscillators and manipulated by diverse processing devices; (3) tape music composed from mixtures of concrete and electronic sound sources.

In all of the compositions, the composers employed the customary techniques of manipulating basic source-sounds recorded on magnetic tape. For example, complex sounds were constructed by splicing together short pieces of tape cut from recordings of various basic sounds. The ear perceives a total impression of complexity without being able to distinguish each of the simple components. This mosaic-like technique, which demands considerable patience on the part of the composer, was, in the early days of tape music sometimes regarded as sufficient to the completion of a tape composition.

In these works, however, the composers found it compositionally desirable to further process basic sound sources by way of semi-automatic devices. For example, tape recorders and associated equipment were used to develop continuous patterns of sound, usually characterized by certain rhythmic rigidity, but nevertheless useful. Between the extremes of handicraft and machine work, the composers used a variety of other specialized techniques, made possible by the flexibility of tape and the versatility of electronic equipment. For example, varying speed was used to produce different pitches and timbres; filtering was used to suppress some of the timbral characteristics of a given sound; reverberation to let the echo add color, liveliness, and a sense of spaciousness.

The composers represented here all composed a number of works for conventional instruments prior to turning to the electronic medium. BULENT AREL, (b. 191 9, Istanbul, Turkey) graduated from and taught at the Ankara State Conservatory. He was the first Music Director of Radio Ankara and pioneered in the field of electronic music combined with conventional instruments with his Music for String Quartet and Oscillator (1957), later revised and retitled Music for String Quartet and Tape. In 1959 he came to the United States as the recipient of a Rockefeller Research Grant to the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and contributed significantly both to the technical development and the literature of electronic music with over a dozen major works in his more than a decade association with the Center. He has taught composition at Yale University where he designed and installed the Electronic Music Studio in 1962 and has taught composition and electronic music for several years as visiting lecturer at Columbia University. Since 1971 he has been Professor of Music and Director of the Electronic Music Studio at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has composed a large number of instrumental, chamber, vocal, and symphonic works as well as music for the ballet, theatre, modern dance, television and film. His works include MlMlANA I, 11, 111 for modern dance of which No. II appears on CRI SD 300, FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO (CRI SD 264) and STEREO ELECTRONIC MUSIC NO. 2 (CRI SD 268). He is recipient of National Endowment for the Arts commissions for instrumental and electronic works, Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center commissions, and a New York Cultural Council Foundation commission for his work Fantasy and Dance for Five Viols and Tape.

Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers, "Get The Fever Out"

sc&tms

Vladimir Ussachevsky & Otto Luening, "Concerted Piece"

-- LINER NOTES --

Collaboration in musical composition is much rarer than, say, novel writing and even picture painting. But Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky have been collaborating with eminent success ever since they discovered the possibilities of composition for tape recorders. CONCERTED PIECE is the third and one of the most attractive results of this collaboration, as its frequent public performances attest. CRI is proud of the unusually beautiiul sound of this recording. A Luening-Ussachevsky compositional collaboration starts with a conference. Having agreed that they want to write a piece, they then decide how long it is 'to last, and then what type of effect or quality they wish it to have (it would be fascinating to eavesdrop on this part of the conference). The rest is simply deciding how to divide up the labor. Later conferences help to eliminate unsuccessful efforts and to carpenter the sections together.

CONCERTED PIECE was composed in 1960 on commission by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, and premiered by them that year. The music bears some resemblance to a movement from a classical concerto, with the tape recorder in the role of soloist or concertino. The first part, composed by Mr. Luening, ends with the cadenza for taped sounds alone. It is somewhat more homogenous than the second, composed by Mr. Ussachevsky, which makes considerable use of an antiphonal interplay between the orchestra and tape.

OTTO LUENING had a long and distinguished musical career before he undertook composition on electronic tape. Of his more than 200 compositions, 15 make use of the tape medium; his SYNTHESIS is on CRI 215. In addition to his teaching activities at Columbia University, he is a director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.

VLADlMlR USSACHEVSKY is Professor of Music at Columbia University and-Chairman of the Electronic Music Center. A public presentation of his first tape experiments In May, 1952, was the first performance of what became known as tape music-an indigenous American development. Besides a number of compositions for tape, he has produced two extensive film scores, one for "No Exit", a screen adaptation of Jean Paul Sartre's famous play, and another for a forty-five minute zbstract movie "Line of Apogee", by Lloyd Williams. In 1967 and 1968 he was invited by the Bell Telephone Laboratories at Murray Hill, N. J. to investigate possibilities of sound synthesis on computers.

New York Dolls, "Trash"

nyd

Otto Luening, "Gargoyles"

OTTO LUENING (United States) studied music in Munich and Zurich. The artistic influence of Andreae, Jarnach and Busoni helped to form his career. He has composed over two hundred works, and is also an active conductor and educator. Since 1952, he has been a close collaborator with Vladimir Ussachevsky in the field of electronic music. GARGOYLES is a composition for violin solo and synthesized sound. The synthesized sound material was produced on the Synthesizer, and later manipulated by tape techniques. The composition consists of a subject and series of short variations, each complete in itself. Some are synthetic and others are for the solo violin. Several variations combine solo and tape. The single tones of the subject introduce different shades of the same type of sound, and continue to accumulate until the end of the piece when the subject is transformed completely. The violin variations function as lyric contrasts to the synthetic ones, which are mostly dramatic and brilliant. The violin solo part is played by Max Pollikoff.

Crocodiles, "Sleeping With the Lord"

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Milton Babbitt, "Composition for Synthesizer"

-- LINER NOTES --

MILTON BABBITT (United States), Professor of Music at Princeton, composer, writer and lecturer, has had compositions performed both here and abroad. He received the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, among other recognitions of his work. COMPOSITION FOR SYNTHESIZER is a purely electronic work. It was created entirely on the Synthesizer and the output has not been subjected to any further mutations or modifications. The composition is less concerned with "new sounds and timbres" than with the control and specification of linear and total rhythms, loudness rhythms and relationships, and flexibility of pitch succession, which can be secured through the programming control of the Synthesizer.

Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, "Nikorette"

Halim El-Dabh, "Leiyla and the Poet"

-- LINER NOTES --

HALIM EL-DABH (Egypt) is United States-educated and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959. He has composed symphonies and concertos, and his ballet, Clytemnestra, was recently performed by Martha Graham and her company. LEIYLA AND THE POET uses purely electronic sounds sparingly but obtains most of its effects by applying the tape manipulation technique of speed transposition, and electronic reverberation, to the instrumental and vocal materials prepared and recorded by the composer. The work is an incident from a work in progress, Electronic Drama, No. 1. Mr. El-Dabh's libretto, inspired by the ancient Arabic ode Majnum LeiyIa, is concerned with a madman and a poet who attempt to persuade Leiyla to follow different paths, either that of a free woman or that which would bind her to unbreakable ties. The chorus, when uttering words recognizable and unrecognizable, inflicts opposing ideas on the drama's three characters.

Death Cab for Cutie, "Little Bribes"

dcfc

Mario Davidovsky, "Synchronisms 1 & 2"

-- LINER NOTES --

MARIO DAVIDOVSKY
Three Synchronisms for instruments and electronic sounds
NO. 1 FOR FLUTE (1963) HARVEY SOLLBERGER (flute)
NO. 2 FOR FLUTE, CLARINET, VIOLIN, CELLO (1964) Sophie Sollberger (flute) Stanley Drucker (clarinet)
Paul Zukofsky (violin), Robert L. Martin ( cello), Efrain Guigui (conductor)

MARIO DAVIDOVSK (b. Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1934) pursued his musical studies in Argentina, working in composition with Guillermo Graetzer, Teodoro Fuchs, Erwin Leuchter, 2nd Ernesto Epstein. In the United States he has studied with Otto Luening and Aaron Copland. Since coming to the United States in 1958, Mr. Davidovsky has won more than a dozen major awards, fellowships and commissions, among them two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, a Koussevitzky Foundation commission and a Fromm Foundation commission for the Synchronism No. 2 recorded here.

While Mr. Davidovsky's reputation has rested largely on the works composed in connection with his association with the electronic music center at Columbia and Princeton universities, his catalog of compositions includes a considerable variety of scores for non-electronic media - chief among them being twp string quartets, a clarinet quintet, Ylanos for orchestra, El Payaso ballet suite, and Serie Sinfdnica. A 1965 Fromm Foundation commission has resulted in Mr. Davidovsky's composition, Inflexions for 14 Players.

Concerning the Three Synchronisms recorded here, Mr. Davidovsky notes that "They belong to a series of short pieces wherein conventional instruments are used in conjunction with electronic sounds. The attempt here has been made to preserve the typical characteristics of the conventional instruments and of the electronic medium respectively - yet to achieve integration of both into a coherent musical texture."

"In the planning and realization of these pieces," Mr. Davidovsky notes further, "two main problems arise - namely proper synchronization (a) of rhythm and (b) of pitch. During the shorter episodes where both electronic and conventional instruments are playing, rather strict timing is adhered to. However, in the more extended episodes of this type, an element of chance is introduced to allow for the inevitable time discrepancies that develop between the live performer(s) and the constant-speed tape recorder.

"To achieve pitch coherence between the conventional instruments which use the 12-tone chromatic scale and the electronic medium which is non-tempered, use is made of tonal occurrences of very high density - manifesied for example by a very high speed succession of attacks, possible only in the electronic medium. Thus, in such instances - based on high speed and short duration of separate tones, it is impossible for the ear to perceive the pure pitch value of each separate event; though in reacting, it does trace so to speak a statistical curve of the density. Only in a very few instances have tempered electronic pitches been employed in the Synchronisms. Throughout all three pieces, the tape recorder has been used as an integral part of the instrumental fabric."

Coven, "Blood on the Snow"

Mario Davidovsky, "Electronic Study No. 2"

MARIO DAVIDOVSKY
ELECTRONIC STUDY NO. 2 (1962)
Tape realized at the Columbia-Princeton
Electronic Music Center

The music on this record was produced at the original Columbia University Tape Music Studio and its successor, the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and at the University of Illinois Electronic Music Studio. It includes some of the earliest electronic music released on commercial records, and is reissued by CRI after its deletion on the Son Nova and Heliodor labels. The tapes used in this reissue are all freshly mixed from the original materials.

Three fundamental types of electronic music are represented: (1) tape music composed from materials created from 'natural' (concrete) sounds such as gongs, voices, and instruments; (2) tape music composed from sounds which were generated by electronic instruments such as audio oscillators and manipulated by diverse processing devices; (3) tape music composed from mixtures of concrete and electronic sound sources.

In all of the compositions, the composers employed the customary techniques of manipulating basic source-sounds recorded on magnetic tape. For example, complex sounds were constructed by splicing together short pieces of tape cut from recordings of various basic sounds. The ear perceives a total impression of complexity without being able to distinguish each of the simple components. This mosaic-like technique, which demands considerable patience on the part of the composer, was, in the early days of tape music sometimes regarded as sufficient to the completion of a tape composition.

In these works, however, the composers found it compositionally desirable to further process basic sound sources by way of semi-automatic devices. For example, tape recorders and associated equipment were used to develop continuous patterns of sound, usually characterized by certain rhythmic rigidity, but nevertheless useful. Between the extremes of handicraft and machine work, the composers used a variety of other specialized techniques, made possible by the flexibility of tape and the versatility of electronic equipment. For example, varying speed was used to produce different pitches and timbres; filtering was used to suppress some of the timbral characteristics of a given sound; reverberation to let the echo add color, liveliness, and a sense of spaciousness.

The composers represented here all composed a number of works for conventional instruments prior to turning to the electronic medium.

Pulitzer Prize-winner MARIO DAVIDOVSKY (b. Argentina, 1934) has lived in New York since 1960, the year of his first Guggenheim Fellowship. Since then he has become renowned for his important SYNCHRONISMS series for electronic,sound and traditional instruments (CRI SD 204 and 268), and for the elegance and refinement of his instrumental works (CRI SD 305). He has won the Naumburg, the Brandeis Creative Arts and the National Academy of Arts and Letters Awards, two Guggenheim Fellowships and two Rockefeller Fellowships. He has received commissions from, among others, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Pan American Union, the New York Chamber Soloists, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, the Fromm Foundation and the Juilliard String Quartet. He is now (1976) Associate Director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and Professor of Music at the City College of New York.

SIDE 1
Davidovsky: ELECTRONIC STUDY NO. 2 is a tightly organized work, basically a succession of percussive sounds. The pitch is indeterminate, but the quality of sound gives the impression that it originated from a variety of resonant membranes. The composer here avoids using any semi-automatic processes of generating or modifying the sounds, and works for the complete control of every detail of his composition. This work was originally distributed on four tracks of tape, each connected to a separate loudspeaker. Even in this two-track stereo version, the place of origin of any given sound combination has a definite structural significance.

Chuck Mangione, "Give It All You Got"

(Commissioned by ABC Sports for the 1980 Winter Olympics)

Mario Davidovsky, "Electronic Studies 1 & 3"

Mario Davidovsky, Electronic Study No. 1
Mario Davidovsky, Electronic Study No. 3

-- LINER NOTES --

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS TO A PROGRAM OF WORKS PRODUCED AT THE COLUMBIA-PRINCETON ELECTRONIC MUSIC CENTER, GIVEN AT THE MCMILLIN THEATRE OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ON MAY 9 AND 10, 1961:
Your presence here, at a concert of electronic music, is a compliment to the composers, as well as to the two Universities that sponsor their work; and while I extend to you a welcome on behalf of the Universities i also wish to convey the composers' hope that you will be as gratified by hearing their works as they are by your willingness to listen.

No doubt your expectations are mixed. You are ready to be surprised, to have your curiosity satisfied, and possibly even to experience snatches of enjoyment as you would at an ordinary concert. If that is your state of mind I am fairly sure you will not be disappointed. But it may be that you are here in a mood of combined trepidation and resistance: this, after all, is the Age of Anxiety. . . .Or you may be bent on proving that electronic music is not music -- doing this by the most painful test of endurance, or else you may be feeling caught because you have been brought by a friend and friendship is dearer to you than prudence.

If for these or any other reasons you are ill at ease, allow me to suggest a very few considerations which should make you more serene, while leaving you your full freedom of opinion, your entire right to dislike and reject. I suggest, to begin with, that we are not here to like or approve but to understand. And the first step to understanding a new art is to try to imagine why the maker wants it the way it is. That is interesting in itself, even if we ultimately disown the product. To understand in this fashion does not mean to accept passively because someone says that the stuff is new and therefore good, that many believe in it, that it's going to succeed anyway, so it's best to resign oneself to the inevitable. This kind of reasoning has gone on about modern art for some thirty years and nothing has been more harmful to the arts. It is an inverted philistinism, which eliminates judgment and passion just as surely as did the older philistinism of blind opposition to whatever was new.

What then is the decent, reasonable attitude to adopt? Very simple: make the assumption, first, that the old style-whatever it is-has exhausted its possibilities and can only offer repetition or trivial variations of the familiar masterpieces. I do not suggest that you should be convinced that your favorite music is obsolete. I invite you to assume that it may be: for by trying to think that it is, as the new composer obviously has done, you will begin to discover what he is up to. By way of encouragement let me remind you that you make this very assumption automatically four or five times in every classical concert, in order to adjust your ear to the changes in style between Bach and Mozart, Mozart and Richard Strauss, and-if you can between Strauss and Alban Berg. If styles and genres did not suffer exhaustion, there would be only one style and form in each art from its beginnings to yesterday.

But, you may say, electronic music is something else again; it is out of bounds; the jump is too great. There is no semblance of scale, the sounds are new, most of them are in fact noises. Ah noise! Noise is the most constant complaint in the history of music. In the heyday of music it was not only Berlioz and Wagner who were damned as noisy. Mozart before them and Haydn, and even earlier Lully and Handel. I suspect that the reason Orpheus was torn to pieces by women is that he made horrendous noises on his lyre while they were washing their clothes at the river in what they thought was melodious silence. The argument of noise is always irrelevant. The true question is: does this noise, when familiar, fall into intelligible forms and impressive contents? To supply the answer takes time. One hearing, two, three, are not enough. Something must change in the sensibility itself, in the way that a foreign language suddenly breaks into meaning and melody after months or years of its being mere noise. As a veteran of the premiere of Stravinsky's Sucre du Printemps in Paris, I can testify to the ieality of the change. At the end of the piece, the conductor Pierre Monteux turned around amid the furious howls of the audience and said that since they had liked the piece so much he would play it again. The response was no better and the police had to quell the tumult. But now, fifty years after, the young accept those hammering rhythms and dissonant chords as if they were lullabies. They relish them while dallying in canoes, at the movies to accompany Disney's abstractions, and at the circus, where the music is used for the elephants to dance to.

Associations, in short, and assumptions and expectations rule our judgments. They govern our feelings, which we think are altogether spontaneous and truthful. But our sensibility is always more complex and more resourceful than we suppose, and that is why I have ventured to bring to your conscious notice what you knew all the time but might not allow for sufficiently in listening to electronic music for the first time.

The word "electronic" suggests a final objection with which it is well to have come to grips. Most people of artistic tastes share the widespread distrust and dislike of machinery and argue that anything pretending to be art cannot come out of a machine: art is the human product par excellence, and electronic music, born of intricate circuits and the oscillations of particles generated by Con Edison, is a contradiction in terms. Here again the answer is simple: the moment man ceased to make music with his voice alone the art became machineridden. Orpheus's lyre was a machine, a symphony orchestra is a regular factory for making artificial sounds, and a piano is the most appalling contrivance of levers and wires this side of the steam engine.

Similarly, the new electronic devices are but a means for producing new materials to play with. What matters is not how they are produced but how they are used. And as to that we are entitled to ask the old questions--do we find the substance rich, evocative, capable of subtlety and strength? Do we, after a while, recognize patterns to which we can respond with our sense of balance, our sense of suspense and fulfillment, our sense of emotional and intellectual congruity? Those are the problems, beyond the technical, which our composers have tried to solve. We shall now attend to their handiwork with pleasure and gratitude (I hope) and certainly with a generous fraction of the patience they have themselves invested in their efforts to please us. -- JACQUES BARZUN

The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was established in 1959 with the assistance of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The Center provides three studios for composition and research in the electronic production of music. One studio houses the RCA Electronic Sound Synthesizer and related recording equipment, the others contain specialized equipment for sound generation and modification. Earlier grants from the Foundation made through Barnard College, allotment of space and other assistance by Columbia University have enabled Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky of Columbia to conduct joint experiments in the medium, with technical assistance from Mr. Peter Mauzey. The Center is jointly administered by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky of Columbia University and Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions of Princeton University.

MARIO DAVIDOVSKY (Argentina) studied composition with Maestro Guillermo Graetzer in Argentina and Aaron Copland in the United States. He has written ballet, chamber, theatre and film music. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, he is presently a staff member there. The sounds for ELECTRONIC STUDY NO. 1 were initially derived from three electronic sources: sinusoidal and square wave generators, and white noise. Conversion of these sounds into compositional materials was achieved by use of filters, reverberation chamber and through different recording processes. Basically, the STUDY is built upon five sound mixtures working as a series which is inverted, transposed and interpolated, and the sound mixtures are changed in density and intensity from the original. The material is developed through four carefully timed sections.

Electronic Study No. 3 in Memoriam Edgar Varese was completed in 1965 at the Electronic Music Center of Princeton and Columbia Universities. Primarily, the piece is constructed on its most basic level, using articulative processes available only in the electronic media. The intense concentration and speed of ocurring events, together with the very sharp articulation characteristics of the piece, give it a very idiosyncratic texture.

Your Next American Idol:

Kris Allen!! 
I mean, it has to be, right? There just can't be any way that America is truly gaga over Adam Lambert, is there?

Is he super-talented? Yes. But I just don't see our everloving tweens buying what he's selling.

When he puts on his "Oh" face and trots out that paint-peeling screech, it takes me right back to 1986, but is that what the kids are in to? Seems to me like Kris is right up their alley.

If you ever needed to explain to aliens what tastelessness sounds like, you could show them Adam's version of "A Change Is Gonna Come". While you can make a career out of bad taste (and remember, I am a fan of it), the Kelly Clarkson/Carrie Underwood-level of fame is gonna elude a guy like Adam. Kris, on the other hand, could totally grow into that kind of a career.

Donald Erb, "Prismatic Variations"

Beaver & Krause, "Spaced"

Donald Erb, "Music for a Festive Occasion"

Grizzly Bear, "Foreground"

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Donald Erb, "Honor, Honor"

"Even in a land of uprightness they go on doing evil"

Robert Draper's article in GQ doesn't reveal much of anything new about Donald Rumsfeld. We already knew he was a "fucking asshole".

What we didn't know was that those oft-cited daily security briefings that Bush got were slathered in Biblical imagery. In all those fawning exit interviews, when Bush was asked, "Can the average American know how hard it is to be President?", he'd shake his head and say, "You can't understand it unless you're in the office. I start every day with a security briefing, and I know how many threats there are against us."

Turns out, the cover pages for those briefings had pictures from the previous day's events in Iraq and a Bible verse. The pictures are invariably pleasant, and whoever chose them had a serious soft spot for tanks in sunsets. On a few occasions, the verses and the pictures combine to stomach-turning degree:



It's little wonder that with cover pages like this, Bush slipped and referred to the war as a 'crusade'.

Donald Erb, "Autumnmusic"

AUTUMNMUSIC
(I) 458
(II) 3: 17
(III) 4:20

Six years after CHRISTMASMUSIC, Erb wrote AUTUMNMUSIC, commissioned by the William lnglis Morse Trust Fund and first played by Frank Brieff and the New Haven Symphony on November 20.1973. AUTUMNMUSIC uses taped electronic sounds along with the orchestra, and calls on the musicians to use their instruments in new ways. The brass players use their keys, the timpanist plays the bowl and the skin, the bass players use pencils on their strings. What is the point? To give the audience a unique musical experience in the sheer joy of sound. The piece is in three movements and Erb is quite serious when he maintains it is "very much in the classical tradition." The work opens with a mysterious, even frightening atmosphere, as dramatic as the very last leaves of summer falling to earth, leaving a barren tree to face the frozen winter. The movement dies, gradually and inevitably. The second and third movements are played without a break. Erb compares the second to a scherzo-trio, and calls the third a finale.

Meet the New Boss, Same As the Old Boss

The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the foe, that's all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they'd all flown in the last war 
It's too easy to dump on Obama right now. He's had another awful week, scurrying away from campaign promises about gay rights, detainee abuse, and military commissions. He also aggressively began to lower expectations for health care reform, going from this:

I am absolutely certain that, generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless, this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

to this:

We have, historically, a tradition of employer-based health care...and you've got a system that's currently in place...We don't want a huge disruption.

But the man is just making the necessary shift from soaring campaign oratory to mundane policy implementation. Compromises will always need to be made. Saving a political fight like 'Don't Ask/Don't Tell' for a day when you're less overwhelmed isn't the same thing as breaking a campaign promise.

Odds are that 'history ain't changed', but Obama shouldn't be a genuine cause for disappointment to any of his supporters yet.

Congress, on the other hand, has nowhere to hide. During the GOP's reign, the House Ethics committee was a sad punchline. Stripped of a quorum by Denny Hastert, it sat idle, like the FEC. The ethical black hole that was the Republican Congress functioned with impunity until John McCain came along with his relatively obscure committee on Indian Affairs. In 2006 and in 2008, the Democrats were handed back their majority in the belief that they would change things for good.

Instead, they are busy furthering the notion that Congress is incorrigible. The Democrats are dragging their feet when it comes to investigating their own. My Congressman, Charlie Rangel, still chairs the Ways and Means Committee despite a myriad of ethics violations. Jack Murtha has a lengthy history of corruption, but he continues to evade scrutiny, not to mention Jane Harman.

Where the Democratic Congress should remain on the offensive, they have shifted to the defensive. Jim Clyburn was reduced this week to threatening fellow Democrats against voting for an investigation of Murtha. Unless they're interested in losing their majority, this is not what the Democrats should be seen doing. In 2009, CYA means taking on scofflaws like Murtha and Rangel, not protecting them. America is tired of 300-lb men taking bribes and getting away with it.

While Obama can get away with punting on issues like Gitmo ('we'll fix it in a year'), Congress doesn't have that luxury on ethics. They are taking baby steps right now, and if they're interested in being a majority again in 2010, they need to start taking some giant leaps. Their poster girl just spent the whole week looking like a shifty Nixon in front of the cameras, needlessly digging herself a hole over CIA briefings. They can't keep this up. Something's gotta give, and if history is any lesson (which it always is), they'll be swept out of power unless they get serious about cleaning house. No one wants to get fooled again.

Donald Erb, "Christmasmusic"

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CHRISTMASMUSIC
(I) 3:36
(II) 3:25

CHRISTMASMUSIC was commissioned to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Cleveland Orchestra and is dedicated to conductor Louis Lane. It was completed during the fall of 1967 and first heard on December 21 of that year. The eight-minute piece features a variety of novel musical media as outlined by the composer:

Some composers of my generation believe that traditional musical instruments are "washed up" as a source of new sounds, and have turned completely either to electronics or the stage as a source of new material. To me the appeal of "live" music is still irresistible. Musical instruments and musicians offer constant sources of new sounds. Listed here are some of the sounds you will hear:

Movement I. Timpani with snare drum brushes
Glass wind chimes
Brass players tapping mouthpiece with palm
Flutes clicking keys
Wind players humming and making tonguing sounds
String players rattling fingers against instruments
A bottle half filled with water used as a percussion instrument

Movement 11. Piano played with glass on strings
Trombone played with F slide removed
Harp strings pulled, played like Japanese koto
Piano played with xylophone mallets

But the point of CHRISTMASMUSIC goes much deeper than the creation of original sound effects. Erb has developed a miniature philosophical reflection on the dual nature of this peculiarly American phenomenon. This explains the contrasting character of the work's two movements, the first "quiet and mysterious" in the composer's words, the second "energetic and . . . earthy."

The festival of Christmas has, it seems to me, two quite opposite aspects to it. Christmas is sacred and secular; it encompasses the service and the office party, the church and the department store, prayers and feasting, the creche and crass commercialism . . . (Yet) CHRISTMASMUSIC is not meant to be taken either as a sermon, or as a satire. It simply attempts to deal, in light of today, with a "tradition" which is constantly changing and rarely examined.

When Louis Lane commissioned the work. he suggested the setting of traditional Christmas material, and Erb obliged by adapting the beautiful chorale melody "O Come Emmanuel." Motivic fragments of the melody are used throughout the first movement, toward the end of which the basses quote the entire melody. The second movement makes use of the melody's final phrase. "Toward the end of this movement." notes the composer, "the melody becomes gr.dually more audible until near the close it is quoted in a rather direct and discernible manner."

Enoch Light and the Light Brigade, "Rachmaninoff Prelude in C# Minor"

Donald Erb, "Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra

CONCERTO FOR TROMBONE AND ORCHESTRA
(I) 3:49
(II) 4:50
(III) 3:31
(IV) 2:47

Stuart Dempster, trombone
Louis Lane, conductor

The CONCERTO FOR TROMBONE AND ORCHESTRA, written a little more than eight years after CHRISTMASMUSIC, may be the composer's best-known work. It was commissioned by trombonist Stuart Dempster with assistance from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music. Completed January 26, 1976, the Concerto was first performed on March 11, 1976 by Mr. Dempster and the St. Louis Symphony conducted by Leonard Slatkin, another important champion of Erb's music. The TROMBONE CONCERTO was also a featured work at the 1980 American Composers Orchestra concert in Lincoln Center and received highly favorable notices. Musical America's Joan LaBarbara called it "a worthy task, integrating the extended, experimental sounds of the contemporary trombone into a traditional format. He has succeeded in producing a fine piece of music . . . "

Mr. Erb has kindly provided the following comments on his work:

The concerto is in four movements. The first movement is the most traditional and uses primarily the time-honored lyric qualities of the trombone. The linear quality of this movement draws at least in part on the contributions of jazz. Many of the great trombo~istsof the twentieth century have been jazz musicians and their influence on the development of the instrument cannot be discounted. Although lyric, the movement is in a medium fast tempo.

The second movement, the only truly slow movement of the concerto, features several other aspects of the instrument. Brass instruments, particularly the trumpet and trombone, are capable of great timbral variety due to the use of many mutes which produce beautiful sounds. Several of these can be employed in a variety of ways and in the concerto the performer is called upon to make subtle changes in their use while playing.

The movement also makes considerable use of the lip trill which is produced by moving from one overtone of the instrument to another. The soloist is asked to play staccato passages of elegant character.

The third movement of the concerto is very similar in character to the scherzo found in most symphonies. In this movement double stops are produced by playi~g one note and simultaneously singing bother. The extreme upper register of the instrument is featured several times in this movement.

The final movement is in many ways the most unusual. Here I drew upon Mr. Dempster's knowledge of the didjeridu, a wind instrument played by the bushmen of Australia and one of the oldest instruments still in use. There are several unique aspects of playing the didjeridu. One is the ability to play continuously due to a technique known as circular breathing. The Aborigines also interpolate animal sounds such as barking through the instrument while the playing continues. I attempted to give the movement a thrust that would enhance the primitive quality involved. It also, hopefully, makes a fitting finale.

This record was made possible, in part, by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent agency of the federal government.

Mr. Dempster's performance was made possible, in part, by a grant from the Bascom Little Fund.

Notes by Marshall A. Portnoy
Cover art by Judith Lerner 1980
THE LOUISVILLE ORCHESTRA
333 West Broadway
Louisville. Kentucky 40202
Jack M. Firestone, General Manager
Andrew Kazdin, Producer
1980 Louisville Orchestra First Edition Records

Fire, "Happy Man Am I"

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Donald Erb, "Spatial Fanfare for Brass and Percussion"

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Side 1 (16:44)
Donald Erb

SPATIAL FANFARE FOR BRASS AND PERCUSSION (1:31)

Called by one reviewer "a composer who will be remembered when the twentieth century is history," Donald Erb is an eclectic author of dozens of works expressed in a vast array of musical media. Born in Youngstown, Ohio, on January 17, 1927, he began his musical studies at the age of eight. After serving in the Navy, he pursued his interest in music as a trumpet player and arranger for dance bands at the end of the big band era. He subsequently received degrees' from Kent State University in trumpet, and from the Cleveland Institute of Music and Indiana University in composition. His serious composing began in 1949, reflecting the major influences of that time, and his study with Marcel Dick gave him a strong background in serial techniques. The composer feels that his own distinct musical personality emerged in 1958, with the completion of Dialogue for Violin and Piano. Since then, he has been constantly searching for new sounds and fresh musical ideas. as is evidenced by the challenging material on this recording. Donald Erb has received numerous fellowships and awards, including those from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Council on the Arts. A Guggenheim Fellowship helped make possible a year of study in electronic music at the Case Institute, and a second Rockefeller Grant enabled the composer to spend a season as Composer-in-Residence with the Dallas Symphony. He is currently Composer-in-Residence at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and lives in Cleveland with his wife and four children.

Louis Lane was also associated with the composition of another short piece by Donald Erb. Lane was to conduct Erb's well-known orchestral piece The Seventh Trumpet at a Cleveland Orchestra concert, but felt that someother work should open the evening. The musicians did not get their parts to the SPATIAL FANFARE until the morning of the premiere. The work is literally "spatial" in that it calls for the players to be situated throughout the hall, surrounding the audience with sound. Despite the musical and logistical problems, the highly inventive piece for brass and percussion went beautifully.

Doc Severinsen, "It's Not Unusual"

Lukas Foss, "Paradigm"

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LUKAS FOSS (geb. 1922)
Paradigm (1968) (18'00)
"for my friends"

Session Reading . Recital. Lecture
Jan Williams, (Percussionist-cond.)
Stephen Bell, (Electric Guitar)
Charles Haupt, Violine
Jerry Kirkbride, (Clarinet)
Marijke Verberne, Cello
George Ritscher, (Tape recorder and Electronics)
Lukas Foss, (Musical Supervision)

Lukas Foss: Paradigm ("'for my friends")

Paradigm ("for my friends") employs 5 musicians: a percussionist/conductor, electric guitar, and 3 other instrumentalists. All have notes to play and words to speak, whisper, or shout. Words are handled like notes.

I-Session. Each player has 3 tasks (musical materials) and proceeds from one to the other, sometimes at random, sometimes on cue. The cues are syllables that combine in a sentence: "Someone will be held responsible".

II--Reading. Each player has moments of note choice and moments of word choice. Words and music are like a mosaic, differently put together at every reading. A glance at the composer's choice of words reveals that grammar and meaning are not left to chance; a poem should result from the 8x8 available word juxtapositions.

Ill-Recital. An instrumental interlude. Every sound is cued by the percussionist whose flexaton serves as a baton.

IV-Lecture. Imitation techniques of all kinds. For example: one imitates the inflection or rhythm of a word on one's instrument; the imitation is either preceding, simultaneously duplicating, or succeeding the spoken word. At times a tape is heard imitating the live performance with a tape delay of 2 seconds. The words are taken from a recent
lecture:

"To take refuge in the past is to play safe. Avoidance of truth. To burn the past is to play safe. Avoidance of knowledge. Safeness lurks wherever we turn. Improvisation that works is improvisation made safe: one plays what one can play, that is, what one knows, and one observes rules, insurance against disorder, traffic controles. Chance music is safe music if we accept any result as nature having its way. To control the result is also to play safe: freedom, choice handed to the performer because it doesn't matter what he does: the given entites control the music, neutralizing the performer's personal additions. Electronic music is safe: escape from the most dangerous elements in music: performance. Shock in music is always effective, hence safe: cringe benefits. Program notes in pseudo-scientific jargon are safe: language used to conceal rather than reveal. Silence is safe, even virtuous. Show me dangerous music."

Lukas Foss, born in Berlin, U. S. citizen since his fifteenth year, composer, conductor, pianist, teacher, and proponent for new music, became successor to Arnold Schoenberg at the University of California in 1953 and conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic in 1962. Foss' early compositions were traditional, neo-classic. In the last 10 years he has emerged as a leading force in the American avant-garde. This transformation was the unexpected result of an improvisation project which he began in 1957 as an experiment with his students at a time when the word "aleatoric" had not yet entered the musical vocabulary. "Time Cycle" was the transition piece. There followed "Echoi", "Elytres", "Fragments", "For 24 Winds", "Cello Concert", Baroque Variations", "Organ Preludes", "Paradigm" and "Geod".

Booker T, "Hey Ya"

Lukas Foss, "Solo Observed"

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Solo Observed
Lukas Foss, piano
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center: Fred Sherry, cello/Richard Fitz, vibraphone/Charles Wadsworth, electric organ

Commissioned and composed for the New World Festival of the arts in Greater Miami, June 1982.

Summer 1981, Lukas Foss began to compose SOLO, his first piano piece in twenty-eight years, for the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff who premiered it in Paris in March 1982. An initial twelve-tone motive reigns. Yet this is not twelve-toone music. The motive is like a theme which undergoes constant change. Nor is this minimal music; in spite of insistent repetitions, each repetition also contains a change implying development, growth and forward movement. Solo is a long development section, "senza sonata"; lumbering, struggling eighth-notes, circling, spiralling, forging ahead, always on the way, never pausing, never giving up, forever closing in on...

In the Spring of 1982, Lukas Foss and the Lincoln Center Chamber Players premiered a new version of Solo at the New World Festival in Miami, Florida. This version has an extended coda in which three other instruments join the piano, after some ten minutes of silent observing of the solo part. The three instruments are a keyboard instrument, a harp or cello and percussion.

The score has the word "Fine" written a bar before the end. This paradox should be explained: the last bar is like an appendage or error--the piano playing on without its master or the phonograph needle (metaphorically speaking) returning to the opening automatically, as the engine stops.

The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is the resident constituent for chamber music at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. The Society's artistic accomplishment under the direction of Charles Wadsworth has been one of remarkable growth and continued success. The critics have been as enthusiastic as the public and Harold Schonberg, the distinguished New York Times critic, describes the group as "the musical success story of the generation".

Gershon Kingsley, "Hey, Hey"

Lukas Foss, "Measure for Measure"

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Measure for Measure
Frank Hoffmeister, tenor
Brooklyn Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra

Shakespeares' plays contain many references to music. In this composition, appropriately entitled "Measure for Measure", Lukas Foss uses excerpts from: The Tempest--What harmony is this?...
Merchant of Venice--The man that has no music in himself...
Twelfth Night--If music be the food of love, play on...
Hamlet--O, the recorders! Let me see one...
Merchant of Venice--I am never merry when I hear sweet music...
Julius Caesar--This is a sleepy tune. O murd'rous slumber!...
A Midsummer Night's Dream--This ditty, after me, sing and dance trippingly...

The tenor solo sings these lines in a meter independent of that of the orchestral accompaniment. The latter is based on Lukas Foss' Salomon Rossi Suite which uses some of Renaissance composer Rossi's delightful, short string pieces. Foss did not orchestrate them in the manner of a symphonic arrangement, rather, he has invented a renaissance orchestral sound.

This music is a 20th Century composer's loving homage to Rossi, in the way Stravinsky's Monumentum pro Gesualdo is an homage to Gesualdo. Foss chose the notes carefully from a large body of string pieces and then had the respect to leave such notes as he chose intact and build with them a larger structure to be played with modern instruments, without the loss of the old spirit.

The Brooklyn Philharmonic, the only professional symphony orchestra in New York City's most populous borough, was created in 1954 amidst the beginnings of a cultural renaissance that by now has returned Brooklyn to its earlier prominence as a center for the arts.

Under the direction of Sigfried Landaus, a protege of Pierre Monteux, the orchestra quickly became established as a permanent part of Brooklyn's cultural life. With the arrival of Lukas Foss, a stir of excitement was created which extended beyond local boundaries. His introduction of marathon concerts in 1970/71 attracted audiences that had never before come to Brooklyn.

Foss, has deemed it imperative that the music of his colleagues be heard. thus, contemporary music has firmly established itself as a Philharmonic specialty, with the popular Meet the Moderns series. The Brooklyn Philharmonic is now the Premier Symphony Orchestra dedicated to the presentation of new music.

Original Caste, "A Picture of Bob Dylan"

Lukas Foss, "Night Music"

-- LINER NOTES --

Lukas Foss--composer, conductor, pianist, teacher--has been a moving force in the world of music for over thirty years. To date there are some 85 compositions in the Foss catalog. He has conducted many major orchestras. He is an indefatigable champion of modern music (Ditson Award 1974) and as a conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic he has made Brooklyn a vital part of the New York musical scene. "Foss never had to choose music, music chose him." (Piatigorski) He studied with Hindemith at Yale, Reiner at Curtis, and Koussevitsky at Tanglewood. His earliest published compositions date back to his 15th year. At 19 he composed an oratorio based on Carl Sandburg's "The Prairie" which brought him immediate recognition. "He cannot fail to raise the standard of music of his generation" wrote Virgil Thomson in the Herald Tribune. At 23 he was the youngest composer ever to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Stylistically Foss' earliest compositions are marked by romantic lyricism, which moved towards a strong neo-classicism. This changed and evolved in turn to the use of aleatoric techniques, described by The Saturday Review as "Foss 'Neo-Classicises' The Avant Garde". His experiments in ensemble improvisation were the first of their kind. "His compositions are among the most original and stimulating composed in America", wrote Aaron Copland. In a recent article in the Village Voice Tom Johnson writes "Little by little he is knitting together a body of work which may actually speak for contemporary culture as a whole more eloquently than any other." As music director for the Buffalo Philharmonic from 1963-1970, he made the city a focus of national attention and a mecca for composers and performers. In 1982 he became music director of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. He was music advisor and conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony in Israel for four years and has guest conducted leading orchestras both here and abroad. Mr. Foss is currently music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, a position he has held since 1971.

Night Music for John Lennon (Prelude, Fugue and Chorale) In Memory of December 8, 1980
Wilmer Wise, trumpet/Brooks Tillotson, french horn/Neil Balm, trumpet/Jonathan Taylor, trombone/Andrew Seligson, tuba
Brooklyn Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra

Lukas Foss began to work on this commission by the Northwood Symphonette for brass quintet and chamber orchestra the morning of the day John Lennon was killed. Admittedly, this influenced the composition. There are no quotations, not even stylistic similarities to Beatle music, but the tonal nostalgia of the Prelude, the use of the electric guitar, the particular use of Major chords (though put into serial order) in the Fugue and the homage implied by the final Chorale all point to the tragic event of December 8th.

Lukas Foss does not claim to be an authority on Rock music, but there have been rock elements in previous compositions--in fact, more so than in the work under discussion. What Foss loves about the Beatles is that theirs is a genuinely "young" music. Many composers have a healthy love-envy for folk expression. Says Foss, "Our classical (or modern classical) music is at best ageless: it is never young. Brahms loved and envied Johann Strauss' waltzes their quality of youth. Bartok spent his life trying to fuse the freshness of gypsy folk elements with his highly musical expression, adn in the 1920's every composer had a love or a lover's quarrel with early jazz."

Another important consideration entered into the composition of Night Music. It was written for Canadian Brass, and therefore, had to be a vehicle for the five soloists. Three years earlier, Foss wrote a Quintet for this excellent ensemble. To quote the composer once again, "I like to write for friends."

The Cowsills, "Hair"

Lukas Foss, "Curriculum Vitae"

CURRICULUM VITAE
Guy Klucevsek, accordion

CURRICULUM VITAE was commissioned by the American Accordionist Society in 1977. The piece requires a virtuoso accordionist; yet, the accordion contains childhood reminiscences for the composer; hence the title, and hence the sudden intrusions of bits of tunes which have autobiographical connotations for Foss: a Brahms Hungarian dance (a record given to him as a child), the Mozart Marche turque (the first Mozart piece he ever played), the Nazi anthem, etc. Except for those flashbacks, CURRICULUM VITAE is devoid of quotations; even the nostalgic tango is a near invention. The piece is both tragic and comic (the pitchless sigh following a sentimental harmonic progression), tonal and atonal, simple and intricate.

THE COLUMBIA STRING QUARTET, founded in 1976, is the resident ensemble of the Group for Contemporary Music, and spends summers in residence at the Grand Teton Festival in Wyoming and the White Mountains Festival in New Hampshire. By special invitation of scholar and Berg authority George Perle, they gave the world premiere of the recently-discovered version of the Lyric Suite with voice on November 1, 1979. The quartet, which has been awarded grants from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, has presented lectures at Princeton, SUNY - Buffalo, City College, the Philadelphia Music Academy, and the CUNY Graduate Center, and has toured Puerto Rico and the eastern United States. It plays the music of Peter Tod Lewis on CRI 392. THE UNIVERSITY OF BUFFALO PERCUSSK)N ENSEMBLE was founded by Jan Williams, its present director, and John Bergamo at the State University of New York at Buffalo's Music Department in 1964. New works are solicited on a regular basis and recent programs have included as many as five first performances. The ensemble performs regularly on the Evenings for New Music series of the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts and the Music Department's annual June in Buffalo Festival. GUY KLUCEVSEK has performed with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, the Philadelphia Composers' Forum and the Orchestra of Our Time. He was the accordionist for the revival of "The Coach with Six Insides" (music by Teiji Ito) off-Broadway and "Strider" on Broadway. Also a composer, he has performed his own works with the Brooklyn Philharmonia, the New York Composers' Forum, Newband, and Relache. This is his first CRI recording.

This record was made possible with the generous assistance of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, Inc.; the Alice M. Ditson Fund for Contemporary Music of Columbia University; the University of Buffalo; SUNY at Albany with special thanks to Joel Chadabe.

QUARTET NO. 3 - Salabert (BMI): 23 min.
MUSIC FOR SIX- Pembroke Music (Carl Fischer, BMI): 16'10"
CURRICULUM VITAE - Pembroke Music (Carl Fischer, BMI): 7'40"

Recorded by Richard Borgersen in New York City
All recordings re-mixed by Michael Riesman at the Big Apple Studio, New York City.
Produced by Carter Harman
Cover Judith Lerner 1980
LC#: 80-750236
1980 Composers Recordings, Inc.
THIS IS A COMPOSER-SUPERVISED RECORDING
Printed in the U.S.A

Miike Snow, "Animal (Crookers Remix)"

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Lukas Foss, "String Quartet No. 3"

STRING QUARTET NO. 3
Columbia Quartet (Benjamin Hudson, violin; Carol Zeavin, violin; Janet Lyman Hill, viola; Andre Emelianoff, cello)

LUKAS FOSS (b. 1922) has been prominent in the world of music for over thirty years. His compositions have given voice to the avant garde since 1960 and his pioneering work with experimental performance groups at UCLA (1 957-63) and in Buffalo (1963-70) helped to establish new techniques. To date there are some 85 compositions in the Foss catalogue. At seventeen he was studying with Hindemith at Yale and with Koussevitzky at Tanglewood. At nineteen he composed an oratorio based on Carl Sandburg's "Prairie"; it brought him immediate recognition. In 1960 the New York Philharmonic- premiered his Time Cycle a unique occasion in the history of the Philharmonic in that the orchestra performed it twice that evening. There followed a number of works which fit into none of the prevalent "schools of new music" notably Echoi and Baroque Variations which had a marked influence on the younger generation of composers.

He has conducted many major orchestras. He is an indefatigable champion of modern music (Ditson award 1974) and in 10 years as conductor of the,Brooklyn Philharmonia, he has made Brooklyn a vital part of the New York musical scene. His SONG OF SONGS; PSALMS; BEHOLD, I BUILD AN HOUSE and THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD appear on CRI.

Notes by Ann Russell
STRING QUARTET NO. 3 is Foss' most extreme composition; it is themeless, tuneless, and restless. It is probably the first quartet without a single pizzicato since Haydn. The four strings are made to sound like an organ furiously preluding away. The sound vision which gave birth to this quartet may be the most merciless in the quartet literature.

Though some of the pages of the music may look unusual (see above), QUARTET NO. 3 is notated in every detail. There are no performer choices, except for the number of repeats of certain patterns. Repetition? Actually something is always changing, even in the introduction, which contains only two pitches, A and C, combining in various ways - a kind of prison from which the players are liberated by a sudden all-interval flurry. There follows an extended fortissimo section of broken chord-waves with ever-changing rhythmic inflections. This leads into a rigidly structured pianissimo episode of accelerating and retarding twenote cells. The idea of an exhausting fortissimo followed by an equally unalleviated pianissimo is reminiscent of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, a work for which Foss has a special passion. Foss' pianissimo section is however unmelodic and active. At one point near the end, the musicians are granted the one and only sustained sound; then the frantic waves and counter waves resume, this time in rhythmic unison, each moment of change cued by the first violin. The closing C major chord is neither a peaceful resolution nor a joke, but rather like an object on which the music stumbles, as if by accident, causing a short circuit, which brings the rush of broken chord patterns to a sudden halt.

STRING QUARTET NO. 3 was written for the Concord Quartet who obtained a grant from the New York State Council toward the commission of the piece and premiered it at Alice Tully Hall, New York on March 15, 1976.