•David Lang's, "love fail" is a meditation on love's timelessness, weaving together details from the Tristan and Isolde story with more modern sources. • The recording also spotlights the vocal quartet Anonymous 4, whose commitment to medieval music and historical scholarship has been acclaimed worldwide. • In a NYTimes review of the BAM performance, Anthony Tommasini wrote: "It was Mr. Lang's music, and the ethereal, pure-toned singing of Anonymous 4, that claimed me in the first section of the piece
"• Commissioned by the New Music Bassoon Fund.
• Seven-piece Rushes Ensemble features the top bassoonists in the U.S., including Dana Jessen.
• Performances booked for March 2014 in Boston (3/26), Philadelphia (3/28) and Montclair, NJ (3/29), with more TBD.
• Extensive three-month marketing, press and social media campaign.
• Promotional videos currently posted on YouTube (youtube.com/watch?v=umhQdxwn26M) and Vimeo (vimeo.com/51771906). "
Percussionist Steve Schick [an origianl member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars] releases his first full-length CD on Cantaloupe Music in conjunction with his first book - which promises to be the definitive volume about percussion in the 20th-21st Century. A former percussionist himself, John Luther Adams finds music from the earth and brings it to life in composition - expect an unadulterated ambient soundscape that takes a journey through different sonic textures and environments, aided by a beautiful production and Schick's breathtaking performance.
"Wolfe is doing what she does best: frenetic power created through post-minimalist techniques that transcend mere repetition. The music materials are sharp, taut, basic, and the economy of material is expertly managed. Wolfe knows how to make a lot out of a little AND pull the listener along for the ride. Both works have programmatic elements but not knowing the program does not interfere with the listening experiences. These works sound fresh and contemporary and I’m confident that audiences in the future will continue to relate and connect with the ideas therein."
-- Sequenza 21
"Teeming with jealousy, rage, passion, murder and a ghost, Julia Wolfe’s Cruel Sister has all the makings of an opera... Under conductor Brad Lubman, Ensemble Resonanz elevates Cruel Sister to an incandescent plane, delving into the psyche of the titular murderous sibling the way Judi Dench once mined the character traits of Lady Macbeth."
This fall, Cantaloupe Music will release Julia Wolfe's Dark Full Ride: Music in Multiples, her first album since 2003. It consists of four new compositions, each clocking in at over 15 minutes, each written for multiples of individual instruments--nine bagpipes, four drum sets, six pianos, and eight double basses. Wolfe says, "Like staring for a long time at a Rothko painting, I imagined each of these pieces as an exploration of one color. But in truth an instrument isn't really a single timbre. There are a myriad of worlds within each sound." Working closely with the performers during the composing process, Wolfe uncovers a never before-heard music. For example, while writing "LAD," she discovered the initial drone produced while filling the bagpipe with air, using that as the piece's introduction. The first seven minutes of the title track "Dark Full Ride" use only a drum set's hi-hats. "my lips from speaking" builds on the piano riff from a classic R&B song to showcase the instrument's ferocity. Finally "Stronghold" shows the bass isn't just about low end. Says Wofe: "With each piece I tried to dive into a psychedelic landscape, at once multilayered, fractured, ecstatic, silent, driving, cacophonous, and direct." " "Sales Inventory
Since 1999, So Percussion has been creating music that explores all the extremes of emotion and musical possibility. It has not been an easy music to define. Called an “experimental powerhouse” by the Village Voice, “astonishing and entrancing” by Billboard Magazine, and “brilliant” by the New York Times, the Brooklyn based quartet’s innovative work with today’s most exciting composers and their own original music has quickly helped them forge a unique and diverse career.
Threads, written for So Percussion in 2005, is a half-hour long “cantata” for percussion quartet in ten short movements. There are three “threads” that are interwoven in the piece: Arias and Preludes that focus on the metallic pitched sounds of vibraphones, glockenspiel and pipes; Choruses in which drumming predominates; and Recitatives made largely from Cage-like noise instruments, bottles, flower pots, crotales, etc. The aim of the different threads is to highlight the wide range of qualities that percussion instruments are capable of, from lyrical and tender to forceful and aggressive, and weave them into one continuous “thread”.
Founded in 1988 by artistic director Francisco J. Núñez, the Young People's Chorus of New York City is an internationally renowned multicultural youth chorus with a reputation for superb virtuosity and brilliant showmanship. Transient Glory is a series conceived by Núñez in 2001 to spotlight the YPC as a creative source of inspiration for the works of the world's leading composers. For the superb third collection from this series, composers Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, Michael Gordon, John Corigliano, Paquito D'Rivera and Bora Yoon were commissioned by YPC for performances that form another rich chapter in their groundbreaking repertoire.
No one inhabits a Steinway quite like Australian pianist Lisa Moore, which is probably why so many modern composers have invited her to interpret their music. Known for her “beautiful and impassioned” approach, as The New York Times described one of her performances, Moore brings a fully charged sense of rhythm, mysticism and adventure to The Stone People, her first full-length recording for Cantaloupe Music. It follows in the footsteps of Moore’s three-part series of acclaimed EPs for the label: Seven (2009), Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers (2011) and Stainless Staining (2012).
As Pulitzer-winning composer and Bang on a Can cofounder David Lang reveals in the album’s liner notes, the project takes its name from the opening piece by another Pultizer winner, John Luther Adams. “John’s music is ruggedly elemental,” Lang writes, “using very restrained materials as a way of probing some of our most fundamental human truths. Who we are. Where we are. How we relate to each other. How we relate to the natural world. His pieces are stark explorations of humankind in its most elemental state, and this CD brings together, for the first time, his complete acoustic music for solo piano.”
Among other firsts, the disc includes two works for piano by Julia Wolfe (2015’s Pulitzer winner), as well as newly recorded pieces by Martin Bresnick, Missy Mazzoli and Kate Moore. By turns meditative, mysterious, tumultuous and tender, The Stone People presents Lisa Moore at the height of her transformative powers.
Gigantic Dancing Human Machine - Andriessen / Bang On A Can
Cantaloupe Music
CD · 1 disc
$18.99Mar 11, 2003
Dutch composer Louis Andriessen turned minimalism upside down in the 1970's with his radical musical responses to American experimentalists Reich, Riley and Glass. He challenged these composers' trance-like states with a European sense of edginess and angularity, and the results are exciting and overpoweringly aggressive. Hoketus - the lankmark of European minimalism - takes its name from the medieval art of hocketing, splitting a single melody between two groups of instruments separated in space. Earth-shattering and tribal in its elemental power, Andriessen describes this piece as a 'Gigantic Dancing Human Machine'. Its recording is an international collaboration of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, members of London's Icebreaker ensemble, and musicians from Andriessen's own group. Workers Union and Hout both generate high-voltage energy out of wild unison melodies and rhythms. the Bang on a Can All-Stars have worked closely with Andriessen over the past 10 years, bringing to these works their intense dedication and extreme musicality, and performing them all over the world.
Widely regarded among the most important chamber works of the 20th century, Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps is a world within itself, a profound rumination on the concept of eternity - and, owing to it's legendary and mythical stature as a work of resistance, an integral part of the European classical standard repertoire for several generations. As such, the Quatuor is still the oldest piece in the repertoire of New York's Anzû Quartet, whose members - Olivia de Prato (violin), Ashley Bathgate (cello), Ken Thomson (clarinet), and Karl Larson (piano) - view the work as a catalyst for much of the contemporary music they perform today. Inspired by the lauded 1976 recording by the TASHI quartet, the group follows in some giant footsteps while digging deep into the original score with a renewed sense of rhythmic vitality, seeking to render Messiaen's pivotal work as powerful today as it was when he first composed it as a prisoner of war in 1940-41.
Over the course of the last 15 years, David Lang and The Crossing, the Grammy-winning chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally, have crafted a body of work that stands apart from the rest for it's profound spiritual connection to our shared sense of humanity-through our stories, our myths, our beliefs, and our dreams. The sense of senses is a milestone that celebrates this connection, across time and space, to deliver a message that music can be a benevolent force for change if we only take the time to listen. "This album is a collection of works that capture the intimate side of The Crossing's relationship with David Lang," Nally explains. "Only two were written for us, yet the others reflect a shared world view, a common idea about sound and community, and a collective focus on our reason for singing. David's thoroughly considered thoughts on 'why we do this' have influenced The Crossing's perpetually reexamined thoughts on that question: how to communicate deep feelings, absent of ego."
Composed by Michael Gordon in 2022, Field of Vision was first presented as a large-scale site-specific work for the Sunken Garden and the surrounding grounds at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, NY. Performed on specially constructed and tuned percussion instruments, industrial metals, wood, and gongs, the piece is meant to produce a complex spectrum of overtones and resonances. The large number of percussionists, and the vast performance field, is meant to highlight a sweeping perspective and the architectural movement of sound. "We want to induce a quasi-meditative, almost ecstatic state - for performer and audience alike - where attention sharpens and dissolves, and thoughts focus and drift," Gordon explains. "In the end, I think the music emerges as an exploration of space itself. Who can tune space? The answer becomes collective: the performers, the instruments, the listeners."
Since forming in 2011, Gamelan Yowana Sari has been a performing Balinese Art Ensemble in residence at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, NYC. Under the direction of Michael Lipsey and Fred Trumpy, Yowana Sari have toured Bali multiple times, studying and performing under the master composer and musician I Dewa Ketut Alit in Pengosekan, Bali. In 2024, the group commissioned new works from Michael Gordon and Evan Ziporyn, which were performed alongside compositions by Dewa Ketut Alit, Vivian Fung, and Kyle Miller at Bang on a Can's Long Play Festival and MASS MoCA Summer Music Festival. Following these concerts, the ensemble returned to Bali to study and perform with Dewa Alit's Gamelan Salukat, as well as to record this album at the famed Wiswakarma Museum.
