Field Recordings collects the Bang on a Can All-Stars' interpretations of newly commissioned works by Tyondai Braxton, Mira Calix, Anna Clyne, Bryce Dessner, Florent Ghys, Michael Gordon, J�hann J�hannsson, David Lang, Christian Marclay, Steve Reich, Todd Reynolds, Julia Wolfe and Nick Zammuto. In the words of composer David Lang, "Field Recordings is a kind of ghost story. We asked composers from different parts of the music world to find a recording of something that already exists -- a voice, a sound, a faded scrap of melody -- and then write a new piece around it. And so they did." A double-disc multimedia project featuring five videos on DVD, Field Recordings highlights the astonishing versatility of the All-Stars, whose grasp of musical styles ranging from classical to rock to musique concrete has helped redefine the term "new music."

Classical Music

Classical Music

For his latest feat of magic in the studio, composer and bassist Florent Ghys presents Télévision — an epic foray into classical forms, musique concrète, samples and sci-fi that warps the very edges of contemporary music. + As Ghys himself describes it, “Télévision is about weather reports, digital music, plastic beauty, synesthesia and dance.” + All 13 pieces were composed, played, recorded, filmed and mixed by Ghys — and we say filmed, because Ghys has taken the extraordinary step of creating a video to accompany each piece, in playful tribute to the medium that inspired the message.

Classical Music

When it comes to seminal alternative rock albums, Pixies’ 1988 debut Surfer Rosa qualifies as a true game-changer. + With strong production and even stronger songs, the album tore a rift in the rock ‘n roll continuum, influencing everyone from Kurt Cobain to Radiohead. + That influence remains as steadfast as ever among the feverish minds behind Asphalt Orchestra, the 12-piece New York-based marching band with an eclectic ear for new music, unpredictable repertoire and boundary-blurring arrangements. + AOPP remains true to the punkish attitude of the original.

Broad gestures, rich textures and narrative sweep are vivid signatures of Alex Weiser's music. Born and raised in New York City, Weiser composes cosmopolitan music that merges a deeply felt historical perspective with a vibrant, forward-looking creative pulse. An energetic advocate for contemporary classical music and for the work of his peers, Weiser co-founded and directs Kettle Corn New Music, and is Public Programs Manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Meditative and devotional in scope, 'and all the days were purple' sets Yiddish and English poems to music in a song cycle that seeks out the divine while reflecting on the longing, beauty, and tumult of life. The album includes texts by Anna Margolin, Edward Hirsch, Rachel Korn, and Abraham Sutzkever, and performances by Eliza Bagg (voice), Lee Dionne (piano), Maya Bennardo (violin), Hannah Levinson (viola), Hannah Collins (cello) and Mike Compitello (percussion). The recording also includes 'Three Epitaphs,' composed in 2016 and featuring excerpts from texts on love and life's transience by Williams Carlos Williams, Seikilos and Emily Dickinson.

Conceived and realized in partnership with Q2 Music's Peabody award-winning podcast Meet the Composer, Splitting Adams is Alarm Will Sound's tribute to American composer John Adams, and in particular to his works Chamber Symphony (1992) and Son of Chamber Symphony (2007). Presented with commentary tracks from MTC's host Nadia Sirota, Alarm Will Sound's artistic director Alan Pierson, and the composer himself, the podcast-plus-performance conveys a rare sense of interaction for the listener; not only does the music, performed in all its lush detail by the 17 musicians in AWS, capture and connect the long trajectory between the two works, but the commentary also shines a revealing light on the story behind the music.

When Michael Gordon's Timber, scored for six amplified wooden 2-by-4s, premiered in 2009, it brought the physicality and endurance of percussion performance to a new level. In the liner notes for Slagwerk Den Haag's recording of the piece, released on Cataloupe Music in 2011, Gordon described a connection to the work of shamanist author Carlos Castaneda, whose self-imposed spirit journey in the desert could wipe the brain clean and "bring on visions." Newly recorded by Mantra Percussion and reworked by an A-list of producers and DJs, Gordon's deep exploration into the extreme possibilities of rhythm gets the full electronic treatment on Timber Remixed. This album contains six key remixes by Squarepusher, Oneohtrix Point Never, Tim Hecker, Johann Johannsson, Fennesz and Hauschka.

The Day was commissioned for Maya Beiser by the University of Iowa/Hancher Auditorium, and is dedicated to Maya. It premiered at SFJAZZ in San Francisco, California, in August 2016. World To Come was commissioned for Maya Beiser by Commissioning Music/USA, The Carnegie Hall Corporation, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing arts, and several other arts organizations. It premiered in 2003 in New York City. Cellist Maya Beiser performs both of these works by David Lang with a sparkling interpretation that assures the listener they were tailor-made just for her bow.Cellist Maya Beiser defies categories. Passionately forging a career path through uncharted territories, she has captivated audiences worldwide with her virtuosity, eclectic repertoire, and relentless quest to redefine her instrument’s boundaries. The Boston Globe declares, “With virtuoso chops, rock-star charisma, and an appetite for pushing her instrument to the edge of avant-garde adventurousness, Maya Beiser is the post-modern diva of the cello,” while Rolling Stone calls her a “cello rock star.”

[Ziporyn's] whole career has been about making US see and hear that music is one world. - the Boston Globe Following the critically acclaimed Frog's Eye (CA21040, 2006) Big Grenadilla/Mumbai marks the second Cantaloupe Music collaboration between composer/clarinetist Evan Ziporyn and Gil Rose's Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP). It is also the second time that Evan has teamed up with world-renowned tabla player Sandeep Das - a member of the Silk Road Ensemble - thus forging together a non-western master musician with a premiere western orchestra. Commissioned and premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in 2006, Big Grenadilla features Evan Ziporyn on bass clarinet and is named for the wood from which clarinets are made and the "big" orchestra, magnifying and framing. Wanting to highlight and amplify what he likes to do best on his instrument, Evan calls the piece "an attempt at ancestor worship, on two levels: The instrument dreams of it's living, rooted reality, with the orchestra playing the role of it's environs." Mumbai is a memorial to and meditation on the terrorist bombings in that city in 2008. Mumbai was commissioned by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and premiered alongside with Grammy nominated soloist Sandeep Das on May 27, 2011.

Tibetan singer Yungchen Lhamo and Russian pianist Anton Batagov first met through their mutual friendship with famed choreographer Bill T. Jones, so it's only natural that their first musical collaboration is based on movement and improvisation. Tayatha traces a journey of spiritual transformation, invoking the universal themes of love, family, faith and renewal.

Too funky for the academy, the Bang on a Can All-Stars emerged from the scruffy unvirons of downtown New York playing a new kind of music, with a new kind of energy, for a new kind of audience. This is the music that made them famous - their breakthrough CDs for Sony Classical, newly packaged, remastered onto one 74-minute disc. Music from Bang on a Can co-founders Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, Bang on a Can All-Stars member and acclaimed composer-clarinettist Evan Ziporyn, and innovators Nick Didkovsky, Annie Gosfield, and Lois V Vierk. With this music, Bang on a Can cracked open a powerful new world. Hear why.

Classical Music

Michael Gordon, co-founder of Bang on a Can and also featured on Nonesuch (Light Is Calling, Weather) and Cantaloupe (Decasia), wrote the 52 minute 'Trance' for Icebreaker in 1995. Called 'a minimalist classic' by The New York Times, 'Trance' is a kaleidoscope of pan-pipe melodies and provocative rhythms, and features Icrebreaker's aggressively virtuosic sound.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

�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

J. L. ADAMS Inuksuit & • Thad Anderson, Noam Bierstone, Omar Camenartes, Michael Compitello, Nathan Davis, Christopher Demetriou, Rob Esler, Matt Evans, Diego Espinosa, Tim Feeney, Benjamin Fraley, Amy Garapic, Russell Greenberg, Nathaniel Hartman, Phil Hermans, Ayano Kataoka, Kelli Kathman, Danny Lichtenfeld, Ryan Maguire, Shard Mamoun, Krystina Marcoux, Murray Mast, Annie Laurie Mauhs-Pugh, Carson Moody, Benjamin Reimer, Jessica Schmitz, Jeff Stern, Bill Solomon, Christopher Swist, Lisa Tolentino, Alessandro Valiante, Owen Weaver (perc) • CANTALOUPE 21096 (CD: 59: 54, DVD 1:23:00)


& Strange and Sacred Noise video directed by Len Kamerling


This is an event. Inuksuit was written in 2009, and has become John Luther Adams’s signature piece. It is designed to be performed in an open, outdoor space, with a range of performers from nine to 99 (this recording uses 32). It is loose in its construction, with a flow of events that is similar from one performance to another, but whose details and ensemble will vary, depending on choices made in performance, and the characteristics of the environment chosen. Its title comes from the abstract stone structures made across Alaska by the Inuit over the centuries. It uses mostly unpitched percussion (or more precisely instruments of relative pitch) such as drums, cymbals, and gongs, but it also uses harmonic “whirly tubes,” conches, sirens, and glockenspiels and piccolos near the end. But Adams’s primary focus on less pitched, more “noisy” sound sources is a savvy one, as it allows great density and complexity of texture without all the additional harmonic complications that would result from using traditional orchestral instruments (for the record, lessons he’s learned from Inuksuit are being applied in a new work for outdoor wind ensembles).


I heard the piece a couple of years ago in New York at the Park Avenue Armory, a performance whose very venue of course contradicted the original premises of the piece, but was nonetheless magnificently executed. But this recording, made in the forest abutting Vermont’s Guilford Sound, captures better the sense of how the piece interacts with the natural environment (especially its birds, who seem quite unintimidated by all the racket). It also gives us a sense of the space that the piece creates and occupies.


The aspect of the work that impresses me the most is its pacing. Sounds are given their natural time to assert themselves before they are overlapped with others that naturally grow from the earlier ones’ timbres and envelopes. Thus “whirly tubes” eventually transform to conches, and are interrupted by drums whose seemingly random attacks become increasingly dense and patterned, which are joined by cymbals and then gongs, with sirens emerging out of the shimmering soup of upper partials, while the drums grow higher in register and more patterned … until it all crests like a tsunami and we are left with the twittering of birds, both musical and real.


The piece lasts roughly an hour (though the literature on it suggests a longer span, c.75–90 minutes), but with each repeat listening I never find it long. Rather, it is like the weather; one sees a storm front approaching and is mesmerized by the growing darkness, the rising wind, the smell of coming rain. It’s a tribute to Adams’s instinctive feel for the natural that he can pull this off; that it feels so open and spacious, and resists judgment.


The headnote may be a little confusing, but this release is the sort of hybrid to which we’re becoming more used today, and yet it also is presented a little confusingly. There is a standard CD of the piece. But there is also a DVD, which includes 1) the same recording, but with multi-track surround sound ( as well as straight DVD stereo) and a video of a different piece, Strange and Sacred Noise (1997). This work is a sort of prelude to Inuksuit , for percussion quartet in several different monotimbral scorings, and using many of the same process-driven techniques (you can read my review of the Mode 53 release in Fanfare 29:5). It’s led by the amazing Steven Schick, and Adams provides succinct commentaries between each of the eight movements. I particularly love the long third one, inspired by the overlapping accelerandos and decelerandos of Nancarrow and Adams’s contemporary Peter Garland. The performance is filmed in the Alaskan tundra, and is stark and dramatic in the juxtaposition of the players with the vast landscape.


I can’t fully review the surround-sound version because I do not have that configuration. But I can certainly testify that the DVD recording is more detailed, and has more presence and depth. (You also get about a dozen nice slides of the stone sentinels and the Alaskan landscape, that cycle endlessly through the piece.) But the CD sound is just dandy as well.


OK, I must briefly carp: While the piece is divided into five tracks for access-convenience (in both audio versions), Cantaloupe nowhere tells you the timings (even on the page for the disc on their web page). It also takes a bit to realize that the video on the DVD is under “extras.” It would have been nice if the contents had been presented just a little less elliptically. This is a minor kvetch; it’s just a little irritating in what feels to me like the label’s slightly cavalier attitude toward the listener.


But I don’t want this to color my overall enthusiasm for this release. This is a visionary work, in the tradition of Ives, Cage, Harrison, and Tenney—all acknowledged ancestor-mentors of the composer. Adams is deeply tuned into the eco-sensibility of the era in a humane, unpretentious, yet grand way. Indeed, I could express it more simply by saying that his art is grand but not grandiose. Want List for the coming year.


FANFARE: Robert Carl

"• 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). "

This is Burhans' debut as a lead composer and recording artist, though he has long been recognized as a vital presence on the NYC new music scene. The New York Times lauded him as "animated and versatile," a "sweet-voiced countertenor," and a "new music virtuoso." He's also a regular member of several groundbreaking groups and ensembles that have helped redefine modern classical music-among them ACME, Alarm Will Sound, Beyondo, Bleknlok, Escort, it's not you it's me, Newspeak, Ensemble Signal and the Wordless Music Orchestra.

Commissioned by Carnegie Hall and Stanford Lively Arts to go on a program with his piece the little match girl passion, death speaks draws it's initial inspiration from the work of Schubert - specifically the song "Death and the Maiden." The five-part "death speaks" features Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond), Bryce Dessner (The National), Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy) and Nico Muhly, and was produced by Bryce Dessner. "[Connects] the dots between Romantic morbidity and emo rock." - New York Times