In 1978, Brian Eno put out Music for Airports, his first 'ambient' album. It was a four-part piece, composed in the studio, devoid of all but the most basic aspects of song, challenging listeners to re-imagine what music might be. Twenty years later, Bang on a Can All-Stars created their own version of the work with live musicians, all the while staying true to the source by working with Eno. It was released on record in 1998 to wide acclaim. Ten years later, Cantaloupe Music released a live version of Music for Airports as a digital-only release. To this day, the All-Stars frequently perform the classic work live. Of such a live performance, the Village Voice remarked, 'It was beautiful, and best enjoyed while lying flat on your back and staring straight up, through the palm trees and the sunroof to the deep night outside, with the neighboring, towering buildings overhead appearing to curve inward around you as breathy keyboards slowly gave way to meandering clarinet'. The Bang on a Can All-Stars, with their unparalleled musicality, their international touring, award-winning cds and far ranging commissioning programs, have become one of the most powerful ambassadors for contemporary music in the world. For all their efforts, Musical America recognized the All-Stars in 2004 as Ensemble of the Year. 'One of the most visceral performing groups around', the London Independent raved.

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.

Classical Music

Classical Music

“We group ourselves into nations,” David Lang writes in the program note, “but it has never really been clear to me what that means, or what we get out of it.” In 2014, he wrote The National Anthems, the featured work on Cantaloupe’s new release. The piece uses one line from each national anthem of the United Nations’ 193 countries.

Attempting to find a universal truth in the process of researching the anthems, he instead came to realize they resembled prayers for fleeting freedom rather than confidence in it. By the work's end, what remains sounds like it could be heard inside a church.

Also on the album is his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Little Match Girl Passion. After hearing from nations of people, the piece places similar prayers in the context of one person.

All together, the album has the feeling of clutching hands. Whether you believe in patriotism or not, it reminds us that everyone in the world holds onto something — whether it’s words, a melody or that which we hope is true.

– WQXR-FM (Elena Saavedra Buckley)

"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."

-- WQXR.com

Classical Music

Tracklist:
1. Treasure
2. Water
3. Needles
4. Cross
5. Shard
6. Swamp
7. Aluminum
8. Flame

Classical Music

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”.

-- Paul Lansky

Founded in 1988 by artistic director Francisco J. N��ez, 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 N��ez 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.

Includes work(s) by Evan Ziporyn. Ensemble: Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Conductor: Gil Rose. Soloists: Anne Harley, Evan Ziporyn.

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 Anz� 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."

Classical Music

Back in April 2014 at Carnegie's Zankel Hall, Augustin Hadelich's performance of David Lang's 'mystery sonatas' was praised by the New York Times as a riveting display of “magisterial poise and serene control.” That same magic penetrates this starkly beautiful recording of the work, played by Hadelich on the exquisite 1723 “ex-Kiesewetter” Stradivari, on loan to him by its current owners since 2011. Lang based his 'mystery sonatas' on the famous pieces by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, but with a modern twist. “I decided to make my own virtuosic pieces about my most intimate, most spiritual thoughts,” he explains, “[but] mine are not about Jesus, and the violin is not retuned between movements. I did keep one of Biber's distinctions. He divides Jesus's life into three phases—the joyous, the sorrowful, and the glorious. The central pieces of my mystery sonatas are called 'joy,' 'sorrow,' and 'glory,' but these are all quiet, internal, reflective states of being.”

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REVIEW:

The violinist Augustin Hadelich premiered this work in 2014 to considerable acclaim. His warm, commanding tone perfectly matches this open and intensely sincere music. This recording is an instant classic.

– Music for Several Instruments

Classical Music

Featuring limited edition packaging in a real wooden box with heat stamped cover design, Timber is composed by Michael Gordon, co-founder of Bang on a Can and Cantaloupe Music. Timber is an evening-length tour de force. Scored for six graduated wooden Simantras percussion instruments devised by French composer Iannis Xenakis the work brings the physicality, endurance and technique of percussion performance to a new level. In this new work, Gordon shapes the music in both polyrhythmic and dynamic waves of textures often each players' hands are in separate rhythmic 'worlds', each traversing a different dynamic contour from loud to soft to loud, similar in some respects to his solo for percussion, XY.

Created by pianist and composer Michael Harrison, Seven Sacred Names is meant as a companion album to the book Nature’s Hidden Dimension by author, astrophysicist and modern Sufi mystic W.H.S. Gebel. The Seven Sacred Names, according to the mystical cosmology of Sufism, tell the story of "...an awakening primal Self," as Gebel writes in the album's liner notes. Taken together, Harrison's seven pieces (with the prologue and epilogue of "Kalim" comprising two distinct movements) foster a listening environment that is ethereal, meditative and at times almost tentative, but also rife with the anticipation and promise of glimpsing hidden truths about ourselves. Featuring a diverse range of artists that includes the Grammy-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, vocalist Ina Filip, cellist Ashley Bathgate, violinists Tim Fain and Caleb Burhans, tabla percussionist Ritvik Yaparpalvi and Harrison himself on piano, the recording moves hypnotically through a subtle but ever-changing suite of tranquil moods and colors — with each stage defining a sacred or exalted state meant to inspire awareness, self-knowledge and self-expression.

The Bang on a Can All-Stars have recorded their first studio album in five years; the first to include the All-Stars' current line-up: Ashley Bathgate, cello; Robert Black, bass; Vicky Chow, piano; David Cossin, percussion; Mark Stewart, electric guitar; and Evan Ziporyn, clarinets.

With Big Beautiful Dark and Scary, the Bang on a Can All-Stars show off their blazing speed, polyrhythmic virtuosity and all-world versatility in a return to the core Bang on a Can sound - an uncategorizable supermix of classical and electric instruments that is part classical ensemble, part rock band, and part jazz sextet. The album is the first in a decade that features the All-Stars exclusively, rather than as part of a collaborative project. Each of the pieces on the double-CD calls upon a different kind of virtuosity, demonstrating the range of musical abilities and experiences arguably unique to this ensemble. Recorded in New York City, all of the music on Big Beautiful Dark and Scary (including the arrangements of the works by Conlon Nancarrow) were written for and premiered by the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

"• Composer/percussionist Glenn Kotche’s fourth studio album features the Kronos Quartet and eighth blackbird. • Release timed to coincide with a series of new work premieres and performances, including Carnegie/Zankel Hall in NYC (2/22), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in SF (3/21-22) and French Legation Museum in Austin, TX (4/16). • Extensive three-month marketing, press and social media campaign, with planned video EPK. "

If there now exists a Second New York School to follow on from the first formed by Cage and his colleagues in the 1950s, then its members would surely comprise Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. This triumvirate has gone further than any in creating a heady polystylisiic mix combining elements of high and low, minimal and maximal, strict and improvised, global and local. Traces of both the polymetric language of totalism and the free-form eclecticism of Zorn may be heard in this music, allied with a post-Stravinskian style of rhythmic muscularity and high-velocity dissonance characteristic of maverick Dutch composer Louis Andriessen.

All of which leads on neatly to Gordon's latest release, a portrait opera of sorts, drawn using texts taken from proto-expressionist painter Vincent van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo. Gordon's predilection for suspending sustained vocal lines above pulsing, often visceral loops and patterns is certainly reminiscent of the Dutch minimalist, while his emphasis on developing two- or three-part textures from single lines evokes Frederic Rzewski.

But the most striking feature of this dark, desolate and often disturbing work is its manifold use of repetition as a means of evoking the kind of madness which so plagued van Gogh's life Like the Dutch artist's fragile mental condition, Gordon's music often appears to be on the edge of chaos but never quite looses control. Indeed, compared with earlier works (such as the wonderfully insane Sunshine ofyour Love) Gordon treats this harrowing subject with more than a modicum of restraint. One is often reminded in the music of van Gogh's arresting description, set towards the end of the work, of "a vague figure fighting like the devil in the midst of the heat".

-- Gramophone [6/2008]