Morton Feldman takes his unique art of limitation to the extreme in his last completed composition "Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello". Ensemble Avantgarde invites you to immerse yourself in a meditative sound world. This is a masterful performance with great serenity and a sense of infinite time: truly music about and for eternity.

Extended Voices is an apt title for this album, for the simple reason that all of the works here either extend the human voice physically or enlarge the performance situation of choral music.

In Pauline Oliveros’s jet-propelled Sound Patterns, the conductor deals with precise, difficult rhythmic structures that have many changes of tempo. The singers improvise pitches within broad areas of high, middle and low and are asked to produce a varied assortment of sounds, including whispers, tongue-clicks, lip-pops and finger-snaps. The vocal noises, along with tone clusters produced by the pitch improvisations, create a humorous, electronic effect.

In Robert Ashley’s She Was a Visitor, the performer finds himself in a decidedly different choral situation. The chorus is divided into groups, each headed by a leader. A lone speaker repeats the title sentence throughout the entire performance. The separate phonemes of this sentence are picked up freely by the group leaders and are relayed to the group members, who sustain them softly and for the duration of one natural breath. The time lag between the group leaders’ utterances and their pickup by the group members produces a staggered, chant-like effect, with the sounds moving outward from the nearest performer to the farthest. It is possible that in a concert performance, the audience could, with minimal instruction, also participate.

Christian Wolff in Cambridge by Morton Feldman is a simple, two-part work, consisting of a succession of chords and single notes sung quietly by the chorus. There is no text. The conductor chooses the duration of each sound on the basis of breath control and harmonic weight.

Chorus and Instruments (II), a longer work also by Morton Feldman, has alternating sections of free and strict tempos, plus the additional colors of tuba and chimes.

In Solos for Voice 2 by John Cage, each singer is asked to make their own realization of the piece, using material, including sheets of transparent plastic, supplied by the composer. By superimposing certain sheets on others, the singer determines several aspects of his vocal part, including vowel and consonant sounds, dynamics, approximate pitch areas and time decisions. The electronic version of this work was developed by Gordon Mumma and David Tudor. The singers’ sounds are picked up by several types of throat, lip and cup microphones, are fed into a complex configuration of electronic equipment and are then processed in real time during the performance. In the Ichyanagi work that gives this album its title, singers use musical instruments, such as slide whistles, to extend the range of their voices. At the same time, electronic instruments transform the voices in terms of timbre, range and dynamics. The written score consists mostly of sustained sounds and glissandos of varying lengths and speeds. The development of the material depends upon a cueing arrangement that instructs the singer to perform in relation to sounds he hears another performer make. Extended Voices also includes a prerecorded tape, composed of purely electronically produced sounds, that functions as complementary or accompaniment material.

The vocoder used in North American Time Capsule 1967 by Alvin Lucier was designed by Sylvania Electronics Systems to encode speech sounds into digital information bits for transmission over narrow band widths via telephone lines or radio channels. There is no written score for this work. The performers are asked to prepare material using any sounds at all that would describe to beings far from our environment either in space or in time the physical, spiritual, social, scientific or any other situation in which we currently find ourselves. The performers’ sounds are fed into the vocoder and are modified during the performance both by the sounds acting as control signals and by the manual alteration of the vocoder components.

-- from the liner notes by Alvin Lucier

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Meditative sound magic from New York City: Together with colleagues and friends such as John Cage, Christian Wolff and Earle Brown, Morton Feldman formed a circle of pre-eminent individualists within the American avant-garde movement of the 20th century, which, commencing in New York, founded a current of international significance. Crucial for his artistic development was undoubtedly his meeting with John Cage (1912–92), with whom he was in close contact after 1950. They mutually inspired each other to create music away from the compositional techniques conventional up to then, which particularly applied to the definition of specific notes, pitches and note durations or regular rhythm. It was also a commission from the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and its Principal Conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas that led to the composition of String Quartet and Orchestra in 1973. Feldman’s final completed work Coptic Light, written in 1986, displays an even more gigantic orchestra than that in String Quartet and Orchestra. In his sensitive works we always gain the impression that they are cautious attempts to achieve coherent musical results, without running against the character of the instruments.

Morton Feldman’s “For John Cage” is the second of seven large-scale works dedicated to artists, a series which includes Frank O’Hara, Bunita Marcus, Christian Wolff, Stefan Wolpe, Philip Guston, and Samuel Beckett. Feldman met John Cage in 1950, at a time when Feldman’s composition studies with Stefan Wolpe had reached a kind of dead end. Cage gave him encouragement, enthusiasm and permission to be himself. They remained friends until Feldman’s death in 1987. In its austere texture, “For John Cage” gives equal weight to the violin and piano parts. The fact that the two instruments often play similar material makes the contrast between the sustained sounds of the violin and the decaying sounds of the piano especially clear. Erik Carlson and Aleck Karis are both champions of new music, and have been premiering contemporary works throughout their respective careers. Carlson is a composer in his own right, and Karis is very familiar with Morton Feldman’s compositions.

Prophets of the New is a series from Sony focusing on classic recordings of the 20th century's most revolutionary works. Among the most beautiful of modern masterpieces, Rothko Chapel was written to be performed in, and perfectly reflects, the spiritual environment created by painter Mark Rothko.

Classical Music

Classical Music

A disc like this really is impossible to criticize in terms of performance. These works all involve a degree of randomness; some use graphic notation. They are, one and all, studies in texture and sound-mass, and despite a superficial resemblance to the usual avant-garde "squeak-bloop" school, they are beautifully shaped--true "sound sculptures". Even in his least conventional pieces Morton Feldman always gives the impression that he knows where he wants the music to go, and everything he writes is informed by a really exquisite sense of timbre and color. The result is compelling, and these performances do the music full justice. Voice and Instruments is particularly impressive. Martha Culver has a lovely, pure soprano that weaves in and out of the instrumental texture with poetic effect. The engineering also is extremely fine. A major addition to the Feldman discography, especially considering that these are all first recordings.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Classical Music

Classical Music

Feldman's canvas contains sparse, isolated tones and commentary in an environment of heightened concern. (Concern negates the idea that Feldman's music embodies an existential void.) Concern creates tension, energized by the composer's sense of responsibility, and desire. The music sounds familiar at times, where a motif occurs and is not forgotten, but returns in another place in another guise. Or multiple motifs (each instrument's personal statement) are reassembled into something resembling something else, or only itself. Even Feldman's repetition is never exact, as there are slight shifts in weight, shade, density, intensity. And when, eventually, the music ends, it just ends, for no need, or reason, with no explanation, no answers.

Morton Feldman's preoccupation with what he called 'acoustical reality' was the primary subject of all his work but the intimate acoustic reality of the piano, the instrument at which he worked, became a particular focus during the last decade of his life. Piano (1977) and Triadic Memories (1981) sound like Feldman of course - both share that extraordinary sense of time suspended, of instrumental color refracted through pitch and back again- but each also offers a radically different conception of the piano. “What do we listen to in Feldman? Music as an art form, versions of ‘something else,’ how time passes, or a man sitting at a piano? Such clear music, so many questions.” (Christopher Fox)