Frederic Rzewski - A Mensch The title of this album refers to the Yiddish word Mensch: literally 'a human being,' but in everyday use someone who acts with integrity, awareness and responsibility. For Frederic Rzewski, the term carried exactly this meaning. A Mensch is not a perfect person, but someone who remains fully human-capable of doubt, contradiction and critical thought, and resistant to becoming passive within larger societal systems. This idea runs quietly but consistently through his work. The pieces brought together here span more than sixty years, from the early 1950s to the last decade of his life, forming a kind of timeline across his career. The musical language changes, sometimes radically, but the underlying concerns remain strikingly constant. Rzewski's music engages with literature, politics and history, often through concrete situations-prison, injustice, personal crisis-but never in an abstract or detached way. The question is always how individuals relate to these forces, and whether they can remain human within them. In that sense, the ethical dimension of the Yiddish Mensch is not just a title, but something that can be heard throughout the programme. Taken as a whole, this recording traces a composer who never gave up on the idea that music can carry meaning beyond itself. Across decades of work, his voice remains clear in it's insistence that art can still ask what it means to live-and to act-as a human being.
Blake: The Philosophy of Composition / Gauwerky, Vandewalle
Wergo
CD
$20.99May 11, 2018
Michael Blake is South African composition’s most important link to the American and British experimental traditions of the second half of the 20th century. It is a connection that derives as much from the composer’s temperament and aesthetic sensibility, as from more conscious decisions relating to the socio-political positioning of composition. As regards the former, Blake’s affinity with composers like Charles Ives and John Cage precedes his mature engagements with these composers through an embrace of certain qualities of openness relating to musical structure and material that can be heard throughout the works recorded on this album. Blake’s “song without words” demonstrates deconstruction, playfulness, irregularity, irony and a postmodern referential sensibility. Apart from “song without words,” which was written in 1972, the seven other works recorded on this album date from between 2008 and 2016, a period of mature compositional activity bookended by the composer’s retirement to the village of Hout Bay near Cape Town late in 2008, and relocation to France in 2015.
Bernhard Lang's Monadology XXXVI is a radical "meta-composition". It deconstructs Chopin's Op. 10 Études through granular analysis, loops, and virtual remixing-destroying and reassembling the score into new sonic textures. The cycle consists of 12 Etüden. The last three are dedicated to Daan Vandewalle, the internationally acclaimed pianist renowned for his mastery of 20th- and 21st-century repertoire, who now brings them to this album.
