Harrison: For Strings

Includes work(s) by Morton Feldman. Ensemble: Barton Workshop.

John Cage allowed for some of his works to be combined and performed simultaneously. Percussionist Bonnie Whiting has created uniquely virtuosic solo-simultaneous realizations of some of these works for "speaking percussionist." 51'15.657" for a speaking percussionist is Whiting's solo-simultaneous realization of all of 45' for a speaker and 27'10.554" for a percussionist. Cage wrote 45' for a speaker to perform himself. He wrote on thirty-two subjects and added a series of gestures (gargling, lighting a match, etc.) to be performed during the delivery. Like the percussion piece, each page is one minute long. Between 1984 and 1987 Cage composed 17 pieces called Music for ____. Any of these pieces can be performed alone or together in any combination. Here Whiting combines one of the percussion versions with the version for voice. Her recital is completed by Cage's two beautiful, classic, early pieces for voice and piano: The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs and A Flower. Here the piano is used as a percussion instrument, never played on the keys but rather knocked and slapped on by th epianist. As in the larger works, Whiting gives a tour de force performance of both parts simultaneously. As a bonus, Whiting's mentor Allen Otte performs his work for speaking pianist/percussionist which is created around works of Cage and utlizing Cage's compositional "tools" for both the music and text.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Ulrich Krieger (born 1962 in Freiburg) is a German contemporary composer, performer, improviser and experimental rock musician based in Los Angeles. Krieger's artistic work spans a broad field from contemporary classical composition and free improvisation to experimental fusion with electronic music, rock, metal and noise. His special interest lies in the exploration of the physical fringes between acoustic and electronic produced sounds. In his music and with his instrument, the saxophone, he developed an original style of playing he calls "acoustic electronics". Acoustic electronics is about using sounds that appear to be electronic but are actually produced on acoustic instruments. His probably best known experimental project with acoustic electronics is the transcription of Lou Reed's guitar feedback opus Metal Machine Music, which he rearranged for chamber orchestra. Composers: Ulrich Krieger Performers: Eric Drescher, bass flute; Christian Vogel, bass clarinet; Ulrich Krieger, tenor saxophone; Ulrich Krieger, electronics; California E.A.R. Unit; Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, cello; Vicki Ray, piano; Amy Knoles, percussion; Sonic Boom; Alex Srameck, contrabass clarinet; Chris Kallmyer, trumpet; Luke Storm, tuba; Robert Allaire, accordion; Ami Tamura, inside piano; Lydia Martin, percussion; Aniela Marie Perry, cello; Jake Rosenzweig, bass; Johannes Uhle, organ; Ulrich Krieger, sopranino saxophone; Ensemble Experimente; Dimitri Jurowski, cello; Maria Lobanowa, flute; Johanna Sponholz, recorder; Nikolaj Abramson, clarinet; Jonas Pieper, saxophone; Stephan Bienwald, electric guitar; Julia Schr�der, harp; Alezander Schubert, accordion; Vinzenz Wei�enburger, piano; Friedemann Werzlau, percussion; Moritz Colitti, violin; Antje Wunderlich, violin; Arthur Hornig, cello; Felix Eugen Thiemann, cello; Gerhard Scherer, Conductor

Originally created as an invitation by Rolling Stone magazine in 1977, as part of a gala issue celebrating the magazine's move from San Francisco to New York, which featured literary and art contributors honoring it's new home. Cage constructed his waltzes as a series of 49 multi-colored triangles superimposed on the Hagstrom map of New York City, each point derived by the use of chance operations. Wanting to celebrate Cage's memory, Don Gillespie decided to collect the sights and sounds from the locations specified in "49 Waltzes." This ambitious project of filming Cage's 147 specific locations in New York's five boroughs took one year to complete.

Mode continues it's Xenakis Edition with the second volume dedicated to his electronic works.

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Classical Music

Joan La Barbara is a long recognized pioneer of extended vocal techniques and champion of new music. She emerged from the New York Downtown scene to perform in the ensembles of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, including the premiere of Glass' "Einstein on the Beach." Composer/Vocalist Joan La Barbara has created a rich body of experimental works, many initially produced on analog tape. This collection includes a first release of the award-winning CYCLONE plus two LP reissues offered here remixed to her original surround concept: as lightning comes, in flashes explores a vast array of La Barbara’s signature extended vocal techniques; Autumn Signal is a rare example of the composer’s work with Buchla synthesizer for spatialization as well as modification of vocals. 96khz/24-bit transfers were made from the original multi-track analog tapes. New stereo and surround mixes were then created under the supervision of the composer. On the Bluray edition: The stereo soundtrack is presented in uncompressed 24-bit PCM audio. The surround versions are presented in 24-bit 5.1 Surround Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio..

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REYNOLDS _Symphony [Myths]. 1 Whispers out of Time. 2 _Symphony [Vertigo] 3 • Kotaro Sato, cond; 1 Edwin London, cond; 2 Harvey Sollberger, cond; 3 Tokyo PO; 1 Cleveland CS; 2 La Jolla SO 3 • MODE 183 (73:51)


I recently read Roger Reynolds’s dense but engaging little book, Mind Models , a set of essays from 1972 concerning trends in advanced music. In retrospect, it’s quite impressive how much he got right about what would come to pass under the aesthetic/cultural impact of technology, communications, globalization. Reynolds (b. 1934), while probably most often typed as a modernist composer, composes a sort of music that isn’t written much here anymore. More important, it probably hasn’t ever been written much in America. What I mean by this is that Reynolds’s music is saturated with ideas , but not just ones about musical technique. Instead, it plays with concepts and artifacts from such points of departure as non-Western culture, literature, geography, architecture, science, to name a few. In this omnivorous intellectual curiosity, and his desire to distill these disparate sources into the common field of musical language, he bears more resemblance to European aesthetics than to American. (Not surprisingly, Xenakis was a friend. Reynolds also has a very close connection to Japanese art, traditional and contemporary, and Takemitsu was another close colleague.) The play of symbols , embodied in sonic gestures, is at the core of his work. While rigorously intellectual, his music isn’t particularly academic. Reynolds has always had a foot in experimentalism as much as modernism. To attempt such a synthesis is questing and risk-taking. And at its best the result has real power.


These three orchestral works listed in the headnote date from 1990, 1988, and 1987, respectively. (It’s a sad commentary on our culture that it appears to have taken two decades to get them to a commercial recording.) All three works aspire to a sort of stately grandeur and mystery. Great sweeping gestures occur, which we can’t really anticipate nor explain, yet they are usually satisfying. Movements trail off into silence abruptly. At times the music seems frozen harmonically, yet there may be several layers of detailed and often fast activity occurring simultaneously. Indeed the predominant rhythmic sense here I would call geological , with bands of sonic activity slipping and grating against one another like tectonic plates.


Symphony [Myths] fits the above description well, drawing its inspiration from two pairs of seaside rocks that serve as shrines in Japan and Greece. The music seems appropriately elemental in its sound. Whispers out of Time is for string orchestra (with a concertino quartet), and relates to a John Ashbery poem about a self-portrait by the 16th-century artist Parmigianino, itself a portrayal of the artist in the reflection of a concave mirror (this begins to give a sense of the layers of meaning and reference which inform Reynolds’s work). It’s a dark, mysterious, imagistic work, with the titles of its movements taken from lines in Ashbery’s poem (“Like a wave breaking on a rock” really sounds like such, with successive sound-crashes and resultant spray). It also uses shards of the Beethoven “Les Adieux” Sonata and the Mahler Ninth Symphony, which increase the elegiac quotient and suffuse it with a more tonal veneer.


Only Symphony [Vertigo] doesn’t quite work for me. Its distinctive technique is the use throughout of a prerecorded part made of computer-processed piano sounds, derived from improvisations by Reynolds’s colleague Cecil Lytle. The result is the only work that sounds a little modernist generic, with its mix of electroacoustic and acoustic, its somewhat more strident gestures, and often-discontinuous flow. Some will find this exciting for the use of the technology and the interaction of the different worlds of sounds. I enjoy the composer’s risk-taking here, but the gamble doesn’t quite pay off.


But overall, this is an excellent portrait of a composer of great imaginative, aesthetic ambition. The performances are committed, though at times feel not as fully shaped as one might like, considering the wealth of detail that needs to be balanced to pull off the works’ desired impact. This is not for everyone, but I recommend it as an important, questing voice in the American scene. There is a real mind, heart, and ear at work here. Yes, it’s not easily ingratiating, but who said we should never work for our aesthetic pleasures?


FANFARE: Robert Carl

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This DVD marks the first complete recording of Xenakis' four string quartet, including the late quartet Ergma.

Classical Music

Njinga ruled 17th century Ndongo - now Angola - as 'king' because tribal custom forbade her to rule as a woman. Flowing freely between time periods, the play traces the diaspora of Njinga's people to Brazil and the United States.

This 9-movement work by this Alaskan composer features Percussion Group Cincinnati, a quartet who commissioned and premiered the piece. The musicians are spatially separated so that waves of percussion crisscross around the room often to a hallucinatory effect.

This first volume in a series combining Radulescu’s complete Piano Sonatas and String Quartets on Mode, performed by the superb JACK Quartet and pianist Stephen Clarke was released earlier this year on CD. It has been greeted with great critical acclaim and sales. And so, a natural starting place for Mode to reenter the LP market. In the 1970s, Horatiu Radulescu (1942-2008) began exploring and composing begun composing what he called “plasmatic music,” in which sound was conceived as an “endless ocean of vibrations,” as opposed to the traditional way in which music treats sound as a fabric of discrete scale steps. His music is linked to the “spectral music” school. Radulescu’s Fifth String Quartet is one of the key works in his output. It is in some ways the richest manifestation of the body of string techniques he had developed for his music. The Fifth Piano Sonata makes abundant use — more so than any of the other sonatas — of Romanian folk material, which is absorbed and integrated into Radulescu’s spectral language.

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The music on this album was recorded in the studio the day after Uitti and Fanous spent 10 minutes improvising together in concert, in a first meeting. It represents bidirectional ideas in music often and erroneously thought to be opposites: western vs. Eastern, improvised vs. #through-composed. In this recording they are stood on their head, examined, dissected, tortured, and ultimately reconciled. Fanous says:"Musically, Frances and I came from two distinct sets of emphases. In my case, these were non-western music, as well as chromaticism in both it's contemporary classical and free jazz expressions, all funneled through the techniques of classical and flamenco guitar. In Frances' case, it was a lifelong devotion to and mastery of parallel directions: improvisation, as well as contemporary composition at the highest level. Both were made infinitely more powerful by the deployment of ingenious extended techniques, including her revolutionary two-bow methods. Our backgrounds contained enough shared common experience to allow for a tentacular interdigitation of our improvisational languages, which was effortless and natural." The session began with bouzouki-cello duets, in which drones played a central role, calling up a middle-eastern sound-world. Fanous writes: "As the pieces evolved, they gradually became unmoored and reverted to who they really were, but together. This process of feeling one's way through the darkness was like navigating towards some unknown endpoint, the way the ancients used the astrolabe to navigate using the positions of the stars - Negoum in Arabic."

This is a great gift to all interested in music of the recent past. Iannis Xenakis conceived of a multimedia installation in 1976–78, which consisted of a pre-recorded electroacoustic score, titled La légende d’Eer, and a structure in which it would unfold, called the “Polytope.” The latter was constructed on the plaza in front of the newly opened Pompidou Arts Center in Paris; it is a fluid series of intersecting parabolic forms, in essence, a tent that is a predecessor of the more sophisticated structures of Frank Gehry and other contemporary constructivist architects. It also hearkens back to Xenakis’s original training as an architect, and his work as Le Corbusier’s assistant in the famous Phillips Pavilion of the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, for which Varèse wrote the Poème électronique. Inside, hundreds of flashing lights and mirrors, and four lasers were coordinated by computer into a constantly mutating series of “constellations.” The effect seems to have been one of a sort of transcendent sensory overload, a confrontation with the overwhelming scope and force of the universe (I heard the composer lecture once on the piece, and showing a picture of the Polytope, he quipped, “Here you see many people going in, and a few coming out.”)

Disques Montaigne has already released the original tape piece on MO 782058. This DVD is the first chance we have to experience something of the full piece, through the visuals of Bruno Rastoin. I say “somewhat,” because alas (and amazingly) no video walk-through of the work was ever made (though admittedly the technology at that point would be quite primitive by current standards). Instead, hundreds of slides of the piece in progress were made, and Rastoin has essentially arranged them into a Powerpoint presentation, flowing from one to another in conjunction with the music. There’s no indication whether the sequence of images corresponds to the original sequence of the piece (or even if that sequence was set in a predetermined loop, or more random). While hardly ideal, working with what was available, this at least gives some sense of a visionary project.

The music itself is spectacular, one of the great landmarks of “pure” electroacoustic music. Lasting 47 minutes, the piece moves through a series of overwhelming climaxes. Some are shatteringly ugly, but all are bracing in their uncompromising power. (I heard the piece at the above-mentioned lecture, which was at the International Computer Music Conference, with one of the most knowledgeable audiences in the world for such. Even here a large portion of the audience fled, perhaps because of the sonic onslaught, perhaps out of aesthetic disagreement, probably a combination of both.) This DVD claims to have restored about three minutes to the original tape, and I honestly don’t know where, but it’s welcome and doesn’t change overall the impact any would know from earlier encounters.

Finally, there’s a 67-minute interview with Xenakis in 1995 at his Paris center CCMIX, conducted by Harry Halbreich, one of the most knowledgeable, imaginative, and enthusiastic of European musicologists devoted to contemporary music. The production quality of the document is very poor—an unstable camera, variable focus, moments of blackout—but it remains important nonetheless. Xenakis eventually would suffer the tragedy of dementia in his last years, but in this, six years before his death, there’s almost no sign of any mental decay, and amazingly enough, the whole interview is conducted in English, in which both participants are fluent. One only laments that if one-tenth the resources devoted to a VH-1 documentary on a washed-up 1970s band could be given to chronicling the life and ideas of one of the great revolutionary musical geniuses of the century, this video product would be at least 10 times better. But we deal with what we’ve got, and I’m very grateful for it.

It may seem I have quibbles here, but this really does have my highest recommendation. Mode is carving out an exceptional catalog of new music DVDs (I already know their Carter and Cage releases), and this one is a heroic rescue operation, a treasure. Bravo to all concerned.

Robert Carl, FANFARE

This release brings all of Subotnick's piano music together on one album for the first time, along with four first recordings, all supervised by the composer. 'Liquid Strata' is an important work in Subotnick's oeuvre. Here the electronic component is what he calls "ghost electronics," and this is the first of 11 Ghost Pieces. In these works, Subotnick sought to address technology in a way that highlights rather than compromises the inherent features and strengths of acoustical instruments. In the Ghost Pieces, Subotnick pre-recorded the vocal "energy shapes" on tape. These audio signals were played back (but not heard), combined with sine tones, and sent to an envelope follower. The voltages generated trigger Buchla-produced pitch, amplitude, modulation and stereo panning. All of the Ghost Pieces are to be performed live on a proscenium stage, with speakers in front of the performer. 'The Other Piano is a continuation of the Ghost pieces. The composer refers to the electronics as "a quadraphonic sound painting [spread] throughout the auditorium, done on the spot, intuitively, by a sound painter.... one always hears the real piano and the transformations are a fantasy, changing in time and space, whirling around the room..." Subotnick drew conceptual ideas for Falling Leaves from Scarlatti sonatas, a "sense of Scarlatti, but not derivative," particularly repeated notes, the virtuosic crossing of hands, and the idea of cadences. The early Preludes Nos. 1 & 2 are post-Webern influenced works. Prelude No. 4 is the first piece where Subotnick worked with the Buchla synthesizer. The electronic component is composed onto stereo tape, which is played alongside the live piano. Liner notes by Bob Gluck and the composer

Alvin Lucier’s work has been more often described in terms of science than of art and his scores often contain experimental procedures. Lucier perfectly represents the fusion of a scientist with an artist. His pieces arise from an inspection of a pure physical phenomenon. The performers on Mode’s fourth disc of Lucier’s music are the Italian experimental music ensemble Alter Ego- two of the works were written for or dedicated to them- and Alvin Lucier himself. The interaction of electronic and acoustic sounds is the central point of Two Circles. These electronic sounds move from the same note in two glissandi, ascending and descending. The acoustic instruments interfere, generating beating from the interaction of closed frequencies. In some cases, these pulsations give the impression to expand the sonic space, whilst in others they appear to bring to an ending. The work is receiving here its first recording.

The orchestral works on this recording include two of Xenakis’ adventurous spatialized works along with Metastaseis, the work with which he emerged onto the international avant-garde scene. Metastaseis A is the original version, which is better known by its revision, Metastaseis B. The revision was the result of conductor Hermann Scherchen, who was critical of the size of the score and of elements of its instrumentation. He agreed to perform it if certain revisions were made. Ultimately, the première of the revised version, Metastaseis B, would be conducted by Hans Rosbaud at Donaueschingen in 1955, where it created a sensation. The public would have to wait until after the composer’s death before hearing the original version of Metastaseis A, which took place in 2008 in Torino under the direction of Arturo Tamayo, who conducts the work in this recording, its first commercial release. Xenakis explained that the sound world of Metastaseis was inspired by his experiences as a member of the student Resistance during the Nazi occupation of Greece. In Nomos Gamma, the listener is struck by the increased size of the percussion section, which rings the orchestra and audience, lending a kind of ritual brutality to the piece.