Flutist Roberto Fabbriciani continues his releases dedicated to the flute repertoire of single composers with works by Belgian composer Henri Pousseur (1929-2009). Previous releases on Mode featured Aldo Clementi and Bruno Maderna. As with the preceding Clementi and Maderna releases, this Pousseur release marks the first time Pousseur’s works for flute have been collected in one recording. It is important to note that Fabbriciani had a long working relationship with the composer. The series of Flexions was composed in 1979 for the performance examinations at the Conservatory in Liège, where Pousseur had been director for 3 years. It aims to introduce students to the diversity of post-tonal harmonic materials without discarding any contact with tradition and the harmonic qualities of the standard repertoire. Two pieces belong to the category of open or mobile form works. The score of Éclipticare (2001) is a proposal to be elaborated (completed). Fabbriciani has made two different versions, including extended playing techniques prominent in the contemporary flute repertoire but largely unused by Pousseur in his written scores. Éclipticare builds a kind of bridge to Zeus jouer de flûtes (2006), a score that is co-signed Pousseur-Fabbriciani for good reasons. Pousseur provided the tape (Hymne à Zeus ornothologue, extracted from the eight Études paraboliques, 1972) as well as a “plan of action” indicating the specific time-spans and the choice of instrument to be used according to the tessitura (from bass-flute to piccolo). All the other details remained in Fabbriciani’s hands. This type of collaboration had long been part of Pousseur’s practice and is also the outcome of his firm belief in the social and human importance of sharing. In addition to the flute repertoire, this release also includes Pousseur’s Scambi for electronic tape, composed in 1957 and realized by Pousseur at the Studio di Fonologia in Milan at the invitation of Luciano Berio.

Classical Music

Classical Music

For Bunita Marcus opens with a clear call to our attention. With these first six notes, we step over the threshold and into the journey of the piece. We know that we are in this for the long haul: Morton Feldman’s late works are notorious for being marathons. He composed For Bunita Marcus in 1985, immediately after his four-hour For Philip Guston, and two years after his six-hour String Quartet (II). These earlier works make an hour-long solo piano piece seem short. Still, it is a long time to sustain a single movement, a single journey, and we inevitably have this in mind as we take the first step: so this is how it starts.

This selection is also available on DVD(Video).

Classical Music

Classical Music

Viola Spaces

Harrison: For Strings

Wolff Edition 1: Bread And Roses

Book edited by Cat Hope and Lindsay Vickery, including CD recording of the 8 John Cage 'Variations' (1958-76), recorded by the Australian ensemble Decibel. Book & CD. First edition. 251 pages. Printed in Germany. Authors featured are Leta E. Miller, David P. Miller, Vincent Bonin, Paul van Emmerik, Thomas DeLio, James Pritchett, Cat Hope, Lindsay Vickery, Stuart James and an introduction by Warren Burt. Variations I [bass clarinet, bass flute, and cello] Variations II [alto saxophone, flute, viola, piano, and cello] Variations III [drum set and a.m. radio] Variations IV [cello, flute, viola, bass clarinet, and environmental sounds] Variations V [reel to reel tapes and oscillators] Variations VI [electric bass guitar and analog effects, electric cello, and digital effects] Variations VII [mobile phones, tablet computers, and laptops] Variations VIII [no input feedback bass clarinet] The eight 'Variations' compositions by John Cage reflect the most productive years of his compositional life - from Variation I in 1958 to Variation VIII in 1976. They show the evolution of some of the earliest aleatoric, multimedia and spatial approaches to contemporary live music performance. This book brings together new and existing perspectives, experiences and backgrounds to these remarkable works, explored by leading International Cage scholars and practitioners. The writings are complemented with a CD recording of Decibel's Complete John Cage Variations Project, an hour long performance program featuring the Variations I - VIII. The works are performed using annotated digital scores created within the ensemble, automating many of the manual processes that resulting in new, accurate versions that align with Cage's artistic aims. Traditional acoustic instruments and period electronics are featured alongside photocells, Arduino boards, online messaging services and calls, noise bass guitar, shortwave radio and custom DIY circuitry. Rare composer notes and missing parts were sourced from the John Cage Trust, New York Public Library and Langlois Foundation. Published in conjunction with Cage's publisher Peters Edition, the scores developed for the project are available via the Apple store. Decibel is a new music ensemble and artistic research team that focuses on the integration of acoustic and electronic instruments in chamber music performance, founded in Western Australia in 2009. They are world-leading interpreters of graphic notations and pioneer digital score formats for composition and performance. This includes the ongoing development of their successful Decibel ScorePlayer App for iPad, enabling coordinated performance of graphic notations for musicians and composers internationally. They have released 7 albums and tour internationally regularly. Cat Hope is an artist scholar whose research interests include animated notation, gender and music, Australian music, digital archiving, as well as music composition and performance as artistic research. She has been awarded Civitella Ranieri, Churchill and Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study Fellowships, and is co-author of 'Digital Arts - An Introduction to New Media (Bloomsbury, 2014) and co-editor of 'Contemporary Musical Virtuosities' (Routledge, 2024). She is a Professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Lindsay Vickery is a composer/performer whose music includes works for acoustic and electronic instruments in interactive-electronic, improvised or fully notated settings, ranging from solo pieces to opera and has been commissioned by numerous groups for concert, dance and theatre. He writes and presents on a range of topics, most recently on the emergence of the "screenscore", nonlinear music and the realization of Cage's music. He is head of composition and music technology at the WA Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia.

This release brings together ALL of Morton Feldman’s compositions for cello and piano, including unpublished works and a first recording.

Together, these works tell the story of Feldman’s music. They span 35 years — over half his lifetime — from when he was searching for his voice as a student to when he was opening new doors in the last years of his life.

The album is bookended by two realizations of the graphic score “Durations 2” (1960), giving an opportunity to hear what the flexibility of graphic notation can bring.

The “Sonatina” (1946) is the earliest work here, and a first recording. Displaying the influence of Béla Bartók, Feldman wrote for the cello sound he loved without fully understanding the realities of playing the instrument. The resulting solo part is naively virtuosic and often even impossible to play. For this recording, Stephen Marotto keeps as close as possible to the written score, aiming to fulfill what Feldman heard in his mind’s ear.

By 1948, Feldman had been studying privately with the composer Stefan Wolpe for several years. The unpublished “Two Pieces,” from that year is a fluctuating music held together not by logic, but through its carefully poised gestures — what Wolpe called “shape.” While the emotional drama of this and other early works would soon disappear from Feldman’s music, it was above all the idea of “shape” that remained with him for the rest of his life.

In 1950, Feldman met John Cage, who shepherded him into the world of the New York avant-garde. The unpublished, compact “Composition for cello and piano” (1951) is a sudden breakthrough, yet it already contains the DNA of his very last works in its minimal material and blurred memories of sounds.

“For Stockhausen, Cage, Stravinsky, and Mary Sprinson” (1972) is an ephemeral, unpublished piece, a shard of music broken off from the main body of work Feldman was producing at the time. It consists of just two musical moments separated by silence — the same chord expressed in two different ways.

At almost 1 hour and 29 minutes, “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” (1981) is one of Feldman’s late, long-duration works, and it is perhaps the best known of the works recorded here.

Liner notes by Samuel Clay Birmaher.

Paul Klee’s Naturstudium (1923) recalibrated the dialogue between art-making and the natural world. By peering closely at nature, Klee’s project was one of a magical de-mystification, seemingly a contradiction in terms until you realize that by looking clearly and dispassionately (the studium part of Naturstudium), he brought us full circle to wonder and awe. Spanish percussionist Luis Tabuenca also peers inward at his world—here the universe of percussion sounds—inviting us to a microscopic listening experience of the grain and texture of percussive timbre.

Using no electronics other than simple amplification we hear, in super close-up, the sounds of bowed percussion instruments, of drops of water falling on a drum set, of the shifting harmonics of a cymbal as it is amplified by the bass drum upon which it rests. This radical change of scale perplexes the ear at first. How could a sound as soft as a simple drop of water be so full and dramatic? How could it demand so much acoustical and psychic space? But we quickly accommodate the dislocation of perspective and resize ourselves as participants in a Lilliputian sound world. Soon we find ourselves as ant-sized listeners in a teeming rain forest of sounds.

One of the loveliest contradictions of perspectives in Tabuenca’s recording is that, in spite of an acoustic recording aimed at capturing the finest nuances of sonic texture, we still hear Luis Tabuenca, a full-sized person and expert percussionist. His lithe movements always radiate from a musically and sonically exacting practice. He excels at creating a equilibrium between the power of the percussive stroke and the cultivation of that power as refined musical gesture and on-stage charisma. It is in just this balance of a raw sonic core with an elegant on-stage presence that he mirrors Klee’s refined observations of the untamable powers of the natural world. All are first recordings. Liner notes by Steven Schick.

The set of The Weather Pieces are reflections on the perception of meteorological phenomena. The listener is immersed in a hybrid sound world, as the line between the live performer and the computer-generated propositions becomes blurred. The musician follows a score that leaves room for interaction with the computer’s ever-changing proposals. The works also use the performer’s voice, using spoken texts to convey inner thoughts and feelings.

Les si doux redoux for basset horn grew out of an idiomatic French expression. Sometimes, during the harshest winters, there are moments of sudden warmth, strangely mild days that are called redoux in French. Les si doux redoux explores discrete changes in the acoustic field, alternating between icy high notes and lower, more tender sounds. It evokes the movement from a static rigid cold, to a warmer, more relaxed and supple state. Unlike the other compositions on this recording, Les si doux redoux is never violent, but like them, is related to personal perception.

Black on Green explores the power of the elements which fascinates us, sometimes leaving an imprint of internalized terror. It grew out of the composer’s recollections of childhood in South Dakota, remembering how the sky would sometimes turn green. Against this murky background, small black clouds would skitter by. This ominous sky became the theater for tornados and supercell storms, as all sorts of energy seemed to come together in a vast whirling motion. Nothing could be done to stop the progression. A person was either lucky and the destruction passed elsewhere, or not.

Robinson was inspired to write Nacarat, a long virtuosic piece, for guitarist Serge Teyssot-Gay after playing with him for many years. As a rock musician who had always created his own music, he had never experienced this way of working, namely, having someone else write for him. This time Robinson imagined a fantastical hurricane filled with colors. The guitarist moves through a violent mass of sound, gradually reaching the absolute calm of the eye, before being pulled into an increasingly turbulent vortex. All are first recordings. Liner notes by Carol Robinson and the performers.

Carol Robinson, a Franco-American composer and clarinetist, is not someone who likes the middle ground, preferring the edges, the extremes. Her music is situated in those places of tenderness and rage that come from commitment and mastery. Trained as a Classical clarinetist, she graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory in the US before continuing her study of contemporary music in Paris thanks to a H.H. Woolley grant. Fascinated by the compositional possibilities offered by electronic sound manipulation, she often composes pieces that link acoustic instruments with electronics. Her on-going integration of aleatoric procedures is one of her signature techniques.

This release gathers two electroacoustic works by Gerard Pape. Dedicated to the late composer Ana-Maria Avram, Vers la lumière II (2017) is an electroacoustic meditation on the afterlife as a kind of continually evolving sonic universe within which the spirit floats freely, carried along in the arms of the sound itself. Pape weaves a slowly evolving lullaby made of complex and ethereal timbral utterances. Each cry seems to stretch out into eternity, the extremely long release of each sound seems to reach toward a future that never arrives. The sound material is derived entirely from samples of a Waterphone, a remarkable instrument invented in the 1960s by american artist Richard Waters. The instrument functions on the principle of a steel resonator containing a small amount of water which is surrounded by a series of various sized bronze rods which can be struck or bowed, creating an arrangement of overtones.

Commissioned to mark the occasion of the total solar eclipse on 29 March 2006, Héliophonie follows a strict temporal structure that is inspired by studies in astrophysies describing the various stages of the evolution of the sun. The first section describes the phase of the birth of the sun, through the formation of cold gas clouds via the accumulation and fusion of particles dispersed in space and the energy released via this process. Pape’s soundworld evokes the internal movement and arresting energy of this atomic accumulation while at the same time constructing the distance and profound depth of the immense void by highlighting the continuum between sound and silence. Dispersed particles of sound fuse like ruptures in the fabric of space, bursting into brilliant and searing clouds of hot gas. The transition to the second section is introduced by the sudden superposition of vibrato-like variations and oscillating temporal layers that evoke the magnetic fields of sun spots. This quickly gives way to a much more rhythmic gestural movement that is suggestive of the abrupt surges of a flame-thrower.

The third section, describing the distant future of the sun, where clouds of sound seem to expand the space and dematerialize the previous more gestural images. Here the sound seems to move in all directions at once and the listener is immerged in a dense atmosphere of highly frictional sensations. Swept away in a storm of hot winds, all sense of time and space seems to evaporate, giving way to a certain consciousness of the endless expanse of the universe. A profound and repetitive cry seems to emanate from the center of the chaos and the piece takes on an intensely meditative aspect. The slow death of the sun is depicted in the fourth section by a decomposition of the previous materials, a contraction and dissolution of the sound itself. The multiple layers of rhythmic pulsations become more and more unstable, and the very sonic material seems to come apart from within, creating a sort of temporal vacuum. Time loses its significance as we fall into the abyss that is the universe of Pape’s musical language.

Both works are first recordings.