This release brings together ALL of Morton Feldman’s compositions for cello and piano, including unpublished works and a first recording.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 The unpublished “Two Pieces,” from that year is a fluctuating music held together not by logic, but through its carefully poised gestures — what Wolpe called “shape.”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 The unpublished, compact “Composition for cello and piano” (1951) is a sudden breakthrough, yet it already contains the DNA of his very last works in its minimal material and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“For Stockhausen, Cage, Stravinsky, and Mary Sprinson” (1972) is an ephemeral, unpublished piece, a shard of music broken off from the main body of work Feldman was producing at the time.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.

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.

On April 6, 1327, a 22-year-old Italian poet named Francesco Petrarca caught a glimpse of a young woman, Laura, in a church in Avignon. He later reported that “living sparks issued from two lovely eyes”. Those sparks enflamed Petrarch such that he spent the rest of his illustrious career coming to terms with them. In the 16th century, madrigals were developed by Adrian Willaert and Cipriano de Rore, which took Petrarch’s agonized images as justification for violating the rules that had guided musicians since before the beginnings of notated music. Those living sparks have leapt ahead seven more centuries to inspire Katharina Rosenberger.

Rosenberger's tempi agitati embeds Petrarch’s texts (especially fragments from his “Ascent of Mount Ventoso”) and settings of sonnets by Willaert and Rore within her own responses to those materials. In live performance, Rosenberger works together with stage-director Ludger Engels to distribute members of the ensemble, Neue Vocalsolisten, around the sound space; they dart around throughout the site, thereby embodying Petrarch’s “vive faville.” While a sound recording lacks the visual dimension crucial to Rosenberger’s concept, it allows the listener to attend much more closely to her rich tapestry of sonorities as she puts Petrarch’s 14th-century poetry and 16th-century madrigals into dialogue with her extended vocal techniques. Sometimes the singers coalesce into whole polyphonic samples before returning to the extended vocal techniques from which they had emerged. Sometimes, finally, the madrigal itself appears, now intact. Rosenberger thereby simulates Petrarch’s struggle to put into coherent form his reactions to Laura’s glance. Those living sparks have indeed inflamed thousands: Laura’s glance goaded Petrarch to the heights of formal perfection in his sonnets, and it led the madrigalists to imagine tonal worlds far beyond the stylistic precepts they had inherited.

Includes six world premiere recordings of the Irish composer's work!

Review:

"How music engenders a sense of speed remains notoriously elusive, with theories of musical time sometimes putting forward the idea of an ongoing motion which underlies perceived processes of change. Drawing upon the suggestion that a number of such processes can be understood without reference to this sense of movement, the current discussion proposes that the concept of ‘quickness’, as formulated by Italo Calvino, forms a useful interpretative lever through which to approach a number of compositions by Irish composer, Gerald Barry. Examinations of Bob, 1998 and In the Asylum suggest ways in which Barry’s approach to musical material plays with perceptions of speed and slowness, and how his work represents a number of different solutions to the problem of creating convincing musical forms." --Contemporary Music Review (Daniel March)

This release brings together two works by Alvin Lucier centered on the pipe organ, a perfect instrument for Lucier’s compositional practice. Both are first recordings. “Swing Bridge” was commissioned by this record’s ensemble, the Australian Art Orchestra, for the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Organ. The score requires that specific pipes be removed from the organ and run into three specially constructed offset chests, each accommodating two pipes (six pitches total). These pipes are manipulated by three or more performers, known as ‘pipe wavers.’ This music explores the phenomenon of the organ making its operation performative and visceral. We hear the way the energy produced by the organ ‘sounds’ the space in which the music was performed and recorded, and, for those who witnessed the performance, we experienced the physicality of air moving through pipes as the wavers shifted the tuning of each pipe microtonally with their hands. This is conceptual work of the highest order but it is also sensual, beautiful, and engrossing, with the textures of the ensemble woven into the pulsations produced by the organ and the resonances of the room. For “Sizzles” the composer writes: “Drums of various sizes are randomly placed throughout the performance space. Fine materials such as lentils, chickpeas, and candy hearts are sprinkled on the drumheads. As low organ tones are sounded, the skins of the drums vibrate sympathetically, causing the drums to sound and the material to move. Each drum is individually amplified with a contact or air microphone and a separate amplifier.”

All tracks have been digitally mastered using 24-bit technology.