EARLE BROWN —A LIFE IN MUSIC—VOL. I • Paul Price, cond; 1–3,5 John Cage, cond; 4,7 Manhattan Percussion Ens; 1–8 Christoph Caskel (perc); 9–11 Aloys Kontarsky (pn, wood blocks); 10 Bernhard Kontarsky (cel, cymbals); 10 David Tudor (pn); 11 AMM; 12 Musica Elettronica Viva 13 • WERGO 6928 (3 CDs: 116:15)


ROLDÁN Ritmicas: No. 6; 1 No. 5. 2 HARRISON Canticle No. 1. 3 RUSSELL 3 Dance Movements. 4 3 Cuban Pieces. 5 COWELL Ostinato pianissimo. 6 CAGE/HARRISON Double Music. 7 CAGE Amore s. 8 STOCKHAUSEN Zyklus. 9 Refrain. 10 KAGEL Transición II. 11 AMM AMM. 12 MEV Spacecraft 13


Though born in Massachusetts, Earle Brown was a young composer living in Denver in 1950 when Merce Cunningham and John Cage came to perform and lecture at the McLean School. His wife at that time, Carolyn Rice Brown, was a dancer who attended Cunningham’s master class. Almost immediately, the four realized they had much in common, and Cage persuaded the Browns to move to New York in 1951—Carolyn was one of the founding members of Merce Cunningham’s dance company (where she was to remain for 20 years as a featured performer) and Earle eventually collaborated with Cage at the Project for Music for Magnetic Tape. This experience with electronic equipment allowed Brown to work as a recording engineer—recording and editing pop, jazz, and classical music—for Capitol Records from 1955–1960. In 1960 he began producing records for Bob Shad’s Time label, having convinced the well-established jazz and pop maven to allow him to record a series of avant-garde compositions. The first of these remarkable documents was issued on Time, but after that label folded in 1966, Brown continued to produce the series for Shad’s larger Mainstream imprint. All 18 of these recordings were reissued on LP in the 1970s, but have not appeared on CD until now.


Brown’s broad knowledge of new music, along with his professional connections, resulted in a groundbreaking collection of music that had been largely unheard—indeed, in some cases, all but unknown—at the time. Represented, of course, were Brown himself and his friends in the “New York School”—Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and their foremost interpreter, pianist David Tudor. But Brown also included what was for the most part the first American documentation of composers from Europe like Nono, Berio, Maderna, Scelsi, and Boulez; Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle from London; an album devoted to South American composers; and one featuring the next, post-Cage generation of American radicals, Ashley, Mumma, Lucier, and Behrman. Equally important, however, was Brown’s understanding that this unfamiliar, often shocking new music needed the best possible performances in order to convince listeners of its merits, as well as the best possible sound quality to capture its tonal subtleties and extravagances. By recording performers like Tudor and pianist Yuji Takahashi, flutist Severino Gazzelloni, violinist Paul Zukofsky, vocalist Cathy Berberian, and experienced ensembles often under the direction of the composers themselves, Brown helped to establish a tradition of new-music performance styles and techniques that would stand as a model for subsequent generations of interpreters.


This long-awaited release (collectors have been paying big bucks for the precious Time and Mainstream LPs) initiates Wergo’s two-year schedule of the reissue of all 18 albums, in six three-CD sets. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that the total playing time listed above averages out to less than 40 minutes per CD. Wergo has decided to maintain the integrity of the original releases’ production by reproducing the cover art, reprinting the original liner notes, and yes, limiting each CD to a single LP’s worth of music. Their digitalization of the original sound quality, which was excellent to begin with, has been handled with care (although some lingering tape hiss is inevitable)—the proof is the first CD, where the percussion timbres are clean, crisp, and vivid. I did notice one new production error in this CD release—on disc 3, the two pieces have been mislabeled; AMM is the first piece on the disc, and Spacecraft the second, not the other way around, as listed on the CD cover and in the booklet.


What about the music, then? The first disc, “Concert Percussion for Orchestra,” reminds us that adventurous composers, looking for new sounds and timbres in the days before electronics, turned to percussion in order to expand the available palette of colors, and with them began to explore the rhythmic intricacies of other, non-classical, ethnic musics. Cuban composer Amadeo Roldán’s works for percussion ensemble date from 1930, William Russell’s Three Dance Movements and Three Cuban Pieces from later that same decade. Henry Cowell’s Ostinato pianissimo (1934) has become one of the repertoire’s classics. John Cage plays the prepared piano solos in his Amores (1943). Though for the most part concise exercises in unusual rhythms and timbres, many of which sound commonplace and simplified today, these pieces nevertheless were highly influential for their time, and display a charming sense of exploration, atmosphere, and, yes, even swing.


The Stockhausen and Kagel works on the second disc were hot off the press in 1960, and they receive gripping readings. The solo percussion score Zyklus , once so jolting, now has an almost meditative feel to it, and this version of Refrain emphasizes its delicacy and spontaneity, offering a constellation of Webernesque detail. Mauricio Kagel’s Transición II surveys a wider range of attacks and rhythms, with previously recorded and live taped components increasing the complexity of tonal relationships. Tudor and percussionist Caskel (who works directly inside the piano) pay sharp attention to the task at hand, briskly aligning the aleatoric elements of the score. (Alternate versions may be heard from the ensemble L’Art pour L’Art on the cpo label and Aldo Orvieto, Dmitri Fiorin, and Alvise Vidolin on Mode.)


Finally, we have what is probably the most unusual album released in the series, recordings of group improvisations by the British band AMM (which at this time included composer Cornelius Cardew) and the Rome-based group of American expatriates including Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, and Richard Teitelbaum (and one Hungarian, Ivan Vandor), Musica Elettronica Viva. Both ensembles featured live electronics as a major part of their instrumental arsenal, and both gleefully embraced noise as a confrontational device and a link to the ritualistic musical activities that, without benefit of a predetermined compositional design, produced their truly spontaneous structures. Drones—frictional, layered, and ambient—are the source for much of their aural environment, and acoustic instruments—pianos, saxophones, even cello—are played with pseudo-electronic timbres or mixed into the fray so as to be all but unrecognizable.


AMM’s contribution is an edited excerpt from a longer, live performance (which may be heard in its entirety on “The Crypt—12 June 1968: The Complete Session” on the Matchless label). In addition, silences of various lengths were edited into the performance after the fact, interrupting the music according to some unexplained, Cagean provocation. Interestingly, these silences still contain several small tics and pops, suggesting that rather than edit in fresh, totally silent digital silence, Wergo decided to use the analog silence taken from an LP (the master tapes may have been unavailable), thus once again maintaining the integrity (albeit flawed) of the original release. MEV’s live activity, Spacecraft , was an open improvisation that they performed a number of times in their early years—other versions may be found on the Alga Marghen label, and in the valuable four-CD set “MEV 40” on New World. The AMM and MEV improvisations have less-than-optimal sound, and are difficult to listen to without flinching, but as examples of controlled chaos they project a raw, immediate catharsis unmatched by any other music of their time. Earle Brown’s decision to include them as representation of the cutting-edge of new music’s new repertoire, giving improvisation a platform equal with composition, was gutsy and prophetic. The remaining releases in this most welcome series will afford further examples of the breadth of Brown’s vision.


FANFARE: Art Lange

Michaels Reise Um Die Erde (Michael's Journey Around the World) is the second act of the opera Donnerstag (Thursday) from the seven-part opera cycle Licht (Light) by Karlheinz Stockhausen. It is a cosmic world theatre in which three protagonists set the tone: Michael as Prince of Angels who appears in human shape to lead mankind to God; Eva as Power of Love and Life; Lucifer as a fallen angel and adversary. To each of these three figures has been assigned a characterizing melody (a musical "formula"), which unfolds through the musical action of the entire opera cycle. In 2008, the ensemble musikFabrik performed Michaels Reise Um Die Erde twice at the Theótre Bobigny in Paris to great acclaim from the press and public alike. Wergo captured these live performances for release in the label's edition musikFabrik series.

With Earle Brown - A Life in Music - Volume 5, WERGO has again dug up treasures of contemporary music from the 1960s and 1970s: The set with 3 CDs not only contains one of the first recordings of Charles Ives' "Concord Sonata" by Aloys Kontarsky but also is a testimony to the virtuosity of Severino Gazzelloni who is, without doubt, one of the greatest flutists of the 20th century. In addition, it contains music of the group Sonic Arts Union with the four pioneers of electronic music David Behrman, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma. The 18 LPs of Earle Brown's (1926-2002) legendary Contemporary Sound Series, recorded between 1960 and 1973, have become a rarity in great demand since the series was discontinued in 1978. These rare and historically important recordings have been carefully digitized and remastered by the Earle Brown Music Foundation. Until the end of 2011, WERGO is going to release six 3-CD sets of these recordings, covering the extraordinary world of contemporary and avant-garde music which flourished in Europe, the USA, Latin America and Japan in the 1960s and the early 1970s.

In his second CD release with WERGO, Enrico Belli once more juxtaposes the American composer George Crumb with music from one of the predecessors who has influenced him most profoundly. Given that "Makrokosmos IV" was both conceived and written for piano duet, it makes sense to place it in the context of Igor Stravinsky's version for piano duet of his composition "Le Sacre du printemps". The Belli Piano Duo's interweaving of works by Igor Stravinsky and George Crumb - most important and virtuoso works for piano four hands - opens entirely new horizons of perception. The results are "Mythical Dances", indeed.

Earle Brown's legendary Contemporary Sound Series will be released on WERGO CDs. Recorded between 1960 and 1973, the original eighteen LPs have been highly sought after in the secondary market since 1978 when they were discontinued. These rare and historically important recordings of international avant-garde music have been carefully digitized and remastered by the Earle Brown Music Foundation. The series presents the extraordinary world of contemporary and avant-garde music that flourished in Europe, the United States, Latin America and Japan in the 1960s and early 1970s. The third CD set within this series contains works by Luciano Berio, Sylvano Bussotti, John Cage, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Iannis Xenakis, Roger Reynolds, Yuji Takahashi and Earle Brown, performed by the great singer Cathy Berberian, accompanied by Francis Pierre, Jean-Pierre Drouet, Boris de Vinogradov and Luciano Berio; furthermore the NHK Symphony Orchestra and the NHK Chorus together with Tokyo Choraliers and the Nippon University Chorus under the direction of Wilhelm Schüchter and the pianist Yuji Takahashi. Each set contains three CDs in jewel boxes including the original liner notes and cover. In addition there is small catalogue/booklet with an essay 'Earle Brown's Contemporary Sound Series' in English, German and French, as well as an information about the complete Contemporary Sound Series to be released.*

The 18 LPs of Earle Brown's legendary Contemporary Sound Series, now re-released by WERGO on CD (six 3-CD sets), have become a rarity in great demand. 'Earle Brown - A Life in Music - Vol. 4' is the most recent CD set in this unique series presented by WERGO. CD 1 contains three stylistically quite different string quartets by Pierre Boulez, Giacinto Scelsi and Earle Brown himself, performed by the ensembles Quatuor Parrenin, Hamann Quartet, Quartetto di Nuova Musica, and the New York String Quartet. CD 2 focuses on works for chamber orchestra by Iannis Xenakis, Aldo Clementi, Bo Nilsson, Wlodzimierz Kotonski, and Yuji Takahashi; apart from them, the first recording of Arnold Schoenberg's 'Drei Stücke' ('Three Pieces') is outstanding as well. The works were performed by the International Kranichsteiner Kammerensemble under the direction of Bruno Maderna, the Hamburger Kammersolisten under the direction of Francis Travis, as well as the exceptional violinist Paul Zukofsky. CD 3 presents four works premiered by the Hamburger Kammersolisten: 'Études contrapuntiques' by Milko Kelemen, 'Tropi' by Niccolò Castiglioni, 'Serenata' by Vittorio Fellegara, and 'Musik für sieben Instrumente' ('Music for Seven Instruments' by Isang Yun.

The repertoire on this CD extends broadly - in terms of style, genre, and chronology - across the compositional output of Igor Stravinsky. Spanning from his most celebrated score for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, "Le Sacre du printemps" (1913), through the neo-classical Concerto en mi bémol "Dumbarton Oaks" (1938), up to the serial "Movements" (1959), the selection testifies to the enormous richness and variety of his artistic legacy. This diverse repertoire is presented here by Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams, however, from a unifying viewpoint: the "black and white" perspective of arrangements for piano duet or two pianos that the composer himself made.

Anyone performing John Cage's music cannot avoid silence. In all the works performed in this collection, percussionist Matthias Kaul deals with silence and how it can be realized in the most concrete way. Kaul is not only a percussionist, he is also a composer and therefore equipped for such a task. In Variations I, Cage plays with various forms of silence. The score consists of transparent sheets with dots and lines and the performers generates concrete tones, sounds and "pauses". The playing instructions for Inlets are still more rudimentary; there are three performers, each of whom has four conch shells. The shells are filled with water and turned round and round; then a fire fueled by pine cones begins, and the piece ends when one of the shells blown like a horn. In Child of Tree, the performer must toss coins to determine how many sections to divide the eight minutes into and which instruments to use in which sections. For this major project, Kaul used 90 different instruments and objects altogether.

The international Vorarlberg Rhine Delta Nature and Bird Reserve, situated where the Rhine flows into Lake Constance, and also the fenlands and reedbeds of the Bodanruck, a range of hills or low mountains lying between the Gnadensee and the uberlinger See, are priceless gems of the Lake Constance landscape. Walter Tilgner has selected some of the most remarkable and interesting among his collection of documentary recordings made largely in springtime over more than 20 years, to compose a marvellous and richly varied work, the "Wetland Wildlife Chorus".

For further information on Walter Tilgner, please visit his website: www.natur-tilgner.de

Klaus Ospald's Leopardi Cycle is based on the work of Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Notable in all three works is a preference for low tonal regions, especially of the brass and woodwinds, augmented by deep percussion. Ospald uses the oscillations, beats and irritations of enharmonic to blur the sounds and make them dazzlingly unreal.

St. Augustine advised his coevals to seek the truth in the "inner man." Such inwardness seems far removed from the reality of life in the twenty-first century. Perhaps that is why a tendency to focus on internal processes has emerged in the music of the last few decades-not in the sense of a new subjectivity, in which sentimental private matters are put on display, but rather in the sense of an exploratory introspection: It's a question of increasing the intensity. Mark Andre seeks existential sonic situations on his path "toward the inside" (nach innen, to quote the fully written-out title of his piece "ni"). Like Andre, the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho has also delved into the internal nature of sound. Her music originates in the rich variety of spectral harmonies, and it sets itself the task of telling a very old story in a new way: a violin concerto as the legend of the grail. An entirely different aspect of inner life manifests itself in Ian Willcock's piece. He visits the discoverer of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud, on his deathbed. At the start of the twentieth century, Freud's glimpses of the "inside" showed that there is more to be found there than the truth: the phantasm.

Masterpieces of the chorale fantasy for organ upon the Latin "Te Deum laudamus" by the great organists of the Marienkirche in Lübeck, Tunder and Buxtehude as well as J.S. Bach dominate this CD, completed by free style compositions. Jürgen Essl, internationally renowned performer, improviser, composer, and teacher, plays on Denmark's only larger instrument that retains a considerable substance of the history of organ building from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

“In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” John Cage noted in 1957. Like the white of a canvas, deafening silence continually surrounds notated and sounded music. And even where music can be heard, it can eloquently conceal things; it can loudly shout out the longing for silence, or it can masterly play with resounding silence. In this edition, four distinctly different pieces reflect four completely different attempts to deal with emotional or audible silence, giving us a glimpse behind the “continuum” that surrounds us. As John Cage stated, “times have changed; music has changed”. It will never stop doing so. The demanding artwork of the album series is created with pictures by the painter Gerhard Richter, commenting on the thematic concentration of the programs in an artistic manner. Richter, one of the most important living German artists, has been a member of the board of trustees of the Ensemble Musikfabrik since 2009.

Erinnerungsspuren by Alberto Posadas is an homage to the piano in six parts. In his "reminiscences", the Spanish composer brings to mind some of the best in his profession, taking them as sources for his studies of the piano's sound space. From François Couperin to Robert Schumann and Claude Debussy to Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Karlheinz Stockhausen. What matters to Posadas in his cycle is not to make explicit connections to the past; he rather discerns concepts from the historical repertoire, namely Erinnerungsspuren [memory traces], that find expression in pianistic experiments. Special playing techniques with the pedals, with preparations and inside the piano allow changes of individual sounds and micro-intervals while they are resounding, thus creating a trans-historical sound space. In his cycle Alberto Posadas gives less answers than he raises questions in which the music of his six predecessors can be heard as sounds of remembrance: How can new and old material put each other in a different light and perhaps even redefine themselves? And what can be the meaning of quotations when it comes to building bridges between old and new, between the known and the unknown?

"Piercing, song-like, aggressive, dance-like – this is how her music sounds. Graciela Paraskevaídis was someone who did not bow down. Companions from all over Latin America call her a great beacon, especially during the years of Uruguay's dictatorship." (Yvonne Petitpierre) For many years, the Argentine-Uruguayan composer maintained close ties of artistic friendship with the Ensemble Aventure which presents seven of her works, including four first recordings, on this release. Graciela Paraskevaídis, an exceptional composer from Latin America, is a real discovery. She developed her own musical language which she taught in Europe and combined with traditional idioms of her home country to respond to concrete, current social issues. The sounds which she has worked with are concentrated to the essential and surrounded by silence, rough, yet cheerful in their own way. Hers is a music full of insight, expression and commitment.

Pianist Grete Sultan (1906-2005) is one of the most extraordinary artists of the 20th century. Raised in a Jewish upper-class household in Berlin, she managed to escape Germany in 1941 after being banned from the concert stage. In New York, she met John Cage with whom she maintained an artistic collaboration for her whole life. Wergo's set Piano Seasons contains her recordings, some of them being released for the first time, of piano works from widely different epochs. Baroque, classical, romantic and contemporary music meet here, finding common ground in the interpretation of this exceptional artist.

Includes work(s) by Toshio Hosokawa. Soloists: Mayumi Miyata, Stefan Hussong.

Morton Feldman's Patterns in a Chromatic Field is a major composition, not only in modern American music but in 20th-century music per se. The composer plays with the musical memory of his recipients and thus creates timeless spheres: In minimally varying patterns, the listener experiences a trance-like avant-garde event in which past, present and future cancel each other out. Patterns in a Chromatic Field is based on the principle of differentiation and repetition. The composition functions like a still life, using the color variations of Middle Eastern rugs as a basis: Even a pattern that appears to repeat itself exactly is actually slightly different in its iterations because of slight changes in hue. In his piece for piano and violoncello, Morton Feldman now creates a large-scale auditive pattern whose sound aesthetics from the layers of notes is no less than a transformative and meditative experience of music. With Antonis Anissegos on the piano and Mathis Mayr, this recording unites two performers who not only are excellent instrumental players but also feel at home in electronic music – a fact that is of benefit to their version of Morton Feldman’s minimalist soaring tonal architecture. Anissegos and Mayr create a detailed and intimate sound quality which can be regarded as referential in its antithesis of the ‘dramatic’.

Forty years after the death of the "bad boy of music," pianist Guy Livingston has brought to light an extraordinary collection of forgotten works by composer George Antheil. George Antheil was a maverick composer of quirky works that brim over with character..." (The New York Times) Guy Livingston "... a pianist with a flair for modernism of all stripes..." (The New York Times) The CD contains three première recordings.

Giacinto Scelsi never saw himself as a traditional composer. In his later creative period he would sit at the piano, record his improvisations and then let others transcribe then. Scelsi's world view was grounded in the Eastern mysticism. His spiritual orientation is expressed in the subtitles of the piano suites performed here by Sabine Liebner. Suite No.9 "Ttai" is titled after the 11th symbol from the I Ching which signifies peace. Suite No.10 "Ka" is titled after a Sanskrit word that refers to something unnameable and unspeakable.

“Halleluja – Oratorium balbulum" is a portrait of the times in which we live, says Peter Eotvos. It is a sarcastic work with postmodern medley passages across music history. The plot takes place on several levels: among the performers as well as with the audience in the concert situation. The language is frighteningly clear, as is the rest of the situation we encounter: We experience Eotvos’s polyglot vision not so much in the language as in the music. There are numerous more or less recognizable quotations from Gregorian chant, Monteverdi and Schein; from Bach and Handel, as well as from Mussorgsky and Gospel music. Alle vittime senza nome [To the Nameless Victims], a purely instrumental work, makes no use of language and nevertheless succeeds in conveying the images and experiences of our time. In three movements, the journey of those seeking protection is illustrated by music in a free narrative style, with delicate solo passages as well as broad waves of sound in the orchestra. “Alle vittime senza nome is meant to remind us of the many Arab and African people who have climbed into overcrowded boats with dreams of reaching a better life only to drown in the waters of the Mediterranean off the coast of Italy.” Eotvos wants to create an awareness of the people that goes beyond the conventional images in the media.

In the 1950's, John Cage tried to make the genesis of his compositions dependent on random processes. Several years later this randomness of the compositional process was reflected in the indeterminacy of the performance, with the aim of separating the compositional design from the interpretive result. Solo for Piano comprises 63 pages with 84 different types of graphical structures, which, due to their shape, are reminiscent of musical notation, but on the other hand, represent no clearly reproducible notes. Here, the notation is modified into a kind of "proposal" for the performer; thus, all kinds of implementation of the score are infinitely possible. On this disc from Wergo, pianist Sabine Liebner presents her own unique interpretation of Cage's musical proposal.

Trumpet player Marco Blaauw has made the further development of the trumpet, it's technique and repertoire, his life's work. He frequently collaborates both with successful contemporary composers and younger composers that deserve to be heard. On this recording, Blaauw presents a fascinating selection of contemporary compositions for trumpet. It includes works by Liza Lim, Rebecca Saunders and the composer of the title track, Carl Ruggles.

Symphony No. 7 for five soloists, speaker, three mixed choirs and orchestra. First recording of the original version. Bozena Harasimowicz-Haas: soprano / Izabella Klosinska: soprano / Jadwiga Rappé: alto / Wieslaw Ochman: tenor / Romuald Tesarowicz: bass / Boris Carmeli: narrator / National Philharmonic Choir Warsaw / Henryk Wojnarowski: chorus master / National Philharmonic Orchestra Warsaw / Kazimierz Kord: conductor.

In the early 1960s, Wergo launched a series that would become a legend in the history of contemporary music recordings. Studio Reihe Neuer Musik featured some of the most important and cutting-edge compositions of the modern era, ranging from Schoenberg's Erwartung to the symphonies of Lutoslawski to the Concord Sonata by Charles Ives. Some of these seminal recordings have never been released on CD and some have been unavailable in any form for many years. On the occasion of the label's 50th anniversary, Wergo is releasing a selection of these gems from the early days of it's 50-year history. These are highlights of 20th-century music history that have lost nothing of their topicality and liveliness, in standard-setting recordings featuring great performers and audiophile sound quality. The CD reissue series starts with recordings featuring works by Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Christian Wolff.