Tag: contemporary composition
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AMN Reviews: Mikel Kuehn – Object/Shadow [New Focus Recordings fcr160]
The results of the musical revolution that Modernism midwived during the last century are still with us. At one time a matter of novelty, the possibilities Modernism opened up—regarding pitch relationships, the role of timbre, and musical syntax—have grown into a kind of alternative common practice whose strategies are always already available to contemporary composers.…
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AMN Reviews: Mariel Roberts – Cartography [New Focus fcr185]
Cartography, the second solo album from cellist Mariel Roberts, follows up and extends the work she did on her debut solo recording, 2012’s Nonextraneous Sounds. There, she presented five pieces for solo cello or cello in tandem with electronics, all of which she had commissioned from composers under the age of 40. Her new CD…
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AMN Reviews: Thomas DeLio – Selected Compositions II 1972-2015 [Neuma 450-116]
Selected Compositions II is the second installment in Neuma’s Composers Series of works by composer Thomas DeLio (1951). As with the first installment, Selected Compositions II contains compositions for solo instruments and small ensembles, some for electronics, and one relatively large-scale work for soprano and orchestra. DeLio, who has a background in mathematics and visual…
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AMN Reviews: Tim Rutherford-Johnson – Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 [U of California Press: 2017]
Certain years take on a talismanic significance. To conjure them is to call up a world—to provide a condensed description of an epochal shift in social arrangements, political structures, or cultural sensibilities. 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, is one such year, being shorthand for the end of the bipolar, Cold War order that…
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AMN Reviews: Sean Ali – My Tongue Crumbles After [Neither/Nor n/n007]; James Ilgenfritz – Origami Cosmos [Infrequent Seams 12]
Discount this as predictable partisanship if you like, but it seems as if the double bass is coming into its own as the instrument par excellence for solo performance. Whether used for improvisation or the realization of compositions, played prepared or unprepared, modified by electronics or plain, the double bass is a large presence in…
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AMN Reviews: Jérôme Combier – Gone [Aeon AECD1651]
Pitch can be likened to shadow. Shadows exist along a gradient, varying in darkness and density with the position of the viewer, the relative constancy of the light source, and the interposition of objects. Like shadow, pitch is something that exists in gradations rather than in discrete units that are precisely defined one against the…
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AMN Reviews: Michael Pisaro – Resting in a Fold of the Fog [Potlatch P117]
Much of composer Michael Pisaro’s work is driven by the desire to explore the often complex ramifications of an ostensibly simple, fundamental idea. It isn’t unusual for him to take as his starting point the act of listening, whether to environmental sounds or to the properties of the material resources—sometimes deceptively basic—that his compositions call…
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AMN Reviews: Hannah Addario-Berry – Scordatura [Aerocade]
Twenty-fifteen marked the centennial of the composition of the Sonata for Solo Cello by Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály. To commemorate the anniversary, cellist Hannah Addario-Berry conceived the Scordatura Project, a program of music featuring the Kodály sonata along with commissioned works for cello by contemporary composers which use the same systematic detuning—the scordatura of the…
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AMN Reviews: Laurence Crane and Asamisimasa – Sound of Horse [Hubro HUBROCD2582]
Composer of a catalogue encompassing over eighty works, London-based Laurence Crane (1961) writes music of elementary parts and structures. The simplicity is deliberate; Crane has expressed an interest in taking simple pitch and harmonic relationships and recontextualizing them in order to renew their capacity to appeal to listeners, and to convey musical content. The five…
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AMN Reviews: Dana Jessen – Carve [Innova 910]
Like the double bass in the 1950s, the bassoon is an instrument often overlooked as a solo voice with the potential to push the boundaries in new music. In order to change that, bassoonist Dana Jessen has been endeavoring to develop an adventurous repertoire of new work for solo bassoon. On Carve, her debut release,…
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AMN Reviews: Jean-Luc Guionnet & Dedalus Ensemble – Distances Ouïes Dites [Potlatch P416]
In his 1966 paper “Space as an Essential Element in Musical Composition,” composer Henry Brant asserted that the spatial element in concert music was an important variable to be taken into consideration when shaping a composition. Since 1950 he had been composing works calling for performers to be grouped and distributed throughout the performance space…
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AMN Reviews: neoN – neon [Aurora ACD5084]
This self-titled CD is the first from Norwegian new music ensemble neon. In addition to its instrumentation of violin and cello, guitar, piano, percussion, flute, clarinet, saxophone and voice, the group includes the composers Kristine Tjøgersen, Jan Martin Smørdal, and Julian Skar, who are represented here by one composition each. Although differing in ways both…
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AMN Reviews: Anthony Cheung – Dystemporal [Wergo WER7343 2]
The line break in free verse often has important implications for the way the poem’s meanings can be read. In the absence of a fixed meter or rhyme scheme, the division of words gives semantic force to some, subordinates others to their immediate neighbors, and generally adds or diminishes weight of meaning through isolation or…
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AMN Reviews: Roman Haubenstock-Ramati – Konstellationen [Kairos 0015003KAI]
As sculpture, a mobile presents an ever-changing profile to the viewer, its constituent elements constantly rearranging themselves in relation to each other and creating new composite forms with every disturbance in the surrounding environment. As early as the 1932 composition of Henry Brant’s Mobiles for unaccompanied flute, the idea of the internally-reorganizing work had been…
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AMN Reviews: Michael Nicolas – Transitions [Sono Luminus DSL-92202]; Mari Kimura – Harmonic Constellations [New World Records 80776-2]
When joined to electronics, the solo acoustic instrument enters into a potentially complex and pointed relationship with itself. The instrument becomes its own double, its voice both converging on and diverging from self-identity as it undergoes modification, metamorphosis, multiplication and whatever other types of manipulation or accompaniment electronics afford. The effects can be modest or…
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AMN Reviews: Richard Karpen – Aperture II / Elliptic [Neuma 450-117]
Richard Karpen is a composer whose work exemplifies what music historian Richard Taruskin characterized as “post-literate” composition—works composed with electronic or other means that eliminate the need for a formally notated score. Karpen (b. 1957), who is Director of the School of Music at the University of Washington, trained as a pianist but also is…
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AMN Reviews: Ensemble Reconsil – Exploring the World [Orlando Records or0014]
In a series of seven concerts held between May 2014 and May 2015, the Ensemble Reconsil, a contemporary music group directed by flutist Alexander Wagendristel, conductor Roland Freisitzer and violist Julia Purgina, presented an ambitious program featuring music from and about fourteen countries, each of which was represented by three of its contemporary composers. In…
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AMN Reviews: Allison Cameron & Contact – A Gossamer Bit [Redshift TK445]; Contact – Discreet Music [Cantaloupe CA21114]
Contact is a versatile, seven-piece new music ensemble based on Toronto, Canada. Founded by percussionist/composer Jerry Pergolesi, who also acts as musical director, the group has the outward appearance of a chamber orchestra, but the inner motivation and skill to cross genres and disciplines at will. Run almost like a rock band, the group draws…
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AMN Reviews: Sidney Bailin – 16-2-60-N-5 Works for Electronics & Piano [Ravello RR7933]
This first release of works by composer-mathematician Sidney Bailin represents a kind of cyclical return to an earlier field of practice. Bailin studied music with Roger Sessions, Otto Luening, Darius Milhaud and others before abandoning it for advanced studies in mathematics; more recently he has returned to composing for acoustic and electronic instruments. Two of…
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AMN Reviews: Horatiu Radulescu – Piano Sonatas & String Quartets Vol. 1 [Mode 290]
Although originating in France and particularly identified with the work of composer Gérard Grisey, Spectralism also flourished in Romania. Horatiu Radulescu (1942-2008), a Romanian composer who for a period took up residence in Paris, crafted a Franco-Romanian Spectralism with unique characteristics of its own. The three works presented on this CD—two piano sonatas played by…
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AMN Reviews: Lewis Nielson – Axis [Mode Records 283]
The music of Lewis Nielson, who recently retired as chair of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music Composition Department, pushes the fragmentary language of modernism to a breaking point and couches it in contemporary timbres. Nielson’s work can be highly expressive—his Il Romanticismo di Lucrezia e Cesare (2014), a theatrical piece for double bass, soprano and…
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AMN Reviews: React – Music for Flute, Violin & Interactive Computer [Ravello RR7930]
The pairing of violin and flute has a long history. During the Classical period, flutes doubled violin melodies in order to cast them in a brighter timbre. In modern ensembles the two voices generally take on independent roles to establish timbral contrast in the upper voices and to maintain more open textures. With the addition…
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AMN Reviews: Splinter Reeds – Got Stung [Splinter Records SR001]
One of the most enduring legacies of 20th century art music is the use of timbre as a major element in musical organization. Whether through serialism’s principle of klangfarbenmelodie or Impressionism’s sound painting with orchestration, the blending and sorting of instrumental voices as a theme in itself took on a salience that continues to resonate…
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AMN Reviews: Russell Pinkston – Balancing Acts [Ravello RR7921]
The balance alluded to in the title of this collection of recent work by composer Russell Pinkston is that between acoustic and electronic sounds. Both are well represented here, separately and in conjunction with each other. Pinkston (b. 1949) teaches composition at the University of Texas, Austin’s Butler School of Music, where he also directs…
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