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For a lucky few with access, however, Raffles arranged a special treat. At the very least, it can be said that the gamelan instruments that Raffles brought to London have been identified as the first in England, though without trained musicians they would remain silent museum pieces. Born at sea in to impecunious parents, Raffles began at age fourteen to clerk for the East India Company in London.
He arrived in Penang in , and thirty summers after he first saw the light of the ocean, Raffles became Lieutenant Governor of Java in He immediately began amassing a collection that would eventually form not only the database for his History of Java but also the nucleus of natural history collections and museums from Singapore to London, including the forerunner of the London Zoo.
When he left Java five years later, according to one source, his collection of manuscripts, textiles, folk art, specimens of live and dead flora and fauna—and gamelan instruments— weighed in excess of thirty tons and required more than two hundred cases. In many ways, the book he published acts as a taxonomy of his collection of Javanese artifacts: it was his way of sharing his collection with the literate public. He was an autodidact, so it is no accident that his collecting efforts served to disseminate knowledge and direct experience from Java to the world; indeed, throughout his life, Raffles was keenly interested in creating centers of education.
His original plans for the new colony of Singapore, which he founded only two years after publishing his History of Java, included grounds for an institute that would house a library and natural history collection. Although this was not completed during his time in the East, Raffles laid the cornerstone in During moments like these, during the cool study of solitary research that follows the heat of exploration and discovery, in the intricacy of the geographical and historical nexus in which I find myself enmeshed as I gaze out of the library windows, I sometimes feel the penetration of the intangible T.
I had to wait nine days to get what I came here for. Far from the panoramic windows, in a warehouse near the airport it calls its Used Book Repository, the library keeps a book with the title Lokananta: A Discography of the National Recording Company of Indonesia, , by Philip Yampolsky, who is currently the Director of the Robert E. In the late s, Yampolsky was given unprecedented access to the recording logs of Lokananta Records.
The result is an extraordinary taxonomy that not only gives detailed information about the recording session of each Lokananta album created over three decades but also creates patterns that offer insights into the history behind the promotion of genres and musicians, including langgam jawa and Waldjinah.
In addition to this textual contribution, Yampolsky spent most of the s recording, editing, and annotating a series of twenty CDs, published in America by. Titled simply Music of Indonesia, the series attempts to preserve and disseminate specimens of the varied folk music traditions of the entire archipelago that the original Lokananta pressings often missed. Javanese and Balinese gamelan music are well-known, but few people know about the ensemble music of the Toba Batak, for example, and even fewer know about the wealth of singing styles and string music in eastern Indonesia or about the old-style Sundanese-Chinese music of gambang kromong.
There are so many wonderful styles and traditions that are ignored by the mass media! That music never made it onto record. The album title refers to Waldjinah herself, who is credited as leading the orchestra.
Established either in or , Loka nanta which is the name of the mythical first gamelan drum created by the god Bathara Guru was intended as the transcription service for Radio Republik Indonesia, but soon began to sell albums to compete with the private companies then coming into existence in Indonesia, companies that often sold Western-influenced crooner music that eschewed local styles. Lokananta was officially opened as a for-profit business in with a three-fold mandate to 1 encourage, establish, and disseminate national musical arts; 2 produce income for the state; and 3 cooperate with other government agencies in programs involving sound recording.
The series number ARI can be partially. In total, 4, copies of ARI were made, a large number by Lokananta standards. Recorded music was not big business in Indonesia until the introduction of cassette tapes in the s since record players were expensive, electricity was intermittent even in the big cities, and the tropical climate is extremely deleterious to vinyl.
Langgam jawa itself accounts for fully five percent of the vinyl output of the label minutes in total while kroncong more generally accounts for ten percent of vinyl output. ARI was recorded on April 24, forty-four years, one month, and two weeks to the day before I first heard it. Yet these references offered no discussion of the cultural context or the meaning of the song, if there was one. In the library, I discovered that Javanese song lyrics were sung poetry and that the distinctions between traditional dance, the famous wayang puppet shows, literature, and music were completely fluid, with genres and traditions freely incorporating and adapting styles, stories, and characters from each other.
Yet these traditions are so deep, come from so many sources, and overlap so frequently that the original meanings are often lost or transmuted into impressions, so that traditional song lyrics tend to be more evocative than substantive. I also learned that the Javanese language has three registers that range from high to low depending on cultural context.
Waldjinah sings this song in ngoko and madya, or low and middle Javanese. The title of the song is a play on words that invokes elements of both a garden and pastoral foodstuffs.
The word play is typical of vocal gamelan music and creates intricate sung poetry that matches the intricacy of the instrumentation. In langgam jawa, as in gamelan, singers choose the lyrics based on meters that fit the melody. Unlike in Western pop music, the music does not exist to support the vocalist, but rather the two components must work in harmony to create a whole melody, or lagu. And unlike in most Western art music, the melodies in gamelan do not express emotion by shifting mood or tone, which requires interpreting the intention of the composer.
In gamelan, as in most Middle Eastern and South and East Asian music, the melody is constructed by the players from a shared. The musicians may embellish the notes within a designated scale as described in cengkok above , but this personal expression must not deviate too much from the accepted frame. To the post-Romantic Western tradition of music, such a method of creating emotion sounds incredibly restrictive, but it allows Javanese music to try to express a universal emotion which music that privileges the emotions of a single individual whether pop singer or composer or lyricist or soloist necessarily shuns.
In langgam jawa, as in gamelan, the meters and lyrics that are used to create a lagu are known as macapats. As musicologist Benjamin Brinner explains, a macapat meter is determined by the number of lines in a stanza as well as the number of syllables in each stanza and the ending vowel sound of each line. Since the length of a stanza is determined by its meter, any melody that fits one verse in a given meter will fit another meter.
Often the macapats used in langgam jawa come from what are known as tembang macapats, which are sung in simple Javanese. Many musicologists believe that the lyrics to some of the tembang macapats are quite ancient and predate Hindu influence, although most macapats date from the late eighteenth century. The bawa, or vocal solo, that Waldjinah chose to introduce this song is in the asmaradana macapat, which is often associated with intense love.
In the kroncong tradition, the lyrics are known as pantun, and make use of a two contrasting halves. The first half, known as sampiran, is often a description of a natural object or element, while the second half, or isi, expresses an emotion. Frequently the relation between the two halves is expressed in a paradox based on the incongruity of the element and the emotion, and often it involves Javanese word play.
But being patient is not always easy. She sings it such a way as to create a rasa with her audience so that they both feel her emotions empathetically and experience the same emotions themselves. The song is performed in an acculturated style that was considered innovative because it adapted classic Javanese gamelan melodies and tuning to Western instruments, and was recorded on a state-owned record label specifically created to encourage local arts.
Astonishingly, Waldjinah accomplished this feat when she was less then twenty-five years old. But all of this I learned later, and in the end, it is merely show and tell. Hovering over the clanking growl of the rampageous traffic and the crepitating surface noise of the half-century-old vinyl was a voice so silken and pure that it seemed to momentarily suspend time and still the air.
Only 50, rupiah! On the weekend of the edition of FIMAV, all talk in Quebec was focused on the ongoing demonstrations by students protesting tuition hikes set by the government of Jean Charest, a government beset by allegations of corruption in the construction industry.
The student demonstrations and boycott of classes had begun in February. Demonstrations and marches were met with a heavy police presence and little inclination for dialogue from Charest and co. Public opinion was solidly behind the Charest government. A week earlier, a group of student boycotters had disrupted classes at UQAM. Things had gone too far. Something needed to be done to stop this sort of behavior. So it came to pass that on that Thursday, the provincial legislature was debating a special law to deal with the protestors.
The law would place restrictions on assembly and demonstrations. Quebec was on the edge of a precipice. As we made our long and torturous way to Victoriaville a two-hour trip that took four due to construction delays , I wondered what the general take on the situation would be there. My question was answered when Levasseur strode onto the stage to introduce the opening performance by Phil Minton. Levasseur was wearing a red felt patch, the symbol adopted by the students, and in his comments he noted that this was a sad day for Quebec, in reference to the new law.
FIMAV relies on govern-. Will the demands of the market alone shape government policy? Minton and 31 local singers, dubbed the Feral Choir, approached the stage from their seats in the Cinema Laurier and then took it over for an hour of joyous vocalizing, answering my last question very much in the affirmative.
It was beautiful to see a group of amateurs deliver such a moving performance under the direction of a master, and it neatly linked the avant-garde with the local quotidian.
The piece documented the voyage on a slave ship to a slave auction. The piece is sprawling and this was a shorter version than I have seen in the past few years! The performance by the Miles Perkins Quartet stood out in terms of conception and sheer beauty of musicianship. The music seemed to float in the air, the musicians filling the spaces with colors and shades, surprising but apt shifts in dynamics and tone, in a delicate balance between composition and improvisation.
It is fortunate if one such concert takes place during a festival; at Victo, there were two, the second being the closing concert by The Trio. Roscoe Mitchell commenced with long tones on soprano sax; George Lewis offered punctuation on trombone, the tension building until Muhal Richard Abrams came in with a single dramatically placed note on the piano that both released the tension and upped the ante.
All three took extended solos, and Lewis processed the soundscape with his laptop in a performance that was challenging, beautiful, and completely satisfying. These are wise, wily veterans with an intuitive understanding of one another, and it was a privilege to enter their musical world for an hour or so. They were optimistic but offered no final answers other than the notion that spiritual clarity is of the utmost importance.
This seemed fitting for the political context in which the festival found itself this year, and indeed I think that Victo found itself again this year. Mike Chamberlain. With multiple simultaneous events each night one could catch only a fraction of the action, but below is a sampling. The Duke was present as much in spirit as in song. Fragments of classics and archetypal trumpet flourishes were updated New York avant style, as much Little Huey as it was Ducal. His quartet featured mid-tempo ballads steeped in the restless close-voiced comping of Matt Mitchell on Fender Rhodes and the rattling rhythms of Chas Smith.
Detecting which sound floated from which instrument was a challenge, as cymbals were bowed, guitar ebowed and violin tapped along the wood or scraped past the bridge.
Instant electroacoustic composition with a human core. The latter were especially effective, manned by Vergil Sharkya, a former student of Philip Jeck who recorded a previous version of the work.
Arriving early to an evening of installations and video, one is confronted by four towering wooden sculptures connected by ropes, a cross between clotheslines and telephone poles. Homemade electronic motors, clothespins and paper clips hung from the lines, all wired to three paper cones, each stuck in a barstool and acting as resonators. Not unexpectedly, like a stylus dredged along earth and gravel.
Steve Rodin took cues from Shaeffer and Cage, his laptop piece opening with a series of looped door squeaks matched by video of same.
Clothes hangers colliding in a closet, a dragged concrete block and freezer hums followed, ambient room sounds filling in the silences. Sixteen slabs of dry ice were sequentially placed on three glass tabletops supported by metal legs.
Candles were lit ritualistically and placed underneath each table to heat the glass. The ice was then held against each surface, the abrupt changes in temperature and friction inducing bellowing shrieks.
While Godspeed and Arcade Fire put Montreal rock on the map, a cellar-full of other underground bands await their 15 minutes. Brave Radar evoked a vaguely Velvets vibe, their female drummer heavy on the floor tom driving a loping groove. Versatile guitarist Marc Ribot closed the festival. This was followed by ragtime, classical, Chuck Berry and raga flavoured workouts, snipped up and whipped out with precise finger work and a smidgen of Derek Bailey.
New York City, NY 6. It also included Its unifying concept: the idea of how texts are reflected and even changed when translated. Not only does the vocal part require polyglot flexibility; it features a wide vocal and dynamic range, demanding exquisite control.
Conductor Oliver Knussen heard an earlier version of this work, Conversations, and asked the composer to expand it. The resulting lightly orchestrated concertino for piano, percussion showcased soloists Eric Huebner and Colin Currie, performing separately and in dialogue with each other.
A particularly brilliant passage saw Currie playing ascending arpeggios on a marimba and xylophone placed at right angles, moving seamlessly from one mallet instrument to another. Like the Carter work, it deals with instrumental interplay, but in a more coloristic fashion. Shimmering slabs of orchestral harmonies, clouds of overlaid flute, and ricocheting gestures are haloed by interactive electronics, which refract musical excerpts into a swirling kaleidoscope that envelops the listener.
The ensuing thirty years have found countless composers extending this idea, but few of them have created works as memorable as this. Christian Carey. Ostrava, Czech Republic 6. This year, the programming expanded to include another alternating-summer festival.
Working in association with the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre, the Center for New Music presented three nights of contemporary opera at the end of June. Though it was less than a third the length of the Ostrava Days fest, and presented far fewer pieces, the programming and performance did its sister festival proud.
The hour-long piece is scored for two singers, a pianist and a Victrola player, each following a sequence of selections from pre-existing operas of their own choosing. It was staged in an ornate and compact gold-leaf opera house in the Ostrava Center. The Victrola opened the concert playing faintly from the rear of the stage. Herr returned after some minutes and took position at the front of stage, donning a partial.
At the nine-minute mark, the piano made its first entrance. In this round of chance gestures, even the lights were subject to random assignment, leaving the house lights on as much as if not more than the stage lighting, a startling move even in The pianist played at times without depressing keys.
The Victrola seemed to pull the audience backwards and forwards through time. Eva a Lilith was exciting as a work of music, theater and voyeurism. Eight open doorways allowed the audience to try to gain vantage. Inside, the Brno-based Dunami Ensemble with the composer on electric guitar, complemented by electric bass, reeds, percussion and vibraphone played a slow and tense soundtrack. The score followed simple repeating themes with passages seemingly left for improvisation.
Occasionally one performer would step outside the structure being banished from Eden, perhaps to peer at the other and move slowly about the stage. The second half of the night, and in fact the second half of the festival, was given over to the brilliant Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino.
Syncopated pops and flutters and reeds built into a slow terror kept pace by parade bass drum. The movement onstage was slow as well, fitting for a story after all that takes place over the course of some fraction of eternity even if the running time was a mere 75 minutes.
The fact that it was composed as a dialogue made certain that there was some action on stage—at least as opposed to Infinito Nero where most of the movement was due to a motor under the stage—but even so, the simple moving of a chair seemed an extreme gesture.
The actors at times even froze in a running stance, as if motion were merely a concept, not an act. Likewise the music, even with its shifting undercurrents, seemed un-. The stage set was effective and brilliantly simple. Projected images of the characters moved over a large screen at one point; at another, curtains from the sides, top and bottom of the stage closed to shrink the tableau claustrophobically to the size of a television set, just big enough for the heads of the two main characters to face each other.
Is this bureaucratic nightmare of a wait the process of getting into heaven? Was the wait about seeing justice served? Or was it simply to get an identification card renewed?
It was clearly ghastly, whatever he was there for. It might not be the grand tragedy of Verdi, but contemporary opera reflects contemporary times. And in an Eastern corner of the Czech Republic it has a new stage. Kurt Gottschalk. The old man sits alone on stage at the Roulette performance space in Brooklyn, drifting through time and space in his mind, things he remembers and things he imagines bumping into each other in a stream-of-consciousness, eternal now. Ashley is as much a writer as a composer, and he has slowly been working away from clear, identifiable musical content and into a unique kind of theater.
He calls his works operas, and they are, because they are about characters dramatically compelled to express their internal lives through music.
They always have extraordinary librettos, even as the musical performers are asked to make less and less obvious music. His ability to write intensely personal interior dialogues is unparalleled.
But that has not been able to save most of his works from a shifting point of view that weakens the dramatic and thematic point. In pieces like Dust and Perfect Lives, he is observing characters from the outside, and writing what he imagines is going on inside their heads, a method that works in novels but is difficult to consistently pull off on stage, where we are supposed to find our way inside a living person, and connect the music and sound to their thoughts. This new opera has a subtle but profound difference.
Rather than writing first person dialogue from a third person perspective, Ashley has written a completely interior, first person piece, with the Old Man, Ashley himself, expressed in multiple. Ashley sat on a high platform, downstage right. His lines set the scene as being inside his head, the main performers seated at a row of desks upstage—Thomas Buckner, Joan La Barbera, Jacqueline Humbert and Sam Ashley—had their own distinctive timbres and styles Humbert was especially musical and fascinating , but were all different aspects of that one voice.
This single perspective meant every moment added to a complex and enigmatic picture of a man whose sense of time had become entirely separated from the rest of the world. All the songs, even the most elusive, were elements of the complex portrait. The Old Man is so well made that the four-hour duration seems to suspend time and is so involving that it feels like a stimulating, refreshing pause.
Ashley is an American artist, kin to Philip K. Dick and Joe Frank, and his avant-garde means are deeply embedded in American culture. His memory reaches for the past, which ultimately seems just out of reach. Self-publishing sure has come a long way. With Picture Infinity, German photographer, writer, and cultural anthropologist Sibylle Zerr has done exactly that.
Picture Infinity presents a selection of more than eighty photos, many in color, taken over the period of eight years of various sequinned Arkestra members in performance, backstage, and on the street. It goes beyond description. One has to experience it. So, when I began my research for Ten Freedom Summers and began to write the music, I experienced a deep sense of how much I personally had been touched by these people and events—they had shaped my life as a young man growing up in Mississippi.
Knowing that their stories were also my story, it was easier to carry that cultural element into my composing. Ten Freedom Summers contains over five hours of intense, exploratory, ambitious, and challenging music. As an aggregate the music consists of dedications to or remembrances of towering individuals, many of them sadly sacrificial in this history.
Spiky piano and crying, sputtering trumpet usher in a massive droning section with shape-shifting piano, now hushed in fear, now defiantly optimistic. The Golden Quintet is just so intensely good, consistently burning and creative but with a propensity for deep reflections and jaw-dropping interpolations of multiple American.
Often in these portraits they return to deep funk, lonely fire, the outpouring of dissonance, and chamber-music constructions whose sober deliberation contains a deep passion. Smith is particularly gifted in his writing for strings, alternating lighter moments where woodwinds and strings gather in billowing clouds with thickets of Ivesian polyphony or pounding, ominous sections whose rhythmic density is equal parts Steve Reich and Anthony Davis.
Can you imagine somebody more suited to write the soundtrack to this history? Jason Bivins. The balance of recognition seems to be shifting, as the Alaskan Adams has created several large-scale works that have raised his profile, such as the spatial percussion piece Inuksuit and the museum installation The Place Where You Go to Listen. Two recent recordings present different aspects of his work. Adams never allows this limited palette to grow stale, continually refreshing and varying the sound world.
Alongside Drury, five percussionists use mallets and bows to craft a tolling and chiming soundscape. Is this a memento mori or a secular ritual? Many composers have incorporated birdsong into their music, most famously Olivier Messiaen, who was an amateur ornithologist and travelled the world to collect birdsongs; they appear in most of his compositions.
Adams has taken the incorporation of birdsong materials further. Rather than prescribing when they are to occur, he gives the musicians phrases transcribed in the field and detailed indications of the habits and movement patterns of the species which sing them.
Things sure all that Chicago had to offer outside The excellent vocalist Christine Correa have changed, to the point where a of it shaped his musical concephas been recording lately with pianist Portuguese label, Clean Feed, seems tion, and a teen-aged epiphany at a Frank Carlberg, but here she teams to be carrying the burden of survival Rahsaan Roland Kirk concert made up with the outrageously good and for the music on both sides of the Athim mindful of the responsibility that always unpredictable Ran Blake for a lantic.
Amado co-founded the label, comes with improvisation. He may first volume of tributes to the sorely although he divested himself of his be determined to tell the truth in missed Abbey Lincoln and not for stake years ago. The Motion is well worth your time. And this concert was recorded in Portugal. Jason Bivins town of Lucerne. A Bottle, quick, tiny gestures. You might, Michael Zerang room and slams them together with however, be pleasantly surprised by Sugar Maple atom-splitting force and no small FMR CD what he does with the instrument.
It took kind of guy who can play rock drums WWW. Over the last decade, the Beirut improv scene has established itself as an equal to that of Chicago, London or Berlin. The CD label Al Maslakh has documented the scene, and since the annual Irtijal festival has served as an important showcase.
The CDs come in bubble envelopes featuring lovingly ink-printed images. There are awesome combinations of rock exuberance and textural flourishes that only musicians truly comfortable with both realms could produce. Layers of extended techniques pile on the fistwaving, head-nodding pulse.
And light at the same time. The truly improvised stuff that makes up the rest of the disc is less rock-oriented than the other Scrambled Eggs collaboration, and gives the listener a chance to hear just how far out those guys can go while still playing instruments that sound like rock instruments.
What makes Beirut improvisers unique is their willingness to engage with many kinds of improv: gestural, laminal, insect, drone, etc. Even rhythm is welcomed! A friend of mine visited these guys and sat in on some practice sessions, and told me that after each improv they would talk animatedly. That kind of detailed dialogue and critique is not as common as one would think among musicians, and this recording attests to its value.
Spill is the Berlin duo of Magda Mayas on piano and Tony Buck on drums, and Stockholm Syndrome features two long tracks recorded in concert in Helsinki and Oslo in High-pitched bowed cymbals form harmonic sequences with brushed straw, wood-on-wood pops and bass thumps.
The friction this duo generates is the result of being so seamlessly intertwined that conflagrations of star-burning intensity naturally appear at every twist. Mayas has a gifted ear for timing, giving Buck the freedom to create unusual combinations of melody and rhythm. For those familiar with his solo releases on his own Hipshot records, Radio Paradise is a tighter studio collection that still amply covers the breadth of his interests.
Without overdubbing, he builds layer after layer of sound—some big, some small - so that all of the subtle parts add up to a dizzying yet cohesive whole in his hands: belted blues vocals, backwards looped guitar lines, hand-clapping, etc. His level of commitment makes a deep impression because it is such a genuinely strange concoction.
Andrew Choate. Twigs, Bowles taps into the complex historical and emotional stew of rustic Americana without denying his involvement with other types of music. Bowles has a clear vision of what makes music speak to others. His banjo technique foregrounds singing melodies, which loom out of the ringing, rhythmic patterns like a tall fir tree emerging from the forest and the fog. Put another way, this guy is playing music to make you feel, not licks to make you cheer. Bill Meyer. The four pieces here each feature different instrumentation, giving some well-deserved exposure to a range of performers from the vibrant Bay Area scene.
As sub-guttural quicksand gathers at their feet, the reedists plot a course of squiggly unisons, insistent breath and grain, and woody flora running wild, before the closing lambent bath. The title track is a fascinating, sprawling half hour in length, opening with quizzical birdsong before proceeding to lay out gorgeous lines over a compelling pulse track.
The piece is filled with superb moments: an absolutely churning solo from Larry Ochs, while Daisy stokes the coals; a gorgeous, vaguely Korean-sounding strings passage, slowly morphing from spaciousness into a Hatwich bells fantasy; and then a honker from Raskin over a slow groove, electronics pulling the whole apart from behind the curtain.
European players who move within the orbit of Norwegian multi-reedist Frode Gjerstad. Four of these recordings feature projects which Gjerstad has been leading for years—his trio, John Butcher his group Calling Signals, and his Gino Robair unique and astonishing large ensemApophenia Rastascan CD ble, Circulasione Totale Orchestra— and nearly all of the musicians who Toshimaru Nakamura appear on these recordings have John Butcher worked with Gjerstad in numerous Radio Paradise contexts.
Monotype CD Back in the s Gjerstad founded his Circulasione Totale When improvisers keep playing Orchestra to showcase this musical together over a span of years, the network of rotating personnel. In an music they make becomes part of interview he once explained that he an evolving dialogue. Each of the two agitating surfaces with motorized discs contains a single continudevices toys, vibrators and bows ous live performance of just over rather than drumsticks, and Butcher seventy minutes, one recorded in does something similar by applying Philadelphia in January, , and motorized gadgets to the bell of his the other in Oslo in March of Thus two essentially acoustic Each piece is a kind of epic journey, instruments turn into amplifiers of winding mysteriously through phases mechanized chaos.
This album, taken from a as a whole will unload an a-rhythmic performance for radio broadcast, is avalanche of impenetrable noise as white-knuckled and uncomprowhich quickly, or slowly, morphs into mising as anything the duo has ever a rambunctious, disheveled groove, done; no mean feat, that.
Instead he runs of Lasse Marhaug. The music is indeone or more continuous streams scribable, inscrutable, unclassifiable, of abrasive sound, which Butcher utterly uncompromising and beautiequals with some very unsaxfully unbearable. It is challenging on Circulasione Totale like ribbons of coarse, pulsating all fronts—for the players, for listenOrchestra sound.
This is a much tougher affair ers, for producers and engineers, for PhilaOslo than their initial encounter, more Circulasione Totale CDx2 anyone who comes into contact with abrasive and determined, but no it or even just near it. From WWW. But on this piece things get even thicker and more resonant other instruments used for this effect include double plugged equalizer, ring modulator, bass clarinet neck, cassette and Minidisc walkmans as a way of thickening the drone and expanding it, with a plunging low end and chiming bowed metal everywhere.
But on all of these pieces there is considerable space and regular drop-offs, never simply suffocating sound. As an example, Capece uses one of these rests to dig into some mouthpiece glissing, peeking out from the low rumble like a coil of energy through the top of your skull, skirling up and down through mouthpiece, ring modulator, warp and woof and wood and whine.
As the piece fades with lonesome maritime bleats issuing from nowhere, my first thought is that I want to hear it all again. Ryoanji offers an ideal example of Ryoanji this approach. The spare groupings of fifteen stones placed on carefully raked white gravel left an indelible impression. Cage worked on a set of drawings Caisson which became the basis for a series of pieces for Another Timbre CD solo instruments and percussion.
In these pieces, a precisely notated percussion score is paired with a graphic score for the other instruments, where lines indicate glissandi of intersecting trajectories. One third of the way through, growling trombone enters, followed No Islands by wordless voice, oboe, and bass.
One quickly Another Timbre CD loses any notion of foreground or background, each element hanging separately in space like a brushstroke.
On the surface, the live improvisation by Tierce captured on Caisson has little to do with Cage, who was outspoken about the differences between his approach and improvisation. First off, there Another Timbre CD is the instrumentation, which mixes zither, contact mikes, electronics, field recordings, turntable, and an amplified Dopleta knitting machine. Occarefully layered in a way that suggests sonic tober was just as auspicious an anniversary, calligraphy. Recordings each and play within flexible time brackets.
The celebrating both events have started to appear. Over the their deep back-catalog. A minute collective improvisation for double bass, percussion, and zither is placed between the two readings: while it eschews gestural arcs, there is a keen ear to dynamics and density as spatters, crackles, daubs of overtones, creaking long textures, and engulfing low-end drones are assembled into spontaneous form.
Recorded in a small wood in a village in Derbyshire, Lash was caught in a downpour; rather than abandon the performance, he persevered. The sound of the bass, rain, wind, insects, birds, sheep, and the distant hum of an airplane equally inhabit the musical plane in a way that the use of field recordings can only approximate. The clean attack and ringing sustain of the piano provides an effective field for abraded sound sources, which move around the sonic plane through careful controlled dynamics and densities.
The six compositions are constructed from a series of single-page scores that specify brief, self-contained sound events. The processes that govern each of the pieces are intriguing and often amusing—such as a piece where ten players drag disposable coffee cups across fifty different surfaces—and in the hands of these performers, the structures provide the foundation for music of absorbing detail.
Michael Rosenstein. Attic Antics is an intriguing dialogue of pure sound exploration, the two instruments moving back and forth between complete entanglement and distant separation. While Moholo-Moholo is always dramatic and inventive whenever he plays, on this session the great South African master-drummer seems especially articulate and nuanced.
At several points Corbett adds shards and brittle bursts from his pocket trumpet, generating a delicate, three-way conversation within the group, while alluding almost inevitably to the musical legacy of Don Cherry. As Gjerstad and his extended family of musical colleagues explore density and fragmentation, cultivat-. Gjerstad has found the right metaphor for this striving, as well as for the ambitious efforts of the whole constellation of players he works with: total circulation, on all levels, in all directions, without closure, passionately and relentlessly pursued.
Alan Waters.
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