Iannis Xenakis, David Del Tredici, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, George Crumb (2014 compi rec. 1965-78)

Great compilation put together by Sony Classical as part of their "Prophets Of The New" reissue series in 2013/14.  Much of the series was also released as a "Masterworks Of The 20th Century" budget box set, a chunk of which has already been posted here - Boulez, Extended Voices, Columbia-Princeton, Crumb, Partch, and Takemitsu.  More to come in due course - I may as well finish the box.

In contrast to the ones above that reissued those landmark LPs in their entireity, this collection picks highlights from three different records.  Firstly we get half of a 1969 album by the Festival Chamber Ensemble under Richard Dufallo, starting with Xenakis' Akrata - I think I prefer this one to the EIDMC Du Paris/Simonovich version, it's got a bit more oomph to it.  Then there's 24 engrossing minutes of David Del Tredici's Syzygy, with soprano and ensemble all over the shop in a setting of James Joyce's Ecce Puer.

Next up is side two of "Electronics & Percussion - Five Realizations By Max Neuhaus" released in 1968.  Stockhausen's Zyklus is scored for a solo percussionist playing multiple instruments, and notated in a spiral so that the player can start anywhere.  The ear-shredding John Cage noisefest Fontana Mix-Feed ("realized 1965") has previously featured here alongside an album's worth of other realizations of it by Neuhaus.  Closing the compilation is a typically bewitching and gorgeous George Crumb piece taken from a 1978 LP.  Lux Aeterna For Five Masked Musicians is scored for soprano, sitar, bass flute/recorder and two percussionists, and as always, makes me want to dig deeper into Crumb.  (More of him at SGTG here and here, plus link in first para above.)

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P.S. whilst reading about Max Neuhaus, I discovered his amazing Radio Net project from 1977 - well worth a listen.  Read about it and d/l the two hours of audio (192 kbps, but hey ho, fine for an old radio tape) here.

Electronic Music For The Mind And Body (2013 compilation, rec. 1958-62)

Cheekily parodying the title of Country Joe & The Fish's legendary psych classic, this inspired compilation from Cherry Red's él subsidiary turned back the clock a further decade for 80 minutes of truly revolutionary sound warping.  The first 35 of these 80 minutes is an entire album in itself, originally composed and recorded 1959-60: Stockhausen's still-astonishing Kontakte.  Working at WDR with Gottfried Michael Koenig, Stockhausen laid out his grandest vision yet of electronic tones, timbres and (in live situations) spatial movement.  A second version would later add in David Tudor's piano and Christoph Caskel's percussion.  Whether in that form or in this pure electronic recording, it remains a magnificent, otherworldly soundscape to get lost in.

Next up on this CD is Iannis Xenakis' Orient-Occident, already featured here, devised in 1960 as a film soundtrack for Enrico Fuchignoni, and featuring a definite Pierre Schaeffer influence.  The shortest piece on the compilation is György Ligeti's Artikulation, recorded at WDR in 1958 with the assistance of Koenig and Cornelius Cardew.  One of only two electronic pieces that Ligeti would fully realise, Artikulation certainly packs a lot into its four minutes, arranging different recordings of noises before piecing them together at random into a 'conversation' of sorts, as if inventing a new machine-language.

Lastly, we get two pieces of prime John Cage.  The 20-minute Cartridge Music was composed in 1960 for performers following a chance score, armed with phonograph cartridges and contact microphones which are then struck against various objects.  This recording is an amalgamation of four performances of the score by Cage and David Tudor in 1962.  The final track on the CD is Aria With Fontana Mix, another 1962 recording overlaying two Cage compositions - his free-score Fontana Mix (much more noisily used by Max Neuhaus a few years later) is used for various tape sources, whilst Cathy Berberian performs his vocal work Aria over the top.

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Kim Kashkashian, Sarah Rothenberg, Houston Chamber Choir - Rothko Chapel (2015)

This album came up in the comments a short while back, so as promised, here it is.  Asked to curate a programme of music for a 40th anniversary concert at Rothko Chapel in 2011, Sarah Rothenberg, pianist and leader of the Da Camera organisation for chamber music in Houston, TX, chose to frame Morton Feldman's unique Rothko-inspired work with pieces by John Cage and Erik Satie.

The connection, Rothenberg explains in her lengthy liner note to this collection of 2012-13 recordings of the pieces in the programme, was that the three composers 'form a triumvirate of original creators who were each closely tied to the visual art of their time'.  And besides that, on this ECM New Series CD the programme just sounds great as a flowing, 70-minute immersion in some unique, inspired music.

Feldman's Rothko Chapel, written in tribute to the painter's great work just after his death, is the obvious opener to this collection.  Its sombre, eerie choral drift, piano backdrop and viola lead remain the perfect musical expression of Rothko's diffuse hints of colour on black backgrounds that graced the inner walls of the Houston chapel.

The remainder of the programme alternates between Rothenberg on solo piano playing inspired choices from Satie's Gnossiennes and Ogives, and the Houston Chamber Choir performing works by John Cage.  I hadn't heard any choral work by Cage prior to this disc, and the pieces here, Four², ear for EAR and Five, sit really well with the main Feldman work.  The programme closes with one of Cage's finest piano pieces, In A Landscape.

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Max Neuhaus ‎– Fontana Mix-Feed (Six Realizations Of John Cage) (2003 compi of '65-'68 recordings)

Regular visitors here will know by now that I like sharp contrasts - and every warm ambient masterpiece deserves a teeth-grating, bracing, cold shower like this as a follow-up.  Fontana Mix-Feed, originally released as a four-track LP in 1966, gave avant-garde percussionist Max Neuhaus the prime credit as 'Fontana Mix' wasn't a set score composed by Cage, but merely an abstract set of patterns that could be subject to any desired alignment and then followed as a unique set of directions for any instrument(s) the performer wished.

In this case, Neuhaus used contact microphones set atop various percussion instruments, placed in front of loudspeakers to create something much more than simple screeching feedback - shimmering, oscillating waves of tightly controlled noise.  As captured on the CD cover photograph above, Neuhaus sat on stage orchestrating this racket on a mixing desk, like Stockhausen jumping forward a decade in a time machine, listening to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and then trying to recreate it on his return.

 original LP cover, 1966

So yep, this album is very noisy indeed, and wonderfully overpowering at high volume; but the joy is in noticing the subtle differences between each of the four live recordings (and on CD, a studio recording and a WDR radio recording) as the performance was affected each time by the physical space of the venue, the exact instruments used, their proximity to each other and to the mikes/speakers, and so on ad infinitum.  I'd love to have been present at one of these performances in the mid-60s, to be overwhelmed by the sheer sonic assault and see the audience's reactions.  A New York Times review from the performance at which track 4 was taped gives a tantalising indication - "This piece was not the kind of electronic music that emanates distantly from the speakers. It felt as though one's own head were part of the feedback circuit."

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John Cage - Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1951)

One of John Cage's best-known works, this suite of 20 pieces was composed 1946-48 and first recorded/released in 1951, played by Aremian-American pianist Maro Ajemain.  A friend of the composer, the work is also dedicated to her.

I first heard the Sonatas & Interludes some years ago in a late-90s Naxos recording, which didn't make a huge impression on me for whatever reason.  Picked up the Ajemian recording last year after the release of Aphex Twin's brilliant EP Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt2, which wore its Cage influences on its sleeve to the point of almost sounding like it was directly quoting this work at times.

So its thanks to Richard D. James that I've found myself hooked on the Sonatas & Interludes for Prepard Piano.  The 'Prepared' part involves nuts, bolts, screws and other objects being inserted into the piano as fully directed by Cage in the score, but perfect adherence to the preparation table is not required -  "do it so that it seems right to you" in the composer's words.  Sounding percussive and forthright at some points, soft and meditative at others, these pieces are a perfect fusion of East and West (Indian philosophy being Cage's starting point for shaping the suite).  The unique piano tones are sometimes bell-like, sometimes like a minature gamelan, and always fascinating and beautiful.

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Previously posted at SGTG: Indeterminacy

John Cage / David Tudor - Indeterminacy (1959)

John Milton Cage Jr, 1912-1992 - composer, music theorist, Zen Buddhist, all of these and more; here he is captured on tape in the late 50s holding forth on every facet of his life and interests.  Encouraged by long-time collaborator David Tudor to start delivering some lectures that were simply storytelling, Cage started compiling minute-long anecdotes on cue cards, and eventually decided to record some of them.

Even if this double-album of 90 stories was just purely a spoken-word recording, I'd still love it - Cage holding forth on everything from music to philosophy to charming autobiographical snapshots is a joy to experience on repeat listens.  The icing on the cake, however, is that Tudor accompanied him in the studio (well, in separate studios where they couldn't hear each other) playing and cutting in elements of Cage's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and Fontana Mix.  Voice and musical/noise backing collide against each other, sometimes abraisively, sometimes dovetailing brilliantly in moments of wonderful serendipity.

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Brandeis University Chamber Chorus - Extended Voices (1967)

This is from the same box set as the Pierre Boulez disc from last week, a great 10-CD collection of some of the greatest music of the 20th-century avant garde, from long-out-of-print CBS & RCA LPs spanning approximately 1964-1974.  One of the best £12 I spent last year.

Extended Voices was originally released in 1967, with The Brandeis University Chamber Chorus performing pieces by six avant-garde composers under the direction/sonic manipulation of composer Alvin Lucier.  All of these recordings are worth taking in for their sheer uniqueness and groundbreaking use of sound and technology, making Extended Voices an effective album experience that fascinates throughout.

After an okay start (there's much better Pauline Oliveros works out there to discover), the two long pieces on Side One are particularly mindblowing, with scraps of speech and vocalisation flying around everywhere and being mangled by the electronic treatments. On Side Two, Robert Ashley's 'She Was A Visitor' is the epilogue to a rarely-performed opera-of-sorts, which is really worth reading up on in context.  The two brief Morton Feldman pieces that close out Extended Voices are worth the entry price as well, being hauntingly produced by Lucier for this release.

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