Gloria Coates

A first listen to the music of Gloria Coates is a breath of fresh air. Here is a genuinely contemporary sound, one that emerges naturally from our time and culture. Here are sounds to express our sense of time, space, movement and activity. There is no sense of is referentiallism. What a relief! There is no rehashing of someone else's style , whether from 10 or 500 years ago. There is no wilful difficulty to this music or the collaging of disparate influences.

Gloria Coates (b. 1938) writes gloriously expressive music that's also sometimes disorienting. That's meant as a compliment. She has fashioned a mesmerizing and unique language from hovering harmonic clouds and her signature gesture -- the glissando (sliding pitches). And in a work like the String Quartet No. 7 for strings and organ, the long downward glides mix with brazen and spooky organ chords and Charles Ives-like hymn quotes to create an alluring aural vertigo.

Gloria Coates - Indian Sounds (Symphony No. 8) (2002) {New World Records 80599-2}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 315 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 182 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 20 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2002 New World Records | 80599-2
Classical / Contemporary Classical

Gloria Coates (b. 1938) is of a modernist generation for whom music is a vehicle for dark, disturbing emotions, for whom the range of musical sounds must be greatly expanded to blast through audience complacency and address the special horrors of our time. At the same time, she is capable, as few members of her generation are, of limiting her materials and welding a work into a single gesture. She realizes, as most serialist and expressionist composers have not realized, how much more intense a piece of music can become when it is narrowly focused, when it does not flutter around to every possible technique, but hammers away within well-defined limits.

Works for piano by Amy Beach, Gloria Coates, Joel Feigin and Ruth Schonthal played superbly by Margaret Mills

Gloria Coates - At Midnight (2013) {Tzadik Composer Series}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 310 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 167 Mb | Artwork | 5% repair rar
© 2013 Tzadik | Composer Series | TZ 8096
Classical / Avant-Garde / Chamber Music

Born in Wisconsin and a resident of Germany since 1969, Gloria Coates has been composing for over fifty years. Her work is complex, filled with canons, palindromes, polyrhythms, dissonances, glissandi and is distinguished by a wide expressive and emotional range. Her first CD on Tzadik presents a varied program of music for solo piano, a string quartet, her exciting violin concerto, a piece for bass and piano and a fabulous piece for two tuning guitars. An historic release by one of the world’s most courageous and original musical pioneers!