I Ching

Mind Games was meant to be a return to form for John Lennon, after an instantly dated protest album that felt didactic and cold. He seemed to be back on track with its opening Top 20 hit title song. But the rest of Mind Games could be a strangely ruminative and often mid-tempo, with a shaggy studio approach. Mind Games: The Ultimate Collection makes it clear who fans should blame: The producer. After three straight projects with co-producers Phil Spector and Yoko Ono, Lennon took over those duties. He clearly couldn't place enough distance between himself and the material to make the best choices for these songs. An outside voice might have encouraged him to continue work on some tracks, or to toss one or two aside.

Mind Games was meant to be a return to form for John Lennon, after an instantly dated protest album that felt didactic and cold. He seemed to be back on track with its opening Top 20 hit title song. But the rest of Mind Games could be a strangely ruminative and often mid-tempo, with a shaggy studio approach. Mind Games: The Ultimate Collection makes it clear who fans should blame: The producer. After three straight projects with co-producers Phil Spector and Yoko Ono, Lennon took over those duties. He clearly couldn't place enough distance between himself and the material to make the best choices for these songs. An outside voice might have encouraged him to continue work on some tracks, or to toss one or two aside.

Études australes is one of several large works Cage wrote during the 1970s by laying starmaps over manuscript paper and using the placement of the stars to determine the pitches. Cage used the I Ching to determine some of the other musical parameters but left the dynamic levels, attacks, and tempos to the discretion of the performer, and this has led to extraordinary diversity in the lengths of performances. The original recording by Grete Sultan, for whom Cage wrote the piece, lasts 169 minutes, Steffen Schleiermacher's version is 203 minutes, and the fastest, at 112 minutes, is by Claudio Crismani. That gives some perspective to the monumentality of this 2011 version by Sabine Liebner, which clocks in at 260 minutes.

James Tenney - Changes: 64 Studies for 6 Harps - Nicholas Deyoe (2019) {New World Records 80810-2}
FLAC (tracks) - 16bit/44.1kHz - Official Digital Download (newworldrecords.org) -> 461 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 345 Mb
Full Artwork (jpg+pdf) -> 18 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2019 New World Records | 80810-2
Classical / Modern Classical / Avant-Garde / Microtonal / Algorithmic

Changes: 64 Studies for 6 Harps (1985) is a large-scale work that combines and connects many of James Tenney's (1934 - 2006) most important theoretical and musical ideas, including gestalt segregation principles and complex intonation systems. Composed with the aid of a mainframe computer at York University, the piece also marks a return to computer-aided, algorithmic composition after a long hiatus. It was one of the first pieces Tenney composed with a computer after he left New York City in the late 1960s to teach at the California Institute of the Arts. After Changes, the majority of Tenney's works involved computer software and formal, algorithmic processes. Tenney was both a prolific composer and theorist but rarely wrote in detail about his own pieces even though his music consistently implemented his theoretical ideas.

Robert Moran (b. 1937) writes beautiful, consonant, melodic music that ... at its best combines graceful surfaces with intimations of emotional depth.