John Cage Late Piano Works

Morton Feldman - Steffen Schleiermacher - The Late Piano Works Vol. 2
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 120 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: MDG "Scene" # 613 1522-2 | Country/Year: Germany 2009
Genre: Classical | Style: Contemporary, Avant-Garde

…If you’re unfamiliar with Feldman’s nuanced, nondevelopmental music, this may not be the easiest point of entry, but . . . well, there probably isn’t an easy point of entry after all, so why not just dive in?

Morton Feldman - Steffen Schleiermacher - The Late Piano Works Vol. 2
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 120 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: MDG "Scene" # 613 1522-2 | Country/Year: Germany 2009
Genre: Classical | Style: Contemporary, Avant-Garde

…If you're unfamiliar with Feldman's nuanced, nondevelopmental music, this may not be the easiest point of entry, but . . . well, there probably isn't an easy point of entry after all, so why not just dive in?

The story of how Morton Feldman and John Cage first met has now become elevated to the status of legendary musical folklore. During a 1950 New York Philharmonic performance of Webern’s Symphony Op. 21, Feldman decided to leave the concert at the interval. In the lobby he met Cage. As Cage says, “we both walked out of a Philharmonic concert in which Webern had just been played, and we shared the desire not to hear anything else because we had been so deeply moved.” It was the beginning of a deep friendship that was to influence both their respective creative spirits. Morton Feldman became a friend, flatmate and student of John Cage.

This release brings together ALL of Morton Feldman’s compositions for cello and piano, including unpublished works and a first recording.

S.E.M. Ensemble - The Entire Musical Works Of Marcel Duchamp - 2000 (1976)
Avant-Garde/Classical | EAC (FLAC+LOG) | 180 MB (WinRAR) | 2000 | Cover
Performers: Petr Kotik, William Lyon Lee, John Bondler, James Kasprowicz, etc.

Known as one of the most vital artists in the history of 20th century art, Marcel Duchamp was a composer whose small output was equally as revolutionary as his visual art. Predating the work of John Cage, this radical experimental composition employed chance operations and non-musical sounds in 1913. The works "Erratum Musical" and "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors" were realized by the S.E.M. Ensemble in 1976. These interpretations for flute, celeste, trombone, and glockenspiel are soft, slow-motion studies that bear similarities to late-20th century compositions of Cage, Christian Wolff, and Morton Feldman. A beautiful booklet contains notes by conductor Peter Kotik. This reissue exhibits a stunning pre-avant-garde composition from the great French artist whose influence on later music had transposed more prominently through his painting than his composition, as John Cage and others has absorbed the radical concepts of his art into musical work some 50 years later. ~ Skip Jansen, All Music Guide

Asia Piano Avantgarde Japan, Vol. 1, is the first installment in what promises to be a cycle of discs from MD&G focusing on Asian experimental music for piano played by the ubiquitous Steffen Schleiermacher. It focuses mostly on pieces composed before 1975, although a couple of these works date from the 1990s. The music, by Toshi Ichiyanagi, Toshio Hosokawa, Kazuo Fukushima, Jo Kondo, and Joji Yuasa, mainly demonstrates the enormous influence that the 1950s-era chance compositions of John Cage, with their long pauses and short bursts of sound, had on Japanese composers of the late twentieth century.

Overlapping textures and soft, shifting timbres are the most recognizable features of Morton Feldman's music, and his attractive sonorities draw listeners in ways other avant-garde sound structures may not. This music's appeal is also attributable to its gentle ambience, a static, meditative style that Feldman pioneered long before trance music became commonplace. The three works on this disc are among Feldman's richest creations, yet the material in each piece is subtly layered and integrated so well that many details will escape detection on first hearing. In Piano and Orchestra, the piano is treated as one texture among many, receding to the background and blending with muted brass and woodwinds in a wash of colors. Cello and Orchestra might seem like a conventional concerto movement, especially since the cellist is centrally placed on this recording and plays with a rather lyrical tone. However, Feldman's orchestral clusters are dense and interlocked, which suggests that the cello should be less prominent and blend more into the mass of sounds behind it. No such ambiguity exists in the performance of Coptic Light, which Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony Orchestra play with even dynamics and careful attention to the work's aggregate effect, which is mesmerizing.