The Music of…Larry Polansky is a marvelous combination of the mathematical and the expressive. The blend is so seamless, in fact, that it serves to point out the absurdity of regarding those two strains as opposite or even especially different.'' (Joshua Kosman, SFGate) This album of chamber music offers three pieces: Polansky's drifting, shape-shifting freeHorn and his pulsing ii-v-i - each of which consists of a continuous modulation between the three different natural-just harmonic series - and minmaj, Polansky's unusual ''translation'' or Ruggles's Angels.
Long Night is an exquisitely drifting, ever-unfolding work for three pianos, all of which are played by noted new music pianist Sarah Cahill. Kyle Gann is a highly regarded composer, author, and award-winning critic (prolifically penning over 2,000 articles for 40 publications) who has written about new music for the Village Voice since 1986. His own music, informed by the American experimental tradition, is complex, unusual, beautiful, and moving. "Kyle Gann is a force of nature…a commanding presence in the landscape of American music."
A round or a canon is a musical form in which several voices or instruments perform the same material, but with staggered entries. For example, in a three-voice version of "Row, row, row your boat," some people don't get to sing the first line until others are singing "Gently down the stream," and others don't get to sing it until "Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily." The last group to sing the opening line is the last to sing "Life is but a dream," and they sing it all by themselves. In a so-called mensuration canon, all of the voices end at the same time, which means that the later you enter the canon, the faster you have to sing – or the more you have to compress - to reach the end at the same time as everybody else. One might predict that as the canon approaches its end, its density increases arithmetically. And it does – with vertigo-producing results.
Playful yet serious, imaginative yet true to the spirit of the originals: Alban Gerhardt and the inimitable Alliage Quintett offer a wholly new perspective on a variety of favourites drawn from the cello’s established repertoire and beyond.
"Cold Blue Music has an unofficial “stable” of composers and performers names that come up on multiple releases. And why not? Every record label needs an identity. Composer Jim Fox is the man behind Cold Blue Music, and that position serves as a kind of bully pulpit for his own music. Again, why not? I like Cold Blue Music a lot, and one of the things I like about it is its advocacy for the specially priced CD single.
Blue Öyster Cult marks time with a second live album on which they turn out good, if redundant, concert versions of recent favorites like "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" and "Godzilla" and add to their repertoire of live covers such oldies as the MC5's "Kick out the Jams" and the Animals' "We Gotta Get out of This Place." A perfectly acceptable, completely unnecessary souvenir record from a hard-touring band of the '70s. (It should perhaps be noted that the mid- to late '70s was a period when more live albums than usual were being released, especially in the wake of Peter Frampton's massively successful 1976 album Frampton Comes Alive!.)