Classical Music Sound Track

Roland Kayn - A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound (2017) {16CD Set, frozen reeds fr7/22}
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© 2017 frozen reeds | fr7/22
Experimental / Modern Classical / Cybernetic Music / Electroacoustic / Electronic

Twenty-two movements, 14 hours and 16 CDs worth of spangling cosmic sound play: this premiere release of the magnum opus by German composer Roland Kayn is a colossus and a marvel. Roland who? In a profession that glorifies big egos and fetishises the kind of creative genius that demands total control, Kayn went to more selfless extremes. He worked in the pioneering electronic studios of Germany and the Netherlands in the mid-20th century and built fastidious command systems with the aim of making “self-sufficient cybernetic music”.

Alarm Will Sound's recording of Steve Reich's monumental orchestral/choral works The Desert Music and Tehillim, released on the Cantaloupe label in 2002, greatly benefits from the group's close connections with the composer: the ensemble's conductor, Alan Pierson, and several of the performers studied at the Eastman School with Brad Lubman, a conductor frequently enlisted by Reich. Also, Pierson's arrangements, which reconcile the chamber and orchestral versions that exist for both works, were prepared in close consultation with the composer; thus, this may well be the definitive recording of these pieces. Brilliantly sonorous in their climaxes – the burst of light near the end of Desert Music, the "Alleluias" that close Tehillim – the players also articulate Reich's intricate canonic textures with nimble precision.

The strength of these pieces by American composer Keeril Makan is that they fall outside the boxes of minimalism, abstract electronic music, and world-influenced styles. The word visceral keeps coming up in his descriptions of his own music, which revels in sheer sound and proceeds in large, physical gestures with, Makan says blithely, "no formal logic other than careful attunement to what the ear and body dictate." Paradoxically, though, it's full of surprises. The three works on the album all fall loosely under the chamber music banner and are all recognizably by the same composer, but each has a different method.

Nordic Sound - Tribute to Axel Borup-Jørgensen was conceived as a musical memorial to the late Danish modern master, Axel Borup-Jørgensen. Five leading Danish and Faroese composers, Bent Sørensen, Sunleif Rasmussen, Thomas Clausen, Mogens Christensen and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, were commissioned by Edition Borup-Jørgensen and the composer’s daughter, Elisabet Selin to write a recorder concerto for Michala Petri and string orchestra. The choice of the recorder was both an outgrowth of Borup-Jørgensen’s decades long engagement with the instrument and as Petri’s personal tribute, who became a “second daughter” to the composer.

For the upcoming 500th anniversary of the death of the great Franco-Flemish composer Pierre de la Rue (around 1460-1518), the vocal ensemble The Sound and the Fury, which specializes in early music, has recorded a selection of the composer’s artistic masses for the label FRA BERNARDO, which impressively reflect the high standard at the court of the music-loving and music-savvy Margaret of Austria. The Pierre de la Rue masses on this recording have one thing in common: they are all based on monadic models, thus in keeping with the most traditional of cyclic mass composition models, the cantus firmus mass.

Moondog - A New Sound Of An Old Instrument (1979) {Kopf KD133017 rel 1997} (plus missing track 13 from LP}
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© 1977, 1997 Roof Music / Kopf Records | KD 13 30 17
Classical / Jazz / Avant-Garde / Modern Classical / Modern Composition / Minimalism / Organ

The only thing that is wrong with this is that it is so short! It's about 35 minutes long, but what a thirty five minutes! Moondog felt that the organ could fit any musical style and set out to prove it. My favourite track is "Mirage" which is a lengthened treatment of "Oboe Round", which I first heard on "Viking on 6th Avenue". The moods that are created are magical it really is a splendid album.

Some years ago Austrian radio ORF started a series of recordings with polyphony from the renaissance on its own label. The ensemble The Sound and the Fury has recorded music by well-known masters like Nicolas Gombert, Pierre de la Rue and Johannes Ockeghem. But they have also paid attention to some forgotten composers of the 15th century. One of them is Guillaume Faugues. As so often there is quite a difference between his reputation in his own time and in modern times. It is very likely nothing of his oeuvre has ever been recorded before.

This is the second recording by BIS of Sally Beamish’s music, and the four pieces it contains confirm utterly her high standing. Her work is thoughtfully lyrical, intense, individual, instinctively dramatic, in ways that remind me somewhat of Nicholas Mawmusic. Like him she has a particular gift for expressive harmony and timbre. The earliest piece here is No, I’m not afraid (1989), six poignant poems written from prison by Irina Ratushinskaya spoken – by Beamish herself – against sparse but hugely effective instrumental backgrounds and interspersed with five purely instrumental interludes. The disc opens with The Caledonian Road of 1997. The name of this piece refers not just to the north London thoroughfare remembered by Beamish from childhood but to her own pilgrimage northward to Scotland, where she now lives. The music resonates with a sense of ritual, of something inevitable. By contrast, the work that follows, the unabashedly poetic The Day Dawn (written for a summer school organised by Contemporary Music-making for Amateurs in 1997, and revised in 2000) derives from a Shetland fiddle tune, and is all about new beginnings.