Philippe Manoury – Fragments pour un portrait (1998): 4. Nuit
Ensemble Intercontemporain / Susanna Mälkki, conductor / IRCAM
Click here to read extended notes about the piece by the composer itself.
Archivi categoria: Strumentale
Ypsilon
K. Stockhausen, Ypsilon for a melodic instrument with micro-tones (1989, flute version).
Notes at Stockhausen Edition no. 28 by Sonoloco
“Ypsilon” is a Greek letter symbolically used to indicate variable quantity. Stockhausen’s composition with the same name from 1989 is scored for “a melody instrument with micro-tones”. The composition can be performed on any wind instrument that has keys or valves. Stockhausen has given the piece a graphical score in 16 pitches. He has indicated that the intervals between the pitches should be “as small as possible but clearly perceivable”. That is what he means by “variable quantities”, since the steps of the intervals depend on the instrument and the player. “Ypsilon” for flute was worked out by Kathinka Pasveer in 1990. Again the melody is that of the Eve-formula, here starting with the central pitch of “Dienstag aus Licht” (“Tuesday from Light”) but stretched to 9 minutes and compressed spatially into approximately a minor third.
The rattling of bells startles at first. The costume of the player is saturated with Indian bells (compare the costume of the birdman Miron of “Musik im Bauch”!). The clicking of the valves adds another dimension to this fabric of sounds, and the human sounds of kissing, combined with other human – vocal – sounds, further the impression. Small pauses are inserted into the progression of events, and sometimes the shaking of the Indian bells reign in supremacy. The player achieves this by shivering!
This is one strange piece of music, which easily transports the suggestive listener into alien levels of experience!
Wyatt sings Cage
Robert Wyatt sings John Cage’s The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs for voice and piano. The piano stay closed and is used as a percussion instrument.
The song was commissioned by singer Janet Fairbank, who later became known for pioneering contemporary music. Cage chose to set a passage from page 556 of Finnegans Wake, a book he bought soon after its publication in 1939. The composition is based, according to Cage himself, on the impressions received from the passage. The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs marks the start of Cage’s interest in Joyce and is the first piece among many in which he uses the writer’s work.
The vocal line only uses three pitches, while the piano remains closed and the pianist produces sounds by hitting the lid or other parts of the instrument in a variety of ways (with his fingers, with his knuckles, etc.) Almost immediately after its composition the song became one of Cage’s most frequently performed works, and was several times performed by the celebrated duo of Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio. Cage later composed another piece for voice and closed piano, A Flower, and a companion piece to The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, called Nowth upon Nacht, also based on Joyce’s book.
From Obscure 1 LP
Viola d’Amore
The viola d’amore is a beautiful instrument with an infinite numbers of possible sound worlds. It has six or seven main strings, bowed, and an equal number of sympathetic strings (click the image to enlarge).
In this album for the Sksh’s netlabel, Garth Knox explore this instrument using different tunings and techniques.
Excerpts:
Studies for Player Piano
Conlon Nancarrow (October 27, 1912 – August 10, 1997) was born in the USA, but he lived in Mexico from 1940 to his death in 1997 because of his membership in the communist party.
It was in Mexico that Nancarrow did the work he is best known for today. He had already written some music in the United States, but the extreme technical demands they made on players meant that satisfactory performances were very rare. That situation did not improve in Mexico’s musical environment, also with few musicians available who could perform his works, so the need to find an alternative way of having his pieces performed became even more pressing. Taking a suggestion from Henry Cowell’s book New Musical Resources, which he bought in New York in 1939, Nancarrow found the answer in the player piano, with its ability to produce extremely complex rhythmic patterns at a speed far beyond the abilities of humans. So, he wrote studies of ever growing complexity, exploiting the mechanical nature of player piano system.
Nancarrow’s first pieces combined the harmonic language and melodic motifs of early jazz pianists like Art Tatum with extraordinarily complicated metrical schemes. The first five rolls he made are called the Boogie-Woogie Suite (later assigned the name Study No. 3 a-e). His later works were abstract, with no obvious references to any music apart from Nancarrow’s itself.
Many of these later pieces (which he generally called studies) are canons in augmentation or diminution or prolation canons. In music, a prolation canon or mensuration canon is a musical composition wherein the different voices play the same melody at different speeds (or prolations, a metrical term that dates to the medieval and Renaissance eras).
While most canons using this device, such as those by Ockeghem, Desprez or J.S. Bach, have the tempos of the various parts in quite simple ratios, like 2:1 or 3:2, Nancarrow’s canons are in far more complicated ratios. The Study No. 40, for example, has its parts in the ratio e:pi (i.e. 2.71828:3.14159, an irrational time ratio unplayable by humans), while the Study No. 37 has twelve individual melodic lines, each one moving at a different tempo.
He became better known in the 1980s, and was lauded as one of the most significant composers of the century. The composer György Ligeti called his music “the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives … the best of any composer living today“.
Here you can listen to the full playlist. By going to YouTube you can select them one by one
In C
In C continues to receive numerous performances every year, by professionals, students, and amateurs. It has had repeated recordings since its 1968 LP premiere, and most are still in print. It welcomes performers from a vast range of practices and traditions, from classical to rock to jazz to non-Western. Recordings range from the Chinese Film Orchestra of Shanghai—on traditional Chinese instruments—to the Hungarian “European Music Project” group, joined by two electronica DJs manipulating The Pulse. It rouses audiences to states of ecstasy and near hysteria, all the while projecting an inner serenity that suggests Cage’s definition of music’s purpose—”to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.” In short, it’s not going away.
[Robert Carl]
An interesting analysis/commentary about Terry Riley’s seminal composition by Robert Carl.
The original recording by Terry Riley dated 1964
Here is the execution by the Shanghai Film Orchestra
A funky peformance by Band On A Can group from NYC
2015-02-10 Tate Modern and Africa Express
Boiler Room Amsterdam Live Performance
2022-10-20 The Young Gods present Play Terry Riley In C Documentary & Live from Les Forces Motrices, Geneva
Vampyr!
Tristan Murail – Vampyr! for electric guitar, from Random Access Memory (1984), Wiek Hijmans electric guitar.
To be honest, I know little about this piece. It’s the sixth track from Random Access Memory, a cycle that includes a set of solo pieces for various instruments and a gold dust in the contemporary academic music where the electric guitar is seldom used.
Vampyr! is one of several works in Murail’s catalogue that do not employ spectral techniques. Rather, in the performance notes, the composer asks the performer to play the piece in the manner of guitarists in the popular and rock traditions, with a heavy overdriven rock sound. In the preface to the work, Murail writes: “The desired sound is rather like that of the solo guitar as played by Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton etc.“. And then, in bold type and with an exclamation mark: “The player should put into Vampyr! all the energy of rock music and that includes the appropriate number of decibels!” Would like to see the whole score.
The rather striking title refers to horror movies and sci-fi B-films; other titles in the cycle do so as well. This subject matter is clearly recognizable in the saturated guitar sound and the frequent, hysterical use of the tremolo arm.
Here Wiek Hijmans effortlessly transforms his Gretsch 1967 model Chet Atkins Tennesean into a ruthless yawing, squealing and screaming board.
Terretektorh
Iannis Xenakis – Terretektorh (1965/66), for large orchestra of 88 players scattered among the audience
Devotion 2
Vache Sharafyan (Վաչե Շարաֆյան): Devotion No. 2 (1999) for Tar, Kemanche, Dhol, Tam-Tam, Piano and string quartet.
Tar, Kemanche, Dhol are musical instruments adopted by various middle eastern cultures like Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia to the Indian subcontinent. Click the names to read details from wikipedia.
Solo for Viola d’Amore
Solo for Viola d’Amore by Georg Friedrich Haas performed live by Garth Knox in Graz.
This is the second half of the piece. In the final section, the sympathetic strings are plucked and bowed directly, an unusual and striking effect. These are the second set of strings on the viola d’amore, usually not played directly, only there to resonate passively. In this piece they are amplified, and controlled by a volume pedal.