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As usual, the 34 CDs collected in this month’s round-up of new recordings of American repertoire reflect a stunning range of musical possibilities. A great amount of lost American musical history has been unearthed recently in recordings of symphonies by Virgil Thomson, George Antheil, and Paul Creston, organ concertos by Leo Sowerby, chamber music by Arthur Foote, and songs by Edward MacDowell, as well as an Ellipsis Arts collection of early electronic music featuring works by 30 American composers. (The music of one important composer overlooked by Ellipsis Arts, Gordon Mumma, is luckily featured on a career retrospective disc by Lovely Music.)

New discs featuring original orchestral works by Ferde Grofé and Robert Russell Bennett, today more often remembered for the orchestrations of music by Gershwin and Richard Rodgers, shed new light on their achievements, and a 2-CD collection of John Cage’s text pieces offers an intimate side to Cage that most people who did not know him personally are unaware of, while a new disc of his orchestral work is further proof of the inexhaustible treasure trove that is the Cage archive.

A variety of new piano discs display an exiting array of approaches which range from Peter Serkin’s lyrical approach to complex modernist scores to Paul Bley‘s lyrical approach to the often equally complex sound world of free jazz. Somewhere in between those two worlds are Elie Siegmeister’s jazz-tinged contributions to modern piano music, collected on 2 new CDs (volume 1 and volume 2), Stephen M. Barnett’s post-impressionistic counterpoint, Ernesto Diaz-Infante’s Feldman meets Monk improvisations and the uncategorizable work of Keith Jarrett, two very different facets of which are represented here this month: his very personal solo piano interpretations of standards and his compositions for other players. And then there’s a disc of rediscovered early works and fragments for player piano by Conlon Nancarrow, and a collection of new music for 2 pianos features an amazing quartertone piece by John Corigliano.

Old and new jazz sounds emanate from a big-band performance by the great Buddy Collette, the first-ever jazz disc on Bridge Records, as well as small group recordings by John Abercrombie, the Dave Holland Quintet, Sarah Jane Cion, and the genre’s boundaries continue to get stretched with new discs by Neil Sadler and Andy Narell who solos on steel drums!

Jazz isn’t the only music whose boundaries get stretched this month. A new disc by the Kronos Quartet, featuring a new piece by Terry Riley as well as arrangements by Osvaldo Golijov, continues the globe-trotting sonic explorations of their landmark Pieces of Africa disc, and Bill Frisell’s new solo disc is a unique amalgamation of jazz, country, blues and several other things…

New discs of chamber music by Elliott Schwartz, Alan Hovhaness, and Steve Reich as well as large scale choral work by Frank Ferko offer great listening rewards as well, so give some of these discs a listen!

William Colvig with Lou Harrison and John Luther Adams Photo by Dennis Keeley

Musician and instrument builder, engineer and mountaineer William Colvig died on March 1, 2000 in Capitola California, at the age of 82.

Born in Medford, Oregon on March 13, 1917, Bill grew up in Weed, California at the base of Mt. Shasta where he developed his lifelong passion for the mountains and learned to play several musical instruments. At the College (now University) of the Pacific and the University of California Berkeley, he studied both music and electrical engineering. He later combined his musical and technical talents, designing and building with composer Lou Harrison the first complete American Gamelan. Over the years, Colvig and Harrison built many other instruments based on models from around the world, tuned in just intonation and other acoustically-perfect tunings.

In addition to being musical collaborators, Bill and Lou were life partners. At a time when gay couples were still largely invisible to the straight world, they openly and tenderly showed their profound love for one another. Their thirty-three years of shared life and devotion is a model and an inspiration for all couples.

Over the years, as their flowing beards and hair turned white, Lou and Bill grew to resemble one another more and more. But Bill’s lithe frame, the spring in his step and the twinkle in his eye also gave him a more than passing resemblance to John Muir. Like Muir, Bill was an ardent advocate for wilderness, who passionately loved the Sierra Nevada and led many trips into the Range of Light for the Sierra Club (founded by Muir). As he wanted it, Bill’s ashes will be scattered among those rugged mountains.

Along with Lou, Bill always warmly welcomed younger composers and musicians into the beautiful home they shared overlooking the Pacific. Over the years, Lou and Bill hosted me for several memorable visits. In 1988, I had the great pleasure of welcoming them to Alaska, for a residency and concert with the Fairbanks Symphony. This was Lou’s first visit to Alaska. But it was homecoming for Bill. In the late 30’s he had left Berkeley to live for several years on the rough and ready frontier of Alaska and the Yukon, and he was thrilled to be back in the North again.

William with Gamelan Photo by Dennis Keeley

For their concert, Lou and Bill brought with them the Sundanese gamelan degung, Sekar Kembar. As far as we can tell, this was the first time a gamelan had been heard “live” in Alaska. Bill played various instruments in the ensemble, and he was featured as soloist playing the suling flute in Lou’s tunefully-sunny Main Bersama-sama for horn, suling and gamelan.

After the concert, Lou and Bill came out to my cabin for a party. My place was deep in the woods. I had no running water and heated with a wood stove. The temperature in the boreal forest that night was well into the forty-somethings below zero. Accustomed to warmer climes, Lou was good-humored in his forbearance. But Bill was in his element. The colder it got, the better he liked it. The aurora borealis dancing in the sky that night was the icing on his cake.

Bill Colvig was one of a kind — a true original’s original. His impish grin and mischievous laugh, his irrepressible enthusiasm and unbridled joy in living will remain always in the hearts of everyone who knew him. The beautiful instruments and the rich life he created with Lou Harrison will be his enduring musical legacy to the world.

When Bill’s spirit left his body, Lou was at his side, holding his hand. “It was a peaceful death”, says his soul-mate. “He was so beautiful. Like a beautiful animal returning to Nature.”

This month’s edition of SoundTracks spans a greater chronology that ever before. Perhaps it’s fitting that in the end of the first year of NewMusicBox, there would be so wide a range. Now that we’re in the 21st Century (pace to the 2001 apostates), of course, it is now possible to have recordings of American music from 4 different centuries, and this time, indeed we do!

From the 18th century, we’ve got music by David Moritz Michael (1751-1827), a German composer who lived and worked in the United States from 1795 to 1815, contributing greatly to early Pennsylvanian musical life both through his work for the Moravian Church and through composing and conducting secular instrumental music. From the 19th century, we’ve got a wonderful new recording of the Piano Concerto and Piano Quintet of Amy Beach performed by the dynamic pianist Joanne Polk who has previously recorded Beach’s complete solo piano music. A few of Beach’s delightful songs appear on a new CD by soprano Carolyn Heafner which also features repertoire by five other composers including Ernst Bacon, who, though largely forgotten, was one of our most important song composers.

As for the 20th century, the choices are as seemingly endless as always. Last month we asked you to name the most important 20th century American composer, one of our easier questions :), and it almost feels like the record companies were listening! Of course, it takes much more that a month to get a CD into production, but it’s a joyous coincidence that the music of five of your choices for most important composer – John Cage, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Duke Ellington, Milton Babbitt and Conlon Nancarrow – all appear on new recordings this month. (Some other possible candidates for most important 20th century composer, who somehow didn’t make it onto our forum yet, resurface again this month in new recordings as well: Henry Cowell, Samuel Barber…) In fact, Griffes appears three times: his complete piano music has been released on two separate discs (disc 1 | disc 2) and his lovely Poem for Flute and Orchestra appears on a collection of flute concertos which also features a little-known concerto by Virgil Thomson. Cage appears twice, first on a new disc devoted to his visceral early percussion music and second on yet another recording of the seemingly-ubiquitous Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, albeit this time with a twist… It’s on Naxos. Cage has finally become standard repertoire after all!

Naxos’s American Classics series continues to offer up other surprises as well: symphonies by Meredith Willson whom I’ve previously only known through The Music Man and other inventive Broadway musicals. There’s even a new Naxos disc featuring the music of a living American composer who is still in his 20s, Carter Pann! A new disc of works written in the last few years for duo violinists János Négyesy and Päivikki Nykter features music by two other composers still in their 20s. Of course, the lion’s share of releases devoted to the music of contemporary American composers is still CRI, a label that continually amazes both with a startling number of new releases as well as historic back-catalog re-issues. This month’s new releases include discs devoted to the music of Jennifer Margaret Barker, Ronald Caltabiano and Herman Berlinski, who turns 90 in August and is still going strong! Even this is trumped by another CRI release, a re-issue of music by Minnesota elder statesman Gene Gutchë who turns 93 in July. The title curiosity level of his “Bongo Divertimento” is only outdone by “Fanfare, Fugue and Funk” featured on another CRI re-issue devoted to the music of Francis Thorne! There are a whole host of other discs devoted to the music of both elder statesmen and younger lions (to borrow the term from the neo-Hard Boppers) including David Diamond, Easley Blackwood, Dominick Argento, Judith Lang Zaimont, Richard Wilson, José Serebrier, Daniel Asia and Ian Krouse.

This month, in the less-than-easily-classifiable department (which is always proof of how varied new American music is) are film scores by Caleb Sampson and the Alloy Orchestra, who’ve used three classic silent films as the departure point for some very unusual music. A new disc by guitarist/composer Tom Taylor merges bluegrass, jazz, rock and classical fugues into a cohesive whole with some help from Dave Grisman and the Kronos Quartet. There are even more elements thrown into the mix on the second Tin Hat Trio album and on the first full length CD from Twisted Tutu, a new music-and-beyond duo whom Kyle Gann, in his provocative liner notes, describes “as the way 21st century music sounds.”

Of course, it’s still a little misleading to talk of releases featuring 21st century music. Chances are, this early on, that even discs that say © 2000 everywhere and offer no other date, such as Steve Heitzeg‘s eclectic music for the PBS documentary Death of a Dream, were at least partially if not completely conceived and recorded sometime before December 31, 1999. But who knows? And, indeed if it has not been disseminated into the world until now, isn’t it 21st Century Music anyway? And if you haven’t heard any of this music before, what then? So much for clocks! Maybe it’s best to turn them off for a while and listen to some of this music…

If there’s anything that the 26 new CDs featured in SoundTracks this month have in common it’s their inability to be pigeonholed. Taken together, they are proof of how far ranging American music is.

While it seems ironic that the most futuristic sounding music that came across our desks this month were discs collecting early tape works by Ingram Marshall and the late Kenneth Gaburo , it’s downright shocking to discover the music of Thomas Wiggins, a.k.a. “Blind Tom ” Bethune, a 19th century piano wizard born into slavery whose original compositions incorporate polytonality, tone-clusters and other modernisms long thought to be alien to American music until Charles Ives! This month we’ve had a veritable avalanche of 19th century American repertoire. In addition to the standout “Blind Tom” CD, there are three new discs of Creole concert works from New Orleans featuring works by the celebrated Louis Moreau Gottschalk , and the almost totally unknown African Americans Edmond Dédé , Charles Lucièn Lambert Sr. and his son Lucièn-Léon Guilliaume Lambert Jr. Their music, which includes mazurkas and quadrilles and homages to Napoleon III, shows what a melting pot America was even two centuries ago. A gorgeous disc of brand new works by Asian American composers shows how musical traditions from all over the world continue to enrich our culture.

Traditional roots American folk music also continues to inspire a variety of new music projects. Jay Ungar and Molly Mason ‘s new disc blends Appalachian and Cajun folksongs with a chamber orchestra and the latest recording by the early music group Hesperus pairs European Medieval and Renaissance music with “early” American folk and blues repertoire by Uncle Dave Macon, Robert Johnson and others. NewGrange , a new progressive bluegrass supergroup featuring Darol Anger, Mike Marshall, Tim O’Brien and keyboardist (!) Philip Aaberg, combines so many different aesthetics it’s hard to know where it will go from one track to the next. Songs from a Random House , an eclectic avant-folk band led by Steven Swartz, mixes pop melodic hooks with a totally experimental musical vocabulary combining hexatonic harmonies with bizarre instrumentation (starring electrified baritone ukelele).

Pop sensibilities are even more pronounced in the attitude and appearance of the new Absolute Ensemble , who’ve even been featured in Vogue Magazine, but who perform a steady diet of post-modern concert repertoire including works by John Adams, Michael Daugherty, and others. Robert Ashley ‘s latest “opera” makes the line between downtown experimentalism and popular culture even blurrier with a work that contains “songs” that would even get pop radio airplay if radio were not governed so tightly by statistical marketing research.

A new disc by the John Link Vocal Quintet further shows the versatility of the voice in original “instrumental works” for voices as well as vocal transcriptions of music by Mussorgsky, Satie, Chick Corea and others.

Labeling the recent jazz recordings included here as jazz also limits their scope. Keyboardist D.D. Jackson , while clearly operating within a jazz framework, incorporates the unusual sonories of electric violin and African percussion into his combo. Greg Osby ‘s new recording combines two generations of players: today’s neo-hard bop-oriented “Young Lions” with masters of the free jazz era: Andrew Hilll and Jim Hall. The Bruce Arnold Trio performs jazz based on 12-tone rows resulting in music that sounds very un-Schoenbergian. Chick Corea , whose compositions have always blended elements of classical music, jazz, Latin and rock, has written a Piano Concerto. A new “big band” disc by Scott Rosenberg all but erases the line between notated experimental ensemble music and free improv. And the music of Meyer Kupferman , a contemporary classical music composer who has written a large body of compositions, is featured on two discs, one devoted exclusively to jazz-influenced works .

The saxophone, an instrument long associated with jazz, continues to prove itself remarkably versatile in a new disc of saxophone quartets featuring the music of six different composers. More versatile, still, is the music being created for dance these days. A new 2-CD sampler featuring dance music by seven different composers offers a good cross-section of the variety.

Tan Dun ‘s Millennium Symphony, which is something of a classical music answer to “We Are The World,” literally incorporates musicians and musical traditions from all six inhabited continents. Several of the works on another orchestral disc, devoted to the music of David Sampson , take their inspiration from other important historic events, the assassination of JFK, the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC.

Finally, a new disc of solo piano music by Matthew Goodheart , mixes a wide range of styles, from inside-the-piano expressionism to harmelodic jazz, with an economy of means. Listen in…

While discs continue to appear on our desks that were recorded and released in 1999, the first batch of recordings with a triple-zero date have begun to surface. This is indeed an exciting time because all new music is old and contrapositively all old music is new!

Plenty of new music is featuring on a total of 25 discs collected for this month’s edition of SoundTracks, and if this month’s offering are any indication, the dawn of the 21st Century offers as great a variety of sound as the dusk of the 20th…

There are big sounds: new discs of recent orchestral music by Elliott Carter and Rolv Yttrehus, a new work for violin and string orchestra by Keith Jarrett, as well as three movie soundtrack scores by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and a soundtrack to the new Tim Robbins’ film based on idiosyncratic composer Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock.

Extremely intimate sounds: A disc of recent art songs by Daron Hagen, plus a collection featuring songs by 10 different composers. There are works for piano and chamber forces plus narration by Mark Schultz, Soulima Stravinsky, and Richard Wilson, a disc of chamber music for flute and harp, plus recordings of chamber works employing other unusual combinations by George Crumb, Judith Sainte-Croix, and Yehuda Yannay. But recordings of chamber works for more standard combinations by Martin Boykan and Walter Winslow prove that there’s still plenty to be said by a piano trio or a string sextet.

There are new jazz combo discs led by Dave Douglas, Mark Elf, and Jon Raskin, plus a disc of organ improvisations by Wayne Marshall. Two new CDs which introduce digital purveyors of music to the unique soundworld of Music for Homemade Instruments, one of which is devoted to the music of MFHI founder Skip La Plante. Steffen Schleiermacher continues his pioneering cycle of the complete piano music of John Cage in a fourth volume collecting indeterminate works from the 1950s. And Gideon Freudmann, whose unusual live electric cello performance was a highlight of the 2000 Conference of Chamber Music America is featured an a disc performing his solo compositions. Electronics also figure in a new disc of collages by Mark Applebaum and as well as a disc of works by Alvin Lucier which use complex circuitry to alter the sounds of a solo piano as well as a gamelan.

Nothing’s changed!

For our first compendium of new American music CDs of the millennium, of course, we’re continuing to feature discs that were recorded in the last millennium! But in the coming months we will soon find out that like so many other terms that need to be re-examined, the appellation “20th century music” no longer suffices to describe new American music.

Several of the discs covered in this issue are so unlike most of the music you’ve heard before that they could very well be considered a harbinger of 21st century music. Nothing has quite prepared us for Al Margolis’s assemblage of 106,476 clarinets, or Tom Johnson’s sonic encyclopedia of every possible piano chord in 12-tone equal temperament. And James Tenney’s music for violin and piano, some of it several decades old, still sounds years ahead of its time. Tenney is also featured on a remarkable new disc by Sonic Youth, arguably the most important American rock band of the past two decades. The album, fittingly titled Goodbye 20th Century, features performances of experimental works by 10 composers of the second half of the 20th century, 9 of whom are Americans, which must be a first in both the history of rock and the history of so-called concert music.

The music of Jerry Gerber posits an orchestra-less future for orchestral music, using programmable synthesizers to convey symphonic sonorities. Although another disc featuring new works by Robert Starer and William Thomas McKinley shows that the orchestra is still very much alive.

Indeed, there will be many musical carryovers from the previous century. And as the post-romantic orchestral music of John Stewart McLennan, the quasi-impressionistic piano music of Alvin Curran and the often mystical music of Stephen Dickman suggest, we are part of a musical continuum that goes much further back in time and that encompasses a world-wide geography.

It’s fitting that for the first issue of NewMusicBox where jazz takes central stage, there are a plethora of interesting new jazz releases. The latest small combo releases by saxophonist Jimmy Greene and trumpet genius Dave Douglas, offer new sets of compositions that are firmly in the jazz tradition, while the larger ensemble outings by master arranger Don Sebesky and legendary congero Ray Barretto put new spins on some classic charts by Ellington and others. An Ellington tune also appears on the latest CD by Don Byron, who appears in this month’s In The First Person. Finally, Ellington’s own interpretations of his music are featured on a never-before released live concert recording of the under-appreciated 1954 line-up of his orchestra, which is particularly fitting in an issue of NewMusicBox devoted to the impact of concert venues on musical performance and should serve as a reminder to today’s record industry that some of the best jazz recordings have been the ones that are not manufactured in the studio.

Traditionally, December is a slim month for new releases. Most record companies and distributors view December as a time to catch up and to make one valiant final effort for the entire year’s releases through holiday promotions. Still, however, a handful of exciting new releases have come our way that might even wind up in many “Best of the Year” lists! A new disc of early chamber music by Elliott Carter, lovingly played by the Chicago Pro Musica, fills in the missing aural links between his accessible Americana and the later metrical complexities. A new recordings of Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land, re-orchestrated for 13 instruments by Murry Sidlin, finally captures the innocence and intimacy which Copland was trying to convey in his only full-length opera.

This month, CRI, continues its usual bounty combining exciting new recordings of new repertoire with re-issues from its legendary back catalog. Two new composers featured on their own first-ever CRI releases this month are Richard Festinger and Mathew Rosenblum, whose must-hear music employs a bizarre 21-tone tuning system combining the standard 12-tone equal tempered scale with 9 additional pitches derived from just intonation. Past repertoire mined by CRI this month include a re-issue of historic composer-led recordings by David Van Vactor and a brand new recording of piano and chamber works by Louise Talma whose music should be much better known. Finally, Vicky Ray‘s exciting new recital disc features six very recent solo piano pieces, five of which were composed within the last four years. Combine that with New Albion’s CD re-issue of Stephen Scott’s classic LP Music for Bowed Pianos for a fascinating overview of new ideas for the piano emanating from the West Coast.

Of course, for people who are producing their own CDs, there is no need to worry about pushing back catalog for the holidays. In fact, this is probably an excellent month to introduce something new: hence new CDs devoted to music by Mark Carlson, Earnest G. Woodall and Larry Kucharz, whose previous CD was also featured in NewMusicBox earlier this year. And although Christina Fong’s new recital disc featuring late solo violin works by John Cage might make your skin crawl (perhaps inspiring the disc’s provocative cover), it challenges the myth that Cage’s late number pieces are all ambient and meditative.

In addition, 4tay, a brand new record label devoted to new music launched with new releases by Herbert A. Deutsch, Albert Tepper, Jerry Rizzi, and Elodie Lauten whose remarkable Variations on the Orange Cycle was featured on the Century List.

Lastly, Sony Classical’s 2-CD retrospective of 30 years of film scores by John Williams, poses a challenge that NewMusicBox would like to make. What are the ten best CDs of 1999 that we featured in NewMusicBox. What are the 10 best CDs of 1999 that we left out?

Although he was a success as both composer and author, as a recluse Paul Bowles was a total failure. After fleeing New York for Morocco in 1947, he and his wife Jane continued to entertain a seemingly endless parade of visitors in his adopted country. Even in the 1990s, after Betolucci’s film of The Sheltering Sky had made him America’s most famous living expatriate, finding him was still as easy as picking up the Tangier telephone book.

I had discovered his work only in the mid-’80s, when within the course of a week I read an essay by Gore Vidal claiming Bowles’s stories as being “among the best ever written by an American” and an unrelated piece by Ned Rorem predicting that “if history remembers [Bowles] it will be for his musical gifts.” The two sides of Bowles’s creative life seem to occupy mutually distinct realms-the music existing to charm, the text trying to horrify-but it was the area in-between than I came to find the most intriguing.

As a regular music critic at the New York Herald-Tribune from 1942 to 1946, Bowles upheld the mantle of Virgil Thomson, and was Thomson’s own choice to replace him as chief critic when he left the paper in 1954. In retrospect, Bowles proved a subversive choice. Entrusted with documenting “serious” music in the city, he became the first critic to devote any serious space to jazz and what today we call “world music,” reserving special contempt for countries which subverted their own indigenous music to a colonial presence, as Cuba did with its African influences and Moroccan Arabs once did with the Berber tradition.

These writings make intriguing reading for a generation which finds world music trendy again. Just as his nihilistic fiction paved the way for the Beats and his musically repetitive non-development fills the missing gap between Colin McPhee and Steve Reich, the best of Bowles’s criticism reveal yet another of today’s interests that he explored first.

By the time I eventually met Mr. Bowles, on a 1998 trip to Morocco with NewMusicBox editor Frank J. Oteri, “going out” for him meant leaving his bed for the living room. His presence in Tangier, though, remained undiminished. The staff at the Hotel Continental, where portions of The Sheltering Sky were filmed, effortlessly steered us to the right neighborhood. Our driver, conversing with local teenagers in a pickup soccer game, found directions to “the American, Paul Bowles” (the only English words amid rapid-fire Arabic). And once on the right street, a stranger we approached got in our car to point out the right apartment building.

Even in ill-health Mr. Bowles (for no other salutation seemed appropriate) proved an amiable host, providing some occasionally mischievous answers to an afternoon’s worth of questions, perhaps a few willfully misheard…

Of the 24 discs featured in our current SoundTracks round-up, only 2 are discs of electronic music: David Doty‘s multicultural microtonal synthesizer landscapes and the unique multi-tracking experiments of Robert Paredes. A third CD, Future Flute — Margaret Lancaster’s recital disc of works by four composers, features works which combine flute with computer electronics. Still, one eighth of the grand total seems peculiar in an issue devoted to new music technology.

In a way, of course, all recordings are electronic music. And in our exploration of music and technology the over-riding objective has been to explore how the great variety of American music can be nurtured by emerging technologies. For example, the technology of recording allows us to experience the intimate vocal recitals of Neva Pilgrim and Sharon Mabry, who performs a recital dedicated exclusively to composers from Tennessee but which can now be heard all over the world. So perhaps the 12.5% is not so peculiar after all.

It is perhaps more shocking to discover that there is now a fourth recording of Morton Feldman‘s Crippled Symmetry, a demanding almost-90 minute chamber music tour-de-force. Perhaps this is evidence that this work will be standard repertoire before too long. Now that there’s finally a recording of Charlemagne Palestine‘s Schlingen-Blängen, a solo organ work of comparable duration released 10 years after it was recorded and 20 years after its composition, perhaps this early minimalist pioneer will get his due. Nonesuch has just issued a new work for string quartet by the most famous of the minimalist revolutionaries, Philip Glass, performed by, who else, the Kronos Quartet. Composed as a soundtrack to accompany the classic 1931 Bela Lugosi film of Dracula, it’s out just in time for Halloween.

Sony has made a firm commitment to the music of Wynton Marsalis issuing a new disc of his music every month this year. We’ve caught up with three of these unprecedented releases: a new interpretation of the Soldier’s Tale (using the same instrumentation as the Stravinsky classic), two ballet scores, and another string quartet. In addition, Marsalis even appears on the Sony compilation Listen to the Storyteller which also features works by Edgar Meyer and Patrick Doyle.

Guy Klucevsek‘s latest disc of solo accordion virtuosity features several of his own works as well as new music for solo accordion by pioneering post-minimalist William Duckworth, Canterbury guitar legend Fred Frith, and the uncategorizable John Zorn. A new orchestral recording devoted to the music of an American composer is always the source of great joy so the new Meyer Kupferman disc is more than welcome. But the behometh among all the releases this month is the New York Philharmonic‘s 10-CD commemorative set of American music. Not out in time for our September Orchestra issue, but we’re thrilled nonetheless. Would that these 10 CDs were the subscription season of any orchestra in America this season!