Category: Tracks

Perhaps no one has dedicated himself to advancing the work of American composers as has John Duffy. And yet somehow he still managed to compose some 300-plus works of his own. (Rumor has it he hasn’t slept since 1974.) But seriously, when the Virginia Arts Festival asked Duffy to head a Composers Institute in 2004, they couldn’t have found a better mentor to the young artists who came to study. He was back in 2005 as the composer-in-residence and that led to the recording of this CD featuring his many musical colleagues at the Festival. Heritage Suite, a violin and piano score derived from Duffy’s soundtrack for the PBS series, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, is here presented in a transcription by saxophonist Carrie Koffman for soprano saxophone and piano. Soprano sax is no mainstay of the Jewish traditional music scene, but in this case it clearly captures the character and emotional power of the subject matter at hand.

—MS

Judith Lang Zaimont’s album Pure Colors gives her listeners a chance to understand what synesthesia feels like. Each piece on this compilation has a different quality, showing all the colors on her palate. A stand out is her composition, Virgie Rainey–Two Narratives for Soprano, Mezzo and Piano, which sounds like a cross between an opera and a Broadway musical, combining virtuosic singing with a light, narrative sound. A multitude of skilled performers extract all the color possible from her written pages.

—AR

First, they changed the landscape for recordings of contemporary music with their American Classics series, then they took on the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music as a subseries. Now Naxos has introduced Wind Band Classics. Their first disc, appropriately enough, is a collection of music mostly by Americans, and it is performed by one of the top ensembles in the country, the University of Kansas Wind Ensemble. John Mackey’s Redline Tango was originally composed for orchestra but since he rescored it for wind band it has become his most widely performed composition. A quick listen to this relentless sonic rollercoaster and you’ll instantly know why.

—FJO

A few years ago Italian guitar virtuoso Marco Cappelli decided to chart, for himself, the state of music in downtown Manhattan, asking ten scenesters to compose for his extreme guitar—a six-string acoustic guitar retrofitted with ten sympathetic resonating strings. The collection of pieces, dubbed the Extreme Guitar Project, is as divergent as the group of old-schoolers that penned the sonic grab bag. One of the standouts on the disc sounds like a harebrained idea: a guitar piece for right hand only. Sure, there’s a tradition of left-handed piano compositions. This notwithstanding, Annie Gosfield’s Marked by a Hat is neither gimmicky nor, upon casual listening, revealing of its handicapped nature. In fact, the one-handedness only further focuses the piece’s exploration into unusual tunings and timbres. Cappelli proves to be adept both as performer and cartographer.

—RN

No word on whether either Milton Cross or Steven Dye wore one of those little plastic wristbands in support of “Pope John Paul for Sainthood” during the recording of this album. Anyone? Anyone? But back to the music. While there are quite a few rooms to wander through while listening to this limited edition disc, I’m most intrigued by the delicate, dreamy intimacy the duo captures on Clear Sky Model. Remarkably, this is on a disc advertised with the line “If you like bass clarinet, violin, homemade horns, piano, electronics—or more specifically, all of those things at once!—then check it out,” so don’t say you weren’t warned. And okay, all hell does sort of break out in the middle of this 10-minute piece, but still. It’s the sort of soundtrack you’d expect would accompany a screening of one of those old Super 8 films people find in their parents’ attics. Something vaguely innocent that wouldn’t seem ominous at all except for the music telling you the “real” back story. I mean, sure, they’re frolicking in the waves and having a hell of a honeymoon now. But they better enjoy it, because in ten years, they’ll have three kids to feed, a second mortgage to sweat, and one of them will be caught having an affair with that guy down the street.

—MS

It’s been imprisoned, dropped, burned, buried, drowned, and force-fed. Needless to say, the piano has had a pretty rough life. But now in the 21st century, it seems composers are letting up a bit, allowing the instrument a little breathing room to recuperate from its decidedly tumultuous past. The ten piano compositions featured on Jeri-Mae G. Astolfi’s latest CD, Mélange, reinforce the trend of strictly keeping the fingers right where they belong: on the keyboard. But not all of the music sits up straight with its hands folded. Take Craig Weston’s …into all crevices of my world, with its timbre-bending digital accompaniment. After the opening gesture floats in your ears, lush reminisces of Debussy are soon dashed by odd bell-like tinkles that echo the piano, only in a slightly different tuning. At first I thought it might simply be a prepared piano piece, but then an eerie veil crept in, an impossible sustain hovering over repeated piano gestures. Weston’s piece is about establishing a vivid atmosphere, not virtuosic flash, although there is a little bit of that too in the music’s final climax.

—RN

I’ve been a fan of jazz pianist/composer Chick Corea ever since I first heard his wacky post-Return to Forever fusion record, The Mad Hatter, in the late ’70s. Amidst the chameleonic range of styles on that album and others I subsequently explored, his writing for string quartet within larger ensembles always stood out to me, and I always wondered what he would do given the chance to write a work scored exclusively for this most hallowed chamber ensemble. While his immediately identifiable piano touch is missing, Corea’s signature mix of percussive tunefulness and trickster experimentation can be clearly heard in his five-movement 2004 composition, The Adventures of Hippocrates, in an extremely idiomatic performance by the Orion String Quartet.

—FJO

I’ve had a few life-changing epiphanies over the years with the music of Philip Glass. The first was my introduction to Glass—North Star and then Einstein in quick succession—and I had a second, more profound one (since it literally refocused my own compositional energies) when I heard Satyagraha. I’ve remained a fan all these years, but the last “Wow-I’m-totally-blown-away” moment for me was when I heard the Nonesuch recording of his Symphony No. 2 nearly a decade ago. I just couldn’t get over the bitonality and the way his instantly recognizable compositional voice could be used in such a maximalist context. It was in my Walkman for weeks. Glass’s new eighth symphony, his first symphony in the traditional sense since that piece (Symphonies 3 through 7 were either only for strings [3], based on music by David Bowie [4], or also incorporated voices [5,6,7]), is the follow-up I’ve been waiting for ever since.

–FJO

You’ve seen a lot of Belinda Reynolds around NewMusicBox lately—she’s been offering us a weekly crash course in issues related to composing for students. When I heard Play, the work inspired by a game she plays with her students on her new disc, I found my ear coyly charmed in a way I was not expecting. But the rest of the disc might serve as required listening for composers who fear that writing for amateur players will buff the edge off of the skill and inventiveness they might display in the rest of their work. Seems the opposite is true, at least in Reynolds’s case. The album’s title track has a mysterious, fairytale quality to the opening flute line, and though the cello and piano pull things down a slightly darker path, the music finds itself cycling around again, not quite down the same path, but through similar trees.

–MS