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Playlist Archive    August 1998 to December 1998

Listed by broadcast date, peruse playlists below with relevant links to composers, labels, etc. All pieces are from in-print compact discs, unless indicated LP or CASS and/or OOP (out of print). Read the latest playlists at the sonic stratosphere page.

Other archive pages
May - August 2000
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September - December 1999
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January - April 1999

Wednesday, December 30, 1998

Steve Reich: the Hits Granted, none of these pieces have charted on Billboard's Pop hit parade, yet Reich is one of the few living American composers applauded in the concert hall and popular enough to have a major label contract. On tonight's program we'll revisit some of Reich's classic hits and get acquainted with some of the compositional concerns of this ever-changing American composer. Formerly pegged as a Minimalist, Reich uses one or all of the following in crafty ways: percussion-based instrumental forces, the layering, phasing and gradual augmentation of interlocking melodic motifs, and the extraction of melodic material from everyday speech.

Wednesday, December 23, 1998

Rugged Americans Partch, Ives, Nancarrow and Sessions were maverick composers who, despite minuscule or nonexistent audiences, persevered and fashioned a distinctly American music. At the age of 29, Harry Partch fed his compositions to a pot-bellied stove and undertook the most quixotic journey of any American composer. Rejecting Western temperament and the starched-shirt mores of Western music, Partch devised a unique tuning system and hand-built his own orchestra of over 30 beautiful instruments to realize his musical vision. The Letter recounts the dire times of Pablo, one of Partch's hobo pals from the 1930s. Charles Ives ranks among the most prescient composers of the century. His use of polytonality, polyrhythms, and other innovative techniques antedates the European avant-garde by decades. Three Places in New England conveys many moods, from the solemn stillness of The "Saint Gaudens" in Boston Common, to the folk songs colliding riotously throughout Putnam's Camp. Marrying Stravinsky's truculent rhythms to Schoenberg's spiky melodic arcs, Roger Sessions' Seventh Symphony is a welcome tonic for the tonal whitewash found in many contemporary works. One of Sessions' students was Conlon Nancarrow, who emigrated to Mexico to escape government harassment in the early 1940s. Nancarrow spent the remaining five decades of his composing life punching rolls of astounding polyphonic and polyrhythmic complexity for the player piano.

Wednesday, December 16, 1998

More Pillage + Plunderphonic From sly quotes to wholesale regurgitation, musical borrowing and "free appropriation" assume multifarious forms. Frustr8ted sets brief comments about frustration amidst grunts and counting from Perez Prado, Paul McCartney and unidentified laughers and panters. Thumping to a suave Gimbel-Fox beat, Levin's Everyday revels in 1970s TV action-adventure orchestration: swaggering string stabs, heroically ascending brass and - did I hear a snippet from Hogan's Heroes? The Bran Flakes' Speak To Me Through Your Shoes begins with a children's show character proclaiming 'I'm silly' and masterfully assembles whirling voices and scattered horn riffs into disjunct funk. In Psychedelic Relapse, mangled swaths of sounds swoosh and swoop through an indescribable aural undertow. Famed for his polystylism - the blending of various musical styles in a single piece - Schnittke updates Beethoven in his Third String Quartet. Eschewing additional filtering and processing, Francis Dhomont sewed together segments from his own pieces and purloined excerpts from his colleagues and former students for the Frankenstein Symphony. Office Products blazes through a half hour live set of clawed guitar strings, ping-pong panning and quicksilver turntable havoc. And Torke's Charcoal? Style is codified and legitimized theft, so who can resist the pounding admixture of Stravinsky's Fireworks and the Firebird's Dance?

Wednesday, December 9, 1998

Electronic Voices Recording technology has inspired composers to explore, capture and enrich the spoken, sung and written word. From the nervously throbbing phonemes of ..Due Giorni Dopo to the vaporous chants of Ascención, the pieces on tonight's program atomize language into particles and/or set spoken text and song. Three Voices and Keller's Gun both fragment texts. Keller's recitation of cut-up words and phrases make odd, irregular melodies. Setting two lines in a poem by Frank O'Hara, Feldman creates a work of stately beauty with hypnotically repeated phonemes and phrases. The recording of each piece magnifies the byproducts of speech such as breaths and palatal clicks as well as tantalizes the ear with infrequent faint distortion. Cortez culls a text too, grainily layering and looping "Oh" from a poem by Snee McCaig. In an operatic tour de force, Alice Shields embeds a reading from the Book of the Dead amidst a whirlwind of hair-raising sounds derived from her classically trained voice. Quiet drones and delicate percussion frame the vocal wizardry of Jan Degaetani in Ancient Voices of Children, whose acoustic instrumentation creates sounds that sound astonishingly electronic. Juxtaposing chanting Tibetan monks and an imminent car crash, Tibetan Monks Buckle Up for Safety furnishes some much needed, though morbid, comic relief.

Wednesday, December 2, 1998

Cardew Helped Prerequisites of a radio broadcast biography: a brilliant announcer deftly imparting historical tidbits between the composer's greatest works as well as lively anecdotes from assorted associates, admirers and critics. The English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) deserves such a program and it should come from a wiser dj than myself. Instead, we'll savor the fruits of Cardew's remarkable collaborations with composers and performers in serial, electronic and improvised music.

Wednesday, November 25, 1998

Four Dramas This week's program features two dramas enmeshed in music and two pieces, though lacking dramaturgical ingredients of narrators and actors, that create drama in unusual ways. An experienced suite-seeking ear won't find discrete movements in The Space Myte Suite. Happily, the drama does not reside in the expectation of a misnomer but in a maze of swirling tines and burbling wash of analog synthesizers. Recounting the tale of Noah and the Ark, the Flood is rife with inventive musico-dramatic devices, such as portraying God with two basses singing simultaneously. Rather than flood the Earth with sturm und drang, Stravinsky unleashes irregular tides of overlapping ostinati. Chion's La Tentation de Sainte-Antoine is a melodrama fusing classic musique concrète, actors, and, most interesting to my ears, tape noise and other artifacts of the recording process. Cosmetic is a corpuscular drama: irruptions of sound and silence intensify the messy slices of contorted speech, hums, rattles and other digital ugliness.

Monday, November 16, 1998

Starry Space Sorry, no empty voids here. Festooned with metallic rings and rumbles, Mr. Meridies' Opening opens a program of vast sound spaces filigreed with twinkling detail. Copper Flying entices the ears into a storm of bonks, buzzes and pulses. Despite the liner notes' admonition to listen at the threshold of silence, the hushed glimmers of For Samuel Beckett beckoned me to the volume knob for a closer listen to Feldman's pianissimo sorcery. Points de Fuite and Espace/Escape, the bookends of Dhomont's triptych Cycle de l'errance, offer a ravishing assemblage of slowly rotating amorphous sounds. Truthfully titled, Glissandi sizzles with heavily filtered sine waves bending ever upwards while Anemoessa ensnares a siren-song chorus in a rumbling orchestral black hole of brass, double basses and who knows what else.

Monday, November 9, 1998

Kristallnacht This week's program remembers Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. In Germany on the nights of November 9 and 10 1938, Nazi stormtroopers roamed through Jewish neighborhoods breaking windows, looting Jewish businesses and homes, and burning synagogues. 101 synagogues were destroyed and nearly 7,500 Jewish businesses were wrecked. 26,000 Jews were beaten, arrested and sent to concentration camps. Composed to mark the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Crystal Psalms weaves live musicians performing in 6 European cities and sounds of Jewish life into an unforgettable electro-acoustic tapestry.

Monday, November 2, 1998

Pillage and Plunderphonic Composers have borrowed, quoted, and plundered each other's music for centuries. Analogous to the use of folk materials by composers such as Ives, Bartok and Copland, plunderphonists scavenge and subject recorded sounds to electronic processing and rearrangement. Coincidentally, both Todd Levin and Plunderphonic progenitor John Oswald helped themselves to former pop icon Michael Jackson. Turn weaves an orchestral translation of Jackson's Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' (which pillaged a vocal chant from Manu Dibango's early 70s hit Soul Makossa) into cop-show jazz, Tchaikovsky and others. Oswald's witty Dab parses Jackson's hit single Bad, scrambling the licks, funky grooves and words into a delirious melange. Portland duo Office Products melds found sound, avant-guitar and turntable havoc into a blistering live performance. Mixing lilting rhythms and soothing voices from educational records, the Bran Flakes and Wobbly each offer a gentler side of plunderphony, while Penrose's Manwich mulches everything in sight, even Madonna. The third movement of Berio's now-classic Sinfonia festoons a Mahler scherzo with quotes from Stravinsky and others. Digging deeper into the past, Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite, composed in 1919-20, transforms 18th century fragments of Pergolesi into an urbane neo-classic, well, er, classic.

Monday, October 26, 1998

Water Programming by title can be a delicate if not foolish business. Fortunately, the water metaphor suitably describes the protean textures pervading these pieces. Personal in tone, By the Rivers of Babylon slowly meanders from melancholy to outrage, while the rhythmic whorls of La Mer ebb and surge into sonic tsunamis. Using granular synthesis, Truax achieved the same effect in Riverrun: droplets of sound spray, fuse and flow inexorably forward. I would be negligent if I did not include a water-based musical instrument; Naïades showcases the aquavina, whose resonator, a water-filled bowl, sways and sustains the pitch with each slosh. Vikings of the Sunrise features Stephen Scott and his Bowed Piano Ensemble voyaging into the piano's interior by tapping, thumping, plucking, scraping, strumming and bowing the strings of a grand piano.

Monday, October 19, 1998

More Stockhausen, Please The rarity of repeat performances remains my biggest gripe with concerts and radio broadcasts. A second hearing often clinches the case for difficult music, which is why the latter half of tonight's show repeats last week's program in toto.

Monday, October 12, 1998

Karlheinz Stockhausen This program is my way of wishing Happy 70th Birthday to this modern master. Detailing Stockhausen's innovations in electronic, electro-acoustic and acoustic music would fill a book. Let me suggest two: Maconie's The Works of Stockhausen and Stockhausen on Music.

Monday, October 5, 1998

Spoken and Sung A diverse offering of sacred and profane words spoken, sung, shouted and shrieked. Excerpted from the 3 cd Plague Mass, This is the law of the Plague features Diamanda Galas thunderously declaiming prohibitions decreed by the Old Testament's Book of Leviticus. Simon Callow is equally harrowing as the speaker in Schoenberg's haunting A Survivor from Warsaw. Overlapping words and phrases that blur, pulverize and lay bare the text are a hallmark of choral music. Notably, much of Lux Aeterna and the bisbigliando section in the Requiem Canticles threw the station's broadcast modulator into a tizzy - despite low audio levels. Feretti's Trio is a delightful filip of chirping computer synthesized voices and off-kilter rhythms.

Monday, September 28 1998

Still Lifes in Sound This program presents music found in field recordings of non-human habitats as well as some orchestral imitations and deft appropriations of "natural" sound. The aural verite of DogPoundFoundSound(BadRadioDogMassacre inhabits the extreme frontier of field recording. Microphone rustling, off-mike perspective and the absence of editing [the piece runs over 2 hours] uncomfortably intensify the gallows yelping, baying and whining of dogs consigned to the Manhattan pound. Epitomizing the prestidigitation of classic field recording, Bernie Krause meticulously captured and edited the Amazon Jungle's chirps, hoots and growls into the seamless sonic blanket of Amazon Nights. Still Life #4 and Westerkamp's brooding Beneath the Forest Floor find a middle ground, appropriating and transforming natural sounds while retaining aurally identifiable contexts. Early 20th century composers have their say too, in the carousing polyphony of Central Park in the Dark and the orchestral locomotive of Honegger's Pacific 231. La Mer anyone?

Monday, September 21 1998

Hulking Sonic Glaciers Set Adrift Magnetic tape and more recently, digital recording technology has allowed composers to create music by extensively elongating and twisting sound sources. Each of these abstract soundscapes serve up sonic glaciers that drift, rumble and occasionally whipcrack their way into your ears. Composed in 1962, Xenakis' landmark Bohor I contains the slowed sounds of clinking jewelry and a Laotian mouth organ. With so much sonic material, it is not surprising that Bohor I as well as Detritus of Mating were originally created for supra-stereo performance, requiring 8 and 6 channels respectively. In contrast, Lyon's Red Velvet seethes with sounds shot through the parabolic barrel of some strange sonic firearm. Cathrathon Complekth God, from the excellent Precipitation compilation, gradually blends drones, roaring feedback and running (or simmering?) water.

Monday, September 14 1998

Silence & Symphonic Percussion Along with Stravinsky's Les Noces, the Ballet Mecanique, composed in 1925, is among the first works in Western music where (or more appropriately, when) silence becomes an instrument in itself. The percussive writing in both the Ballet and Martland's Drill for two pianos carves a sharp contrast between sound and silence, between wiry flurries and valedictory chords. Tymperturbably Blue's opening brass stabs set off a slithering call and response between the timpani and muted brass. A momentary, though powerful, silence before the clarinet cadenza unleashes the slow motion stampede of xylophones, bongos, vibraphones and timpani. The original Jazz Party LP had dubbed-in applause; thankfully, in the cd reissue we can hear the twinkling xylophone coda without the canned clapping.

Monday, September 7 1998

Focus on the Flute We'll hear an ensemble of overdubbed flutes in Vermont Counterpoint, the rippling flute echoes of Luening's Moonflight from the essential Pioneers of Electronic Music cd, and several classic works for solo flute: Varese's Denisty 21.5, Debussy's Syrinx and my slight cheat, Ferneyhough's daunting Superscriptio for solo piccolo. Also of note is Seattle composer Bret Battey's propulsive Pater Noster's Tricyclic Companion and Boulez's Memoriale, which is dedicated to the memory of flutist Lawrence Beauregard.

Monday, August 31 1998

Lyrical Complexity These pieces, though assigned by historians under textbook rubrics such as the Second Viennese School (Berg's Three Pieces, op.6), American Originals (Ives, Zappa, Moondog, Graettinger) and Minimalism (Adams), all share a thrilling and dramatic deployment of complexity. To me, complexity in music refers to a satisfying surfeit of concurrent rhythmic, harmonic and melodic polyphony. From the slowly augmented ostinati in Moondog's Theme to the timbral judo of the Movements, each piece in its own way exacerbates and resolves its complex tensions with an eloquent lyricism.

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