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Playlist Archive    January 1999 to April 1999

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
January - April 2000
September - December 1999
May - August 1999
August - December 1998

Wednesday, April 28 1999

From Data Unlike the instrumentally-scripted sagas of Strauss' tone poems or other program music, the 20th century saw composers translating non-musical information directly into the style, sound and structure of music. Stiller's A Periodic Table of the Elements describes the elements in reverse numerical order from joliotium to hydrogen. For each element, the composer found a musical parallel abundance (duration), chemical affinities (orchestration), radioactivity (percussion), valences (note values), and so forth. Earth's Magnetic Field uses data provided by NASA; the result sounds like a pipe organ shimmering in the sunshine. The Mutant Data Orchestra subverts stored information by miswiring and mutating data from digital answering machines and other devices to create an incessant orchestral roar of noise.

Wednesday, April 21 1999

By Request Listener requests received by letter, phone calls and email. Along with more Feldman and Stockhausen, I was happy to honor requests to repeat Kits Beach Soundwalk, and for some of my music, too. Keep those cards and letters (and emails) coming!

Wednesday, April 14 1999

Sound & Silence SsssshhhHH!

Wednesday, April 7 1999

Philip Glass Philip Glass burst on the scene in the late 1960s as a radical alternative to the experimental disciples of John Cage and the Babbitt-entranced academic serialists. Like composers in earlier times such as Chopin, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and Bartok, Glass became his own best missionary, presenting his music on countless tours. Excepting the spaciously scored Violin Concerto from 1987, the music on tonight's program dates from the heady 1970s. Each of these pieces ensnare the listener in whirling maze of sound. In Music with Changing Parts, listen for the ringing tones that aurally mimic the persistence of vision effect.

Wednesday, March 31, 1999

Neo- Our century is rife with concurrent trends, hence the prevalence of prefixed styles such as Neo-Medaeval, Neo Baroque, Neo-Classicism, Neo-Romanticism and Neo-Modernism. The Eternal and Song of the Cherubim could be pegged as Neo-Liturgical, staking out the same territory associated with Gorecki and Part. Setting songs from the gloomy late 1970s new wave band Joy Division, The Eternal is a continuous 52 minute work with portentous voices, cavernous reverberation, and a crushing feeling of gloom. Laced with a pseudo-continuo, the Schnittke, to quote the composer, seeks to "recreate the age-old form-concept of the changing of the seasons." Subtitled "Romantic", Hanson's Symphony No. 2 lives up to the name with unabashedly impassioned declamation, dramatic eruptions and sweeping melodies so characteristic of Neo-Romantic music. More "Neo-"s await!

Wednesday, March 24, 1999

Narratives Composers have always written for the human voice, but alas, most trained singers sacrifice words on the altar of the so-called bel canto style, whose entrails, if examined, reveal excessive vibrato, swerving glissandi and mangled words. Like any sonic phenomenon, obfuscated language can have musical value: for Oedipus Rex, Stravinsky deliberately chose the grandeur of Latin for the singers and assigned a narrator to recount the action in the vernacular. For me, the gulf of linguistic comprehension ennobles the tragedy. Partch also used contrasting voices to dramatic effect in U.S. Highball, which recounts the perils and cross-country perambulations of hobo Slim. A baritone portrays the tyro hobo while an intoning voice depicts characters and conditions encountered on the trip. Creating the discomfiting feeling of suggested speech, General Speech requires the solo trombonist to articulate General MacArthur's West Point address through the instrument. Possible Lullabies has no narrator and but should serve as a beacon to composers and singers who want words sung clearly and musically.

Wednesday, March 17, 1999

Some String Music Contemporary composers and performers have unearthed an orchestra of colors, textures and spectacular effects from the classic string instruments - the violin, viola, cello and double bass. Symphonique No. 3 takes a 19th century romantic violin melody and weaves canon after canon into a mind-numbing polyphonic web. The Stäbler and the Xenakis pieces require a virtuoso double bassist who must make the instrument moan, spew dive bombing glissandi and morph into a percussion section in a trice. Schnittke's Second Quartet uses now-traditional effects such as glissandi harmonics to lyrical effect. The quartets from the New York School - Feldman, Wolff and Brown - diverge so much in style and scope from one another that a casual listener might conclude that the chief characteristic of this school is multifarious innovation!

Wednesday, March 10, 1999

Electro-acoustic A survey of electro-acoustic music's powerful palette from the sizzling textures of Resuscitation and Cruel Summer to the aural micromovement in Mists and Night Camera.

Wednesday, March 3, 1999

Sounds Orchestral In America's symphony halls, the orchestra consists of the standard string, wind, brass and percussion instruments. Aside from soloists, augmented forces or the occasional composer-specified oddball percussion such as a hammer or anvil, the standard symphony orchestra rarely uses additional instruments. Among today's composers, however, an orchestra can also entail instruments such as samplers, synths, and almost anything you can imagine. Unfortunately, such protean groupings of instruments are severely constrained by budgets and conservative music directors. Thomas Adès' Living Toys presents one solution by finding new juxtapositions for classic 20th century sonorities such as jazzy wah-wah brass, un-Iberian castanets and unexpected dissonances. Chutzpah can sometimes carry the day: hearty screams, trenchant rhythms and the Young Composers Collective's frenetic ensemble playing make Children Play in the House of the Ox a thrill. Fire Fragile Flight takes a bold and probably inexpensive tack; slide whistles, sul ponticello bowing, a thundersheet and inventive scoring transform the orchestra into a mysterious mass of swarming insects. Messiaen's magnificent Turangalîla calls for extra wind and brass as well as an unusual solo instrument, the ondes Martenot, which probably makes it performance proof - except in Europe.

Wednesday, February 24, 1999

Stockhausen Now Several listeners who enjoyed last October's two week Stockhausen celebration requested some Stockhausen from the 90s. Your wish is my command. I am pleased to present the massive Electronic Music and Sound Scenes from Friday, an installment of Licht, a cycle consisting of an opera composed for each day of the week. At almost 150 minutes, the piece becomes a world unto itself: elongated synthesizer tones, subterranean chirps and chittering high frequencies periodically surrender to the sound scenes, which crackle and erupt from the speakers. The sound scenes hearken back to Stockhausen's vocal writing of the late 1950s and 1960s; vocal unisons quickly diverge and congeal into complex clusters. Keep an ear open for more Stockhausen pieces in the coming months!

Wednesday, February 17, 1999

Four Symphonies Tonight's program inaugurates a series of broadcasts featuring outstanding compositions by Northwest composers. Scored for orchestra and percussion quartet, Asplund's 4th Symphony weaves a sound world that to my ears sews several threads of 20th century music together. From the hothouse late-German Romanticism heard in Korngold's Symphony in F-Sharp to the spiky and meticulously scored Sixth Symphony of Roger Sessions, the Asplund by turns grooves, lumbers and looms.

Wednesday, February 10, 1999

Unusual Instruments Aside from electronic-based devices, which traditional instruments have undergone such immense expansion and diffusion? Developments such as minor improvements in the piano, the period-instrument revival and the transposition of modern instruments to higher or lower ranges (e.g., the octobass flute, pocket trumpet etc.) have registered little impact in 20th century music. My money is on the "do it yourselfers" who have designed and built tonight's aural feast of unusual and modified instruments. Perhaps the best known is instrument inventor and tuning pioneer Harry Partch, who built his own orchestra to perform his music. His monumental accomplishment merits its own program which will air soon. My words cannot do justice to the astonishing palette of sounds created by these aural adventurers, so if you missed the program, seek them out!

Wednesday, February 3, 1999

Pierrot Lunaire Excepting the exultant Desertscapes and La Barbara's colorful Shamansong, this week's program betrays my abiding desire to feature a 20th century opera on the program. But how to encapsulate the libretto? A short one act opera, Il Prigoniero is an allegory about the deception of freedom. Assisted by a benevolent jailer, the prisoner escapes to freedom only to find that his benefactor has laid a trap. Captured, the prisoner realizes that his freedom was a cruel deception and finds freedom (?) in death. Traverser la Foret forgoes drama for poetic declamation. Typically, poetic declamation can devolve into gilded ranting, but Pousseur's use of spoken polyphony, unison lines that verge on bisbigliando as well as other vocal and instrumental embellishments make the cantata compelling. Of course, Pierrot Lunaire is no opera but eerily declamatory, dramatic and indispensable.

Wednesday, January 27, 1999

More Electronic Voices More electro-acoustic music that sets, splices and splatters the spoken, sung and written word. Stockhausen's classic Gesang der Jünglinge sounds like an interstellar radio transmission bounced back to Earth, but Requiem has beamed in from another planet altogether. Redundant I and Omaggio each set texts. The latter, an homage to James Joyce, sprays phoneme clusters while Redundant lives up to its name, slowly and obsessively filtering a short poem. Resurrecting a snippet of Elvis movie dialogue, Return of the King warps Presley's words into melismatic sighs and yells. Also of note are the cybercroonings of Lawrence Lui, whose arch film-noir delivery portends arias in unwritten operas-to-be as well as suggests the cocktail confessional of lounge music.

Wednesday, January 20, 1999

Metal Rhythm Consigned during the 19th century to the auxiliary role of time-keeping, sound effects and conveying dramatic urgency, percussionists now enjoy the luxury of a literature provided by Cowell, Varèse, Cage and many other composers. Latter-day innovators including solo drumset virtuoso Pete Zeldman and metal object manipulator Z'ev offer their unique explorations for percussionists to consider as well as inspiring unorthodox live performances.

Wednesday, January 13, 1999

Musique Concrète: Some Pioneers and Progeny Formerly considered irreconcilable approaches to making non-acoustic music, Musique Concrète and Electronic Music converged in the late 1950s. The current terms, Electro-Acoustic or Electronic Music, refer to music that utilizes both electronic and/or acoustic means of generating and processing sound. My deliberately loose definition encompasses almost all recordings from Pop to Classical, most of which freely appropriate techniques devised by the pioneers of Electro-Acoustic Music. Unlike Pop, Electro-Acoustic Music rarely uses lyrics (and when it does, it tends to follow the Modernist models of Webern and Schoenberg), infrequently couples periodic rhythms with percussion and often challenges the ear with kaleidoscopic shifts in texture and tempi. Electronica denotes the ostinati-enchained dance music found in clubs, at raves, etc. Some of the more ambitious examples of Electronica will be presented in a future broadcast.

Wednesday, January 6, 1999

20th Century Piano From Beethoven to Boulez and beyond, piano pieces mark milestones in musical styles and herald new developments in Western music. The Six Little Piano Pieces from 1911 trace Schoenberg's continued drift from tonality into aphoristic quiet spaces. Bacchanale was John Cage's first prepared piano composition. Inspired by Henry Cowell's foray into the piano's interior, Cage "prepared" the strings of the piano with assorted muting and resonating objects, fabricating a percussion orchestra. Stravinsky refashioned the orchestra in his neglected masterpiece, the Movements for Piano and Orchestra, whose glancing and flickering melodies contrast starkly with the lumbering rhythms and stormy clusters of the Bartok Sonata. For his pieces Piano 1 through 3, Steve MacLean recorded his improvised prepared piano performances and deftly edited the results into witty, winning compositions. Duckworth's Time Curve Preludes, a cycle of 24 piano miniatures, has been categorized as post-minimalist, but I think of it as enlightened rural folk piano without the pseudo-Satie pulsating ambiance peddled (sic) by drooling New Age pianists. 20th century piano literature is broad and deep: subsequent installments in this series will continue to feature shorter pieces in the first hour with a longer work concluding the program.

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