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Playlist Archive    May 1999 to August 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
January - April 1999
August - December 1998

Wednesday, August 25, 1999

Happy Birthday Stockhausen While Stockhausen turns 71 this week, this radio show celebrates its first anniversary with an uninterrupted broadcast of Inori. Composed in 1973-74, Inori is one of the last orchestral works Stockhausen composed before embarking on the Licht cycle in 1977. Insistent pulsation and dramatic fermatae make Inori one of Stockhausen's most accessible works. Another interesting note about Inori: to move the music in space, Stockhausen specified the orchestra's seating plan - to the meter!

I worried that I could not come up with enough theme programs, but after 50 or so, I have plenty of shows on deck. Here's to 100!

Wednesday, August 18 1999

is it an orchestra? Contemporary composers, continuing the tradition of Strauss, Mahler and other late 19th and early 20th century forebears, keep adding so many instruments to the orchestra and concocting so many different instrumental combinations that the conception of "orchestra" has shifted from a fixed group of musicians and instruments into an array of performers creating new and unusual sounds. Among the first compositions for magnetic tape in the United States, Imaginary Landscape No. 5 requires an "orchestra" of 42 records whose massed impact jolts the listener with sudden stops and unexpected juxtapositions. Also rife with surprises, Penderecki's classic Threnody transforms 52 strings into a screeching coven while Wolfgang Rihm's Etude d'après Séraphin glowers with the sussurations of prerecorded processed instruments (from other Séraphin parts), trombones, contrabasses, harps and percussion. Another certified classic, Webern's Five Pieces op. 10 contain brief powerful masterpieces that perforate an increasingly implied silence with delicate timbres.

Wednesday, August 11 1999

The Quiet Chamber Fear not, the show has not succumbed to monotone mood music, but this week's selections, from the quiet minimalism of bernhard günter to the searing Quartet for the End of Time, exude an arresting - and occasionally discomfiting - intimacy.

Wednesday, August 4 1999

20th Century Opera: Harrison Birtwistle By turns plaintive, vicious, wistful and scabrous, Punch and Judy is an opera of jarring contrasts. Although I don't grasp the substance of the opera - even after several hearings - the thrilling Adding Song, the instrumental toccatas, the high voltage singing and moving apotheosis demand a broadcast. The beginning of Five Distances recalls Stravinsky's Octet, but unlike other composers steeped in Stravinsky, Birtwistle has his own trenchant touch; the conclusion's blorping bassoon is uniquely Birtwistle. The spacious recording should not be taken as studio gimmickry: the score requires that the players sit as far apart as practically possible.

Wednesday, July 28 1999

l'objet sonore Pierre Schaeffer, the instigator of musique concrète, defined the sonorous object as an acoustic "object for human perception and not a mathematical or electroacoustical object for synthesis." Tearing paper (Origami Animae), advertisements (Breaking) and RAI's signature singing bird (L' oiseau RAI) are just a few of the sound objects that have been transformed in remarkable ways. In contrast, Le ressort et la poulie was improvised on "the resounding book" with a set of microphones that were used as pencils points and pens on the book's surface.

Wednesday, July 21 1999

Variations Traditionally, variations showcase a composer's virtuosity with musical material. As aural anchors, variations help listeners follow the composer's line(s) of musical thought and marvel at ingenious melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and timbral invention. In an unusual variation on standard radio practice, three different recordings of Stravinsky's Variations (Aldous Huxley in Memoriam) were interspersed during the broadcast to allow listeners to try Stravinsky's advice and "listen not once but repeatedly." While some musique concrète and acousmatic music is predicated on the incessant variation and processing of a single sound into often unrecognizable musical material, Chion's Variations lays the process bare with adept filtering, ring modulation and exquisitely timed silences between variations.

Wednesday, July 14 1999

Culture Jamming In war, the defenseless should have no compunction about using enemy weapons. As consumers we have no relief from the barrage of radio, television, movies, billboards advertisements and other sensual monopolies exerted by companies large and small. Happily, the power of audio editing and processing allows adventurous composers to sculpt feeble audio detritus such as advertisements or national anthems into music.

Wednesday, July 7 1999

20th Century Piano Unlike the 19th century's expanded forms and rapid-fire passage work, 20th century piano innovations erupted in the realm of rhythm and timbre. Cowell was the first to probe the piano's interior; the folksy Aeolian Harp requires the pianist to strum the strings. Noted for his invention of the prepared piano, John Cage's In a Landscape for acoustic piano pre-echoed New Age music. The open damper pedal, tonally ambiguous arpeggios and amorphous melody unfurl an aural landscape with an infinite horizon. Today's cheap imitations confine such effects within the obvious song form, which misses the masterly discombobulating effect of Cage's piece. The first few seconds of Piano Phase could be dismissed as New Age fodder, but the rippling intervals persist and surprise the listener (this one, anyway) with dextrous contrapuntal ingenuity. Laced with quotes and allusions, Ives' Concord Sonata vigorously slices clusters, hymns and marches into 19th century florid parlour room piano.

Wednesday, June 30 1999

Supersonic Radiophonic Remembered for his fiery recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations and an uncommon interest in Schoenberg, Glenn Gould was also controversial; unlike most classical concert pianists, Gould took a direct hand in aggressively editing his recordings. Gould's interest in tape editing and Baroque polyphony fused in the renowned sound documentary, The Idea of North. Commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The Idea of North weaves voices, stories and the music of Sibelius into a gorgeous polyphonic web. I would like to thank our on-air guest, composer and new music writer Gavin Borchert, who added his insight, as well the CBC who graciously granted the permission for the broadcast.

Wednesday, June 23 1999

artsEdge Poets, dancers, musicians, and performance artists converge at the Seattle Center's annual festival dedicated to experimentation in the arts!

Wednesday, June 16 1999

earsay An emerging Vancouver B.C.-based label, earsay lushly packages challenging electro-acoustic music and maintains a webzine as well as organizes a live performance series and collates a local concert calendar. The music is multifarious too: Westerkamp's Gently Penetrating is an aural expedition through an exotic bazaar in an exotic land. A sprawling sound poem rife with arresting whispers, melismatic laments and Ethel Merman-gone-mad vocals, Mother Too is a tour de force for voice and tape. The layered vocals and metal scraping of Czink's shadeless, peopled may allude to Stockhausen's Mikrophonie I and II, but this piece stakes out its own brooding unforgettable territory. Sere is a pop song for 2015: skipping cds, an aching vocal and even an interesting non-pop formula!

Wednesday, June 9 1999

Arnold Schoenberg: the Hits Still the terror of the blue-rinse set, Schoenberg remains a bugbear for many concert goers. Although preceded by Wagner's Tristan Prelude and Strauss' chromatically saturated tone poems, Schoenberg's pantonal (popularly called "atonal") and serial compositions freed Harmony from its decreed structural function and changed music forever. Did Schoenberg turn music into the Dionysian devouring of (dis)ordered tones or dispatch listeners on a brainy yet bloodless hunt for the tone row? Neither. Although Schoenberg did not claim that his method of composing with twelve tones of the scale was a system to create compositions, Schoenberg's ideas were mythologized as the inevitable outcome of Western music. This unresolved ideological conflict banished music and its allegedly objective qualities - melody, harmony and structure - into subjective cultural sign and symbol making - where it belongs.

Wednesday, June 2 1999

JLIAT Drone does not adequately describe the richness of The Ocean of Infinite Being and 16:05:94 in which slowly attacking and decaying layers fuse into undulating waves. Unlike the self-evident evolving forms heard in Minimalist music, JLIAT's pieces are serenely unpredictable.

Wednesday, May 26 1999

Harry Partch Blowout part 1 An article in Newsweek and the Columbia Records release of The World of Harry Partch marked the apex of Partch's fame in the late 1960s. Criminally out of print, The World... LP is perhaps the best sounding Partch-supervised recording and remains essential for Partch fanatics. In my own so-called career as a composer, The World... LP was a pivotal inspiration for my own musical ambitions. Without that LP, this radio show would not exist!

Despite its length, Revelation in the Courthouse Park is one of Partch's most accessible works. Aurally intelligible lyrics, pointed sonic satire (hilarious falsetto choruses, clunky small town brass bands, repetitive syllabic chants, etc.) and solid story telling taken from Euripides' The Bacchae make Revelation... a delight - and a masterpiece. Prediction: the future will celebrate Partch for inventing his own orchestra and eventually choose Partch's concept of corporeal music over the statuary of The Ring, as the model for 21st century performance.

Wednesday, May 19 1999

20th Century Piano Unmatched polyphony and a vast dynamic range make the piano an orchestra unto itself. Cage and Nancarrow found their own respective orchestras inside the piano. Preparing piano strings with bolts, mutes and other objects, Cage fabricated a miniature percussion orchestra. For his Studies for Player Piano, Nancarrow hand-punched player piano rolls and unleashed an ear-blinding torrent of notes and complex rhythms. A Jazz Age confection, the Capriccio requires a fleet-fingered pianist to sustain the high spirits of this jolly piece. In contrast, Durand's Concerto for Piano seethes with tension and erupts into deliciously spiky textures.

Wednesday, May 12 1999

electromuse2 As instigator and curator of electromuse2, I have cheerfully commandeered the show to preview the upcoming festival of experimental and electronic music in Seattle. Happily, the artists are anything but homogenous: from the jump-cut, beat-based sound collage of the Bran Flakes to the transmogrified bass guitar work of Intonarumori, each of these performances stake out distinctive territory. Only two of these recordings have been commercially released; most are live tracks culled from previous shows or unreleased studio work.

Wednesday, May 5 1999

Roger Reynolds A master at seamlessly integrating acoustic instruments and tape, Reynolds' From Behind the Unreasoning Mask deftly blurs the distinctions between acoustic and electronic sounds. Versions/Stages is a virtuoso extraction and expansion of cello, crashing waves and other recorded source materials. Integrating computer-transformed flute timbres into a chamber ensemble, Transfigured Wind II immerses the listener in a ravishing jungle of sound. Tonight's tribute is headphone music in the best sense: all of these pieces were carefully spatialized across the stereo spectrum.

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