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Playlist Archive    January - April 2000

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

Wednesday, April 26, 2000

Indeterminacy Accompanied by David Tudor, John Cage tells 90 stories in 90 minutes. Working beyond earshot of Cage, Tudor accompanied Cage with piano and prerecorded tapes to create a delightful and at times whimsical piece. A classic!

Wednesday, April 19, 2000

Repetition is a form of change While scanning playlists of various new music shows on the radio, I was struck at the lack of repetition and recalled Eno's famed apothegm, "Repetition is a form of change." Henceforth, we shall repeat more, and talk less.

Wednesday, April 12, 2000

20th Century Piano The polyphonic rhythms and tempi of Conlon Nancarrow's ear-blinding player pianos as well as Northwest composers Roger Briggs and Keith Eisenbrey, whose Slow Blues probes little-explored strata of the piano's resonating body.

Wednesday, April 5, 2000

Beyond Jazz Tonight's program presents musicians chiefly rooted in improvisation who often verge "beyond jazz" into other musics. Sun Ra and Bob Graettinger, though rooted in swing, forged new sonorities and like AMM, sculpted those sonorities into new and unusual forms.

Wednesday, March 29, 2000

Electroacoustic Round Up I am astounded and grateful that so many composers continue to create electroacoustic music despite the dearth of venues for public performance. Most composers create acoustic music for a forthcoming, or at least fantasized, live performance, but aside from the occasional "acousmonium" dedicated to live acousmatic diffusion, most concert halls remain poorly prepared for tape music. Fortunately, it seems more new music mavens are interested in electroacoustic music!

Wednesday, March 15, 2000

Edgard Varèse: the Hits Dubbed by Henry Miller "the stratospheric Colossus of Sound," Varèse was a seminal 20th century composer. With Ionisation (1930-31) he wrote the first major work for percussion ensemble, pioneered the integration of electronic sounds with acoustic instruments in Déserts (1950-54), created the Poème Électronique (1957-58), one of the first classics of electro-acoustic music, and was the first modern composer to champion his fellow composers. Varèse's music is remarkable for its elastic sense of tempo, steadily accumulating melodic cells, and, in the orchestral works, massive sound strata. And heck, they're all hits!

Wednesday, March 8, 2000

Speech/Speech-Music From Lockwood's eloquent Delta Run to the thunderous setting of King Oedipus by Harry Partch, the pieces on tonight's program use the human voice from notated speech music to atomized words.

Wednesday, March 1, 2000

For Solo... Solo performance has been likened to a higwire act, but that cliché depends on the individual performer. Few other composers demand so much of their performers; last year, I had the chance to peruse Ferneyhough's score to the Intermedio and was suitably terrified. A pioneer of clarinet multiphonics, William O. Smith, finds an orchestra in his Fancies, a series of studies probing clarinet timbres. language ,as a music ranges from witty wordplay and natty neologisms to an effusive verbal chloroform in which Boretz' hypnotic voice becomes music.

Wednesday, February 23, 2000

Sounds Orchestral A tale, perhaps apocryphal, tells that at the premiere of Copland's unexpectedly searing and discordant Connotations, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy turned to the composer and exclaimed "Oh, Mr. Copland!" Early performances of Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis elicited bafflement too from ignorant musicians and hostile critics. In contrast, Thomas Adès has enjoyed the rarity of consistent critical acclaim, which usually marks a Glazunov or other safe composer. Yet Asyla seethes with inventive textures from the quasi-gamelan in the opening bars to the sly anthemic allusions to techno in the third movement. Digitally remixed and re-rendered from his chamber works, Applebaum's ReMixes have an orchestral flair rarely heard in electroacoustic music these days.

Wednesday, February 16, 2000

Drone Quietly The pieces on tonight's program use a single or small number of textures as a springboard. Burt's White Witch of the Moon deploys several scales which congeal into looming almost moaning harmonic clouds. Despite their frenetic pace, Budd's throbbing modal solos against a Buchla generated drone seem moody and expansive. JLIAT's A long drone-like piece of music... forced my ears to refocus and chase mirages of recurring patterns just like a good Beethoven symphony.

Wednesday, February 9, 2000

20th Century Piano Composed 40 years apart, Piano Rag Music (1919) and Movements (1959) share the trenchant motives and angular motion which remain unique to Stravinsky. Like Movements, Windows to Three and the Concerto Conciso are dissonant yet texturally and transparently fleet-footed, which seems to be the preferred path to transcending tonality from Webern onwards. One branch of Minimalism has been described as "process music" where musical structures unfold in an aurally obvious manner. Simultaneously enervating and mesmerizing, The Chord Catalog is a literal and linear rendering of all 8178 chords possible in the octave of a piano. I found myself veering wildly between Apollonian listening (should I focus on the intervals and the deliberately awkward Chop Sticks rhythms?) and Dionysian absorption (or should I soak it all in?). Music should elicit multiple responses of course, but I could not help recalling that my quandary harkened back to the initial confused response to serial music: is discerning the row and its transpositions essential to understanding the music? My advice is "Hear all you can and respond as you wish."

Wednesday, February 2, 2000

Electro-Acoustic Music A saucy admixture of recent and classic electro-acoustic music that has crossed my path.

Wednesday, January 26, 2000

Scot Jenerik Tonight's program features Scot Jenerik, a San Franciso-based pyromusician and bleeding-edge performer. His elegantly caterwauling 3000 Words offer a raw, aggressive and arresting portrait of his wife and two close comrades.

Wednesday, January 19, 2000

Free Improvisation Musicians have always improvised, but rarely in a communal effort to probe the nature of music and its limits. Free improv traces its modern roots to Lennie Tristano's famed free jazz session for Capitol Records in the late 1940s. Capitol's recording engineer was so disturbed by the absence of chord patterns and periodic rhythms that he erased some of the tapes. Free improv blossomed in the 1960s when musicians extended the reach of of improvisation and transcended foolish questions such as "Does it swing?" and "Is it Jazz?" by embracing the influence of non-jazz musics.

Wednesday, January 12, 2000

20th Century Choral Music From the cataclysmic diminished break in the Bulgarian Voices' Dyulmano, Dyulbero to the serpentine dissonances of Pärt's Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonien, choral music has kept pace with 20th century innovations, including electro-acoustic timbres in Miller's Dies Santicficatus. In Canticum Canticorum Salomonis, Penderecki deliriously whores the effects of the post war avant garde: bowed cymbals, descending clouds of string pizzicati, Stockhausenesque choral outbursts, overwrought klangenfarben percussion and vocal moaning. The Psalms of Repentance stakes out darker territory but even over the course of an hour, Schnittke's stygian gloom always entrances.

Wednesday, January 5, 2000

proto-Electronic Music Under the direction of Herbert Eimert, WDR Cologne became the seminal studio for the creation and diffusion of electronic music in the early 1950s. Long-forgotten pioneers such as Karel Goeyvaerts and more well known composers such as Stockhausen and Koenig painstakingly constructed pieces with sine wave generators, reverberation and magnetic tape. Built by Russian inventor Evegeny Murzin, the ANS Synthesizer (named after harmonic pioneer Alexander Scriabin, who we remember today chiefly for his piano music, the voluptuous Poem of Ecstasy and his Mystic Chord of stacked fourths) used glass discs, whose layers of painted dye created sounds photo-electrically.

Since 1977, Stockhausen has been composing Light, a magnum opus comprised of seven operas, each named for a day of the week. Slated as the third scene in Wednesday, the Helicopter String Quartet is performed by the Arditti Quartet, new music stalwarts who specialize in performing contemporary string quartets. Like Trans, Stockhausen conceived the piece in a dream: each musician, aloft in a helicopter, plays in tandem with the chopping helicopter blades while in the concert hall below, the audience listens through loudspeakers and watches the airborne performers on video screens. Despite many logistical obstacles, the Ardittis premiered the Helicopter String Quartet at the Holland Festival in 1995 - with helicopters! This recording includes an additional 3 minutes of music composed after the premiere.

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