★Edition Wandelweiser
The chord catalogue / Within fourths/Within fifths
Samuelel Vriezen (piano). Tom Johnson 'The Chord Catalogue'. All 8178 two-to thirteen-note chords possible within one octave. Samuel Vriezen 'Within Fourths/Within Fifths'. Progressions in one to five voices of all possible combinations of notes with each voice being limited to three steps, a perfect fourth apart from the neighboring voices (Within Fourths) or to four steps, a perfect fifth apart from the neighboring voices (Within Fifths). 'I like to think of The Chord Catalogue as a sor…
Lost in dreams - works for piano
Eva-Maria Houben (piano). 'Traumverloren I' (lost in dreams I) (2010). 'Klaviersonate nr. 10' (sonata for piano no. 10) (2013), 'les cloches du songe' (traumglocken - dream bells) I: in memoriam modest mussorgsky II: in memoriam george enescu III: in memoriam robert schumann IV: in memoriam franz liszt V: in memoriam olivier messiaen
Druids and questions
Electroacoustic music with recorded organ sounds.
An unrhymed chord
an unrhymed chord is a deceptively simple piece. from the score we see that each performer picks a single sound, sustains this sound for one to fifteen minutes in each half of the piece, and that amplitude is inversely proportional to duration. it does not seem like much in the way of instructions for a piece that lasts just over an hour. however, after I started making a realization I quickly realized how dynamic the situation the piece presents actually is. I had never heard a music quite li…
cage.frey.vriezen.feldman.ayres.johnson manion
Pianist and composer Dante Boon often programs his recitals as webs. He likes to put compositions of great diversity in style and technique side by side. However, myriad connections can always be found between pairs of pieces, and these give the whole a subtle coherence. This is also how his first CD is organized, presenting pieces by seven composers spanning almost a century of music. But the most important unifying element of this disc is Dante's own musical personality and approach to the pia…
Hearing Metal 1
Performer: Greg Stuart (tam-tam). 'The 60-inch (Mikrophonie) tam-tam is a large piece of metal, a proto-sculpture. Brancusi might have altered it: rounding and tapering the edges, making an oval instead of a circle, polishing the surface into smooth gold. The tam-tam is also a vast sound landscape-an instrument that makes noise at the slightest provocation. A resonance is created just in the act of walking past the instrument or breathing on it ... that is, if your ear (or a microphone) is close…
Counting Keys
Most composers who use mathematics to construct music do not intend it to be heard. Tom Johnson does. When he performed his piano cycle "Counting Keys" in Cologne in 1986 he began each piece by counting out its structure in numbers so that the audience could follow the logic of the music. A particularly appreciative member of that audience was John Cage. One might wonder what the famous advocate of indeterminacy could find interesting in this exactly determined, highly predictable music, until o…