★Mode
The Number Pieces 5 - Two2
Laurel Karlik Sheehan gave the Canadian premiere of Two2 with Jack Behrens in 1990. Rob Haskins is a respected John Cage expert and scholar. Together they bring an authority and expertise to this performance of Two2. In most of the Number Pieces, all the performers have some freedom through Cage’s use of time brackets, flexible measures that show a range of possible starting and ending times. The time bracket system of notation used in these works allows a certain amount of flexibility in the p…
Number Pieces 4
The first recording of John Cage’s large scale composition for 3 recorder players. The Trio Dolce wrote Cage for permission to perform Solo with Obbligato Accompaniment on three alto recorders, one octave higher than the prescribed range. In a letter from March 1987 Cage replied: “Of course you may use the 3 alto recorders. I am glad that you are playing that piece.” They performed it on July 1988 with Cage in attendance. Cage’s enthusiastic reaction to this performance encouraged Trio Dolce t…
Epigram And Evolution: Complete Piano Works
These piano pieces were written at every turning point in Roger Reynolds’ creative life, marking his evolution. The music is driven by relentless attacks toward catharsis, but also bittersweet chords, and trembling, rolling, wandering or sweeping masses of sound. We feel as though we are being pushed around by forces beyond human imagination. This sense of being carried away by an uninterrupted undercurrent may be the image of the world we live in. The featured pianists are the legendary Yuji Ta…
Tracer - Chamber Works 1952-1999
Surround sound DVD. Earle Brown first encountered the work of Alexander Calder in 1948, whose mobile sculptures Brown saw as a visual embodiment of the variable (impermanent) aesthetic that he was striving to create. This Calder aesthetic stayed with Brown throughout his several stylistic shifts. Whether he was writing twelve-tone serial music (Music for Violin, Cello, and Piano), conceptual graphic scores (Folio and Four Systems), composed material open form scores (String Quartet, New Piece an…
Virtuoso Opera Fantasies, Paraphrases & Transcriptions
This new release marks the first collection of Alvin Curran’s major works for piano solo. It also marks the first release in Mode’s Edition Yvar Mikhashoff, a series documenting the great artistry of the late pianist. Yvar Mikhashoff was a champion of new and neglected music — his unique style revealed new facets and insights to everyscore he played. The full scope of his pianistic brilliance will be showcased in Mode’s comprehensive Edition YvarMikhashoff, including solo composer recitals, fou…
The Art of the Curved Bow, Vol. 1
The Curved Bow, or BACH Bow, gives string-players the unique ability to play up to all four strings simultaneously — an impossibility with today's bow. Some believe that the curved bow was used during Bach's time, in the 20th century it was championed by the likes of Albert Schweitzer. It is a device with incredible potential for new and old repertoire, shedding new musical light on the works in which it is employed. Michael Bach has been playing with the curved bow for many years, continually d…
Yvar Mikhashoff Plays Alvin Curran: Piano Works
This new release marks the first collection of Alvin Curran’s major works for piano solo. It also marks the first release in Mode’s Edition Yvar Mikhashoff, a series documenting the great artistry of the late pianist. Yvar Mikhashoff was a champion of new and neglected music — his unique style revealed new facets and insights to everyscore he played. The full scope of his pianistic brilliance will be showcased in Mode’s comprehensive Edition YvarMikhashoff, including solo composer recitals, fou…
Made In America: The Complete Works Of William Russell
** 2021 Stock ** William Russell was, along with his friends John Cage, Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, one of the seminal figures in modern percussion music. Russell composed his landmark percussion during the 1930s, eventually abandoning composition to work in jazz and settle in New Orleans. He was the first composer in the western tradition to integrate African, Caribbean and Asian instruments along with found objects and the influence of jazz into his work, all the while maintaining a distinc…
Wolpe in Jerusalem
** 2021 Stock. Deluxe packaging in slipcase, including essays by Austin Clarkson and Yuval Shaked, and historical photos. Liner notes in English, German, French and Hebrew ** In 1931, Stefan Wolpe escaped from the growing Nazi threat, eventually arriving in Vienna to study with Anton Webern. When the Austrian authorities threatened to deport him back to Germany, he left and eventually settled in Jerusalem in 1934 where he began to teach composition and direct the choir at the Palestine Conservat…
Strange and Sacred Noise
** 2021 Stock ** John Luther Adams is an Alaskan composer. For Adams, Alaska is not a catalogue of ideas and sounds, instead, Alaska is a provocation. For all of its enormity, Alaska leans inward towards essential qualities and purified forces, and in Adams’ music we find this same sense of space and the same tendency inward towards the purified. His is an intimate and focused music that reverberates in a large place. Strange and Sacred Noise is a monumental work for percussion quartet in 9 move…
The Echoing Green
** 2021 Stock ** Like Morton Feldman, whose music he acknowledges as an influence Walter Zimmermann (b.1949) is fascinated by the relationship between painting and music, and how material of an apparently simple nature played by apparently “normal” instruments is capable of almost infinite subtlety. Frankfurt’s HCD Ensemble are also members of Germany’s infamous Ensemble Modern. They are joined here by the superb violinist Peter Rundel and cellist Michael Bach. Wüstenwanderung [Wandering in the …
Listen How They Talk
** 2021 Stock ** One of Mexico’s leading composers, Hilda Paredes went to London at age 21 where she studied with Peter Maxwell Davies and Richard Rodney Bennett. Parades says that the longer she has been away from Mexico, the more she has felt drawn to it. For her, ‘Mexico’ means not the territory immediately beneath the US border, but the far south of the country – the home of the ancient Mayan cultures. Significantly, most of her titles are not in Spanish, but in Mayan (a language her grandfa…
Music for Strings
** 2021 Stock ** The present recording traces the development of Harrison’s creativity over a half century – from 1948 to his last large-scale composition (1997). The Suite No. 2 for Strings was written while Lou Harrison lived in New York. Having spent his formative years in San Francisco, Harrison had a great deal of trouble adjusting to East Coast big-city life. A nervous breakdown required him to be hospitalized for about nine months. The Suite No. 2 dates from the year after this traumatic …
La Terre et le Feu
** 2021 Stock ** This disc of French composer Joël-François Durand’s music amplifies his ongoing interest in the classical ‘four elements’: air, earth, fire and water. World class performers include the London Sinfonietta, BBC Symphony Orchestra, conductor Pierre-André Valade, and renowned Swedish organist Hans-Ola Ericcsson. The oboe concerto, La terre et le feu features a hallmark of Durand’s work: rising figures that gradually strain upwards. The work consists of an introduction and four prin…
Out of Chaos
** 2021 Stock ** An American who came of age in the late 1980s, Jason Eckardt’s music captures the essences of the genres that led him first to performance (as a guitarist), and then to composition: heavy metal and art rock, jazz, gagaku and p’ansori, the Second Viennese School, American post-serialism, and the new complexity. It evokes the power of inspired, virtuosic improvisation, the incisiveness of classical ensemble playing, and the raw expressivity of ethnic music. The first complete CD o…
Labyrinthe de Minotaur
** 2021 Stock ** French composer Alain Bancquart (b.1934) is one of the leading composers of microtonal music in Europe. Labyrinthe du Minotaur explores the myth of the Minotaur and the labyrinthe. This large scale piece constantly delves into microtonal and harmonic relationships together with a lyrical polyphony. It is based on texts by his wife, author Marie-Claire Bancquart. The unusual instrumental ensemble incorporates (in addition to the above musicians): pianos in quarter- and sixteenth-…
Shadow of an Idea
** 2021 Stock ** The influence of two American composers – John Cage and Morton Feldman – has been decisive on Walter Zimmermann. With Cage, it was his music from the late forties – works like the String Quartet, the Suite for Toy Piano and the Six Melodies – that caught his attention: works underpinned by precise numerical construction, yet with an engaging directness of expression. Feldman has been an inspiration to Zimmermann’s lyrical impetus, and Cage to his constructivist urges. Yet the t…
Another Sunrise
** 2021 Stock ** Peter Garland’s music is uniquely American; a blend of minimalism with influences from South/Central America, Asia and the Native Americans; along with American mavericks John Cage, Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, and Edgar Varèse. Born in 1952, he studied with Harold Budd and James Tenney. The works on this record share a special meditative, and at times ecstatic, spirituality. Garland has a long artistic association with the performers on this disc. Essential Music’s…
Look She Said (Complete Works For Bass)
** 2021 Stock ** “The double-bass – the paradox of its large size and basically quiet sound, and its low registral grounding – has long attracted me. I’ve also been fortunate in knowing outstanding double-bass players.” – Christian Wolff This disc collects all of Wolff’s large body of works for the bass, including a piece for solo electric bass guitar. Two of the works were written specifically for Robert Black, who prepared these pieces with Wolff. The composer attended all of the recordings se…
Dancing With Henry
** 2021 Stock ** Some of the most revered compositions of the twentieth century arose from the collaboration of composers and choreographers. Henry Cowell sought solutions that would treat both art forms with equal respect. Works on this disc-the majority of which are recorded for the first time, many from unpublished manuscripts-were composed for Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman (Dance of Sport), Bonnie Bird, and Martha Graham (Heroic Dance and Suite for Woodwind Quintet). Atlantis was envisione…