Tom Johnson : Combinations
Tom Johnson uses numbers as base material, turning formulas, combinations and other mathematic phenomena into music. And somehow, this music becomes poetry, sometimes like a haiku, sometimes like a sonnet, sometimes descriptive and clear, often enigmatic but always beautiful.
Baobab
"Originally written for orchestra, Phill Niblock’s Disseminate (1998) and Baobab (2011) were arranged by the composer specifically for the Bozzini Quartet, or rather, for ‘multiples’ of the Quartet: twenty different tracks are mixed in each piece — twenty different instruments, the equivalent of five string quartets. The music is essentially a work on the shifting nature of overtone patterns that arise from acoustic instruments. As composer Robert Ashley convincingly argued, these pieces inscrib…
String Quartets
Defining the character of a composer’s music is always hazardous, especially if the composer is restless. But around Stefano Scodanibbio’s music we often return to the concept of wandering, which moreover reflects his life. This is testified by his writings, which tell us how travel, lack of stability, desire were factors to be found written or improvised in his works. An important and restless philosopher introducing the volume that collects those writings (Not enough for me, Quodlibet, 2019) g…
Because a circle is not enough
music for bowed string instruments consists mostly of music composed by Malcolm Goldstein (b. 1936) between 2018 and 2019 while living in Montréal, Québec. The impulse to compose this series came from Goldstein’s experience as a teacher and performer of Béla Bartók’s 44 Duos for Two Violins (1931). Whereas Bartók’s series features a clear progression to the pieces, gradually increasing in technical and musical complexity from beginning to end, music for bowed string instruments has no such seque…
3 String Quartets
Starting with his music of the 1960s and early 1970s, with works such as For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964), the Prose Collection (1968–71), and Changing the System (1974), Christian Wolff (b. 1934) quietly re-invented chamber music. He created music in which the activities of the performers— timing, cueing, assembling and selecting materials—were foregrounded. Although to some extent these activities were always a part of classical music, Wolff opened them up for creative decision-making by the musici…