I meant to say months instead of weeks in the last post. I really didn't intend to be gone for that long. Circumstances prevented me from posting anything new here. I haven't even looked at this blog until yesterday. I went through and read some of the comments. I am in the process of reupping expired files and they should be active soon.
My PC crashed during the time I was gone. The PC had a line-in jack and enabled me to digitize LPs and cassettes. Fortunately I do have a laptop which is how I'm writing this post and doing just about everything else. Unfortunately, my laptop does not have a line-in jack, it just has a microphone jack which I believe records poorly and is not suited for recording from analog sources. Since I have no PC for the moment (or a line-in jack) I won't be able to record from any vinyl and cassettes so the posts will be more infrequent until I either acquire a new PC or find another way to record LPs and tapes to the computer. I have some good music on LPs I wanted to share, but they're put on hold (hopefully just for the time being). Meanwhile, here's a new share.
Christian Wolff - Tilbury (Complete)/Snowdrop
Performers: Dimitrios Polisoidis - violin, viola
Hildegard Kleeb - piano
Roland Dahinden - trombone, melodica
Excerpts from the liner notes:
The Tilbury pieces are so named because of pianist John Tilbury whom I I had come to know not long before writing the first four of them. Along with Snowdrop (started in a late Vermont Winter; snowdrops are among the earliest Spring flowers) they were my attempt at systemic ways of writing which, with the early minimalism of Riley, Glass and Reich, then the English variants of Christopher Hobbs, Dave Smith, Michael Nyman, John White and others, as well as many visual artists were in the air.
In Tilbury 1 the basic material consists of single pitches in a narrow range (one octave plus a semitone). In Tilbury 2 the pitches are widely scattered. In Tilbury 3 the pitch material, the planets of the solar system, takes the form of arpeggiated pitches appearing cyclically at cyclically varying speeds, including some very slow ones (hence the long single sounds). Tilbury 4 consists simply of 13 notes which are to be individually sustained for from two to four beats, and seven made-up scales from which one plays 3 to 8 notes. There's no score, only instructions for an unspecified number of players (starting from a minimum of two) for real-time realization, a kind of improvisation.
Snowdrop is a score which writes down such a realization using a somewhat different collection of scales, based again on the planetary system. This score too, though, can be flexibly realized in performance. It's also based on keyboard writing (it was written in response to a request by the musicologist-critic Mario Bortolotto for harpsichord), but again the instrumentation is open and can be multiple and overlayed as in Tilbury 1.
Tilbury 5 was written almost 25 years later at the request of Roland Dahinden, Hildegard Kleeb and Dimitrios Polisoidis, to extend the Tilbury set. The earlier pieces belong to a fairly austere minimalism (itself a reaction to the austerities of total serialism). This one comes after many years - starting, just after these earlier pieces, in parts of Burdocks - of trying to loosen up the music and work out of more familiar, standard, Western, 19th and 20th century images, not replicating them of course but variously refracting them. (Christian Wolff)
Tracklisting:
1. Tilbury 1 {10:06}
2. Tilbury 2 {4:14}
3. Tilbury 3 {5:33}
4. Tilbury 4 {7:40}
5. Snowdrop {14:47}
6. Tilbury 5 {16:14}
(1) or (1) [maybe reposted soon]
