Music of Meyer Kupferman

Meyer Kupferman - Music of Meyer Kupferman

Liner notes by Meyer Kupferman

The Celestial City
Gilbert Kalish - pianist, performing live and on pre-recorded tapes

When I composed THE CELESTIAL CITY in 1974 for my dear friend, Gilbert Kalish, I conceived of the work as a concerto for piano and orchestra even though the piece has no orchestra. The tape accompaniment is scored for two tracks of pre-recorded piano, which provide a background that is as imposing and as colorful as an orchestra and that is more flexible. The combined sound of these tightly coordinated pianos creates a contemporary 'SUPERPIANO!' which can dazzle us with its endless displays of astonishing keyboard sonorities and which apparently requires an indefatigable 'six-handed' virtuoso (like Kalish) to operate.

The Garden of My Father's House
Max Pollikoff - violinist; Meyer Kupferman - clarinetist

The piece is a musical ritual, based on a C-sharp drone, or pedal note, that is heard without interruption, across several ranges, throughout the piece. The violin's drone tremolos, often combined with perfect fifths and quarter-tone tunings, imply the key of C-sharp minor. The violin part is always rubato - lyrical, expressive and frequently very passionate. But, most importantly, the violin is always tonal.
The clarinet, on the other hand, is atonal, its pitches drawn from the twelve-tone row that i used to write my Cycles of Infinities. The style of the clarinet is contemporary, using wide-range intervals, biting accents and unusual instrumental effects, including fluttertonguing and quarter-tone trills.
In combining the 'contrasting' roles of the two instruments, I sought to create a musical ritual-game that would draw energy and bits of information from the polarized instruments. The language of the piece calls the listener's attention to the cogent features of both instrumental personalities in a manner that is somewhat similar to the way in which Yiddish combines German and Hebrew. The drone becomes more and more magnetic and begins to join the parts together until they become one in the final C-sharp unison.

Angel Footprints
Max Pollikoff - violinist, performing live and on pre-recorded tapes

ANGEL FOOTPRINTS, commissioned by Max Pollikoff, was completed in 1973. The use of a tape part, consisting of two tracks of pre-recorded violin, continues my experiments with 'mirror' tape procedures begun more than a decade earlier....Much of the focus of the work is on melody, and, in creating the tape parts, I chose to stress similarities, rather than contrasts, among the different lines; for example, strett-like canons are frequently draped around the live violin line.

Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. The Celestial City {24:52}

Side 2

1. The Garden of My Father's House {8:01}

2. Angel Footprints {18:11}

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Music for Flute & Tape

various artists compilation - Music for Flute & Tape

Karl Korte - Rembrances (1971)

for flute & synthesized processed sound

electronic tape realized at the Studio for Electronic Music, State University of New York at Binghamton

Mario Davidovsky - Synchronisms No. 1 (1962)

for flute & recorded electronic sounds

tape realized at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center

Meyer Kupferman - Superflute (1971)

for flute & tape

Samuel Baron - flute on all pieces


Tracklisting:

Side One

1. Karl Korte - Remembrances {18:54}

Side Two

1. Mario Davidovsky - Synchronisms No. 1 {3:35}

2. Meyer Kupferman - Superflute {12:51}

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Glocken der Heimat: German Church Bells

Glocken der Heimat: German Church Bells

This LP is a presentation of the recorded sounds of bells from churches within Germany. The narration is in German as are the liner notes.
I would like to thank H.C. Earwicker for translating the liner notes. The liner notes provide a small amount of background on each church represented on this album as well as general background information about church bells. The liner notes in German and H.C.'s translation are included in the file. Apparently, this album was put out by German-Americans as my copy was printed in the U.S.A. There's not any other information about this record to be found on the internet.

Here's the background information from H.C.'s translation of the liner notes:

Bells of Home - the bells of our cathedrals and churches in East-, West- and Middle-Germany sounding on this long-playing record direct the thoughts to past times, recollections from the history of these venerable houses of God, but also recollections of one's own experiences, the stations of our lives, to whom the sound of the Bells of Home is closely tied - baptism and benediction, wedding and death, the bell at clerical feasts or in times of trouble as a storm- or firebell.
In older times everybody in town knew if sorrow or joy were the cause when the bells started to ring. But since the bells are set into motion by electric energy and not by human hands, the merry "belern" and "kleppen" (as it was called in older German dialects) has come to an end. The force of the clanging bells can still capture us today, but it has lost a lot of its almost magic powers.
Originally, the casting of bells was practiced by monks in monasteries, but as early as in the 8th Century there were wandering casters. They were going from town to town, producing their work under close observation by the curious and watchful township. By this means, the perilous and costly transportation of the bells could be avoided.
Many legends were woven around the casting of certain bells. The most known is the story of the meddlesome apprentice who casts a bell of his own and is beaten to death by his angered master. Legend also tells of buried and sunken bells. Thus their ringing is said to come out of the earth, out of mountains, out of dark woods and from the depths of the waters. They were buried or sunken for some reason - perhaps because they were not consecrated and therefore flew away at their first ringing, or they got taken by the devil, or because they didn't want to be stolen by enemies and bandits.
Many of these legends are still alive today. Yet many old bells of whose creation and odysseys they tell are gone for a long time. They were molten down in times of war, shattered or carried off.



Listing of churches in order of presentation on each side:


Side A
St.-Petri-Cathedral in Bremen
Bamberg Cathedral
Maria-Magdelena Church of Breslau
Sankt-Marien Church in Luebeck
Cathedral of Trier
Jakobi Church of Stettin
Freiburg Minster
Cologne Cathedral
Cathedral of Limburg by the Lahn
Kaiserdom (Imperial cathedral) of Speyer
Cathedral of Worms
Cathedral of Erfurt
Minster of Ulm
Cathedral of Magdeburg


Side B
Minster of Aachen
Cathedral of Regensburg
Thomas-Church of Leipzig
Cathedral of Wuerzburg
The Mainz Cathedral
Sankt Peter of Munich
Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin
Sebaldus Church of Nuremberg
Benedictine Abbey Ettal
Cathedral of Koenigsberg
Muenchner Frauenkirche (Munich)

Tracklisting:

Side A

1. side A {18:58}

Side B

1. side B {16:10}

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New Directions in Music 1

Pierre Boulez/Karlheinz Stockhausen - New Directions in Music 1

I didn't mean to go over two weeks without posting anything. Hopefully, I'll be able to resume regular posting. Anyway, I dug out this LP by two familar groundbreaking composers. Enjoy.


Excerpts from the liner notes written by Robert Kraft who conducted the performances on this LP:

Our perfromers were less than wildly enthusiastic about the music at first sight, and even at fifteenth sight they were inclined to invent "lazy dogmas of impossibility" (an early Alpinist quoted in Sir Gavin de Beer's The First Ascent of Mont Blanc). However, the performers now feel that these two pieces are perfectly imagined for their instruments. In fact, the instruments have been used so well and to such effect as to cause every player to regret not having more to play.

Pierre Boulez - Le Marteau sans maitre for alto voice and six instruments

Performers:

Margery MacKay - alto voice
Arthur Gleghorn - flutist
Milton Thomas - violist
William Kraft - vibraphonist
Dorothy Remsen - xylorimbist
Theodore Norman - guitarist
Walt Goodwin - percussionist (playing bongos, maracas, tambourines, claves, bells, tam-tam, triangle, gong, cymbals, small cymbals)


Though Le Marteau is significant primarily for its own newness, the fact that it brings together two or three diverse strands seems to me almost as important. It is a connecting and tradition-forming work.
...

These are the major composer influences - Webern mostly, Schoenberg for Pierrot Lunaire, Stravinsky in one type of rhythm. Of some part of their music Boulez has made new and significant use. There are other influences and ingredients too, for example, Oriental and Latin American percussion instruments (gongs, maracas, bongos), jazz, the music of Messiaen and Varese.

Le Marteau represents a consolidation and simplification in Boulez's own development, too. It is his first work to have attained a wide success. (Why? Because it is less purely "abstract" than his piano pieces? Because it has a dramatic form and an exotic instrumentation? Because it is comparatively simple to hear and and to follow?)

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Zeitmasse for five woodwinds


Performers:

Arthur Gleghorn - flutist
Donald Muggeridge - oboist
Donald Leake - English-horn player
Donald Christlieb - bassoonist
William Ulyate - clarinetist


Electronic music - Stockhausen's own - is the most obvious influence on the Zeitmasse. In fact, the two kinds of composition ought to be considered side by side. The truth is, however, that I am incompetent to do so and will therefore have to stop at recommending the Zeitmasse to the listener as a piece of musical patterns and designs like any other, with tensions, speeds, progression, successive logic of ideas, form, like any other.

Tracklisting:

Side 1

1. Pierre Boulez - Le Marteau sans maitre: Avant "L'Artisanat furieux" {1:28}

2. Pierre Boulez - Le Marteau sans maitre: Commentaire I de "Bourreaux de solitude" {3:38}

3. Pierre Boulez - Le Marteau sans maitre: "L'Artisanat furieux" {2:05}

4. Pierre Boulez - Le Marteau sans maitre: Commentaire II de "Bourreaux de solitude" {3:05}

5. Pierre Boulez - Le Marteau sans maitre: "Bel edifice et les pressentiments" version premiere {2:48}

6. Pierre Boulez - Le Marteau sans maitre: "Bourreaux de solitude" {4:16}

7. Pierre Boulez - Le Marteau sans maitre: Apres "L'Artisanat furieux" {0:49}

8. Pierre Boulez - Le Marteau sans maitre: Commentaire III de "bourreaux de solitude" {4:31}

9. Pierre Boulez - Le Marteau sans maitre: "Bel edifice et les pressentiments" double {6:28}

Side 2

1. Karlheinz Stockhausen - Zeitmasse {13:07}

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The Twilight Zone, Volume 1 (of 5)

This LP series was originally released by Varese Sarabande in the US, starting with Volume One in 1983. It was also published in Europe, with identical contents and covers, by Milan.
It features a wide-ranged selection of complete original scores from Rod Serling's groundbreaking Mystery and Science Fiction TV series, produced in the late 50s and early 60s. Besides works from lesser known composers like Nathan Van Cleave and Leonard Rosenman, we get to hear music from such heavyweight maestros as Jerry Goldsmith, who was just getting his career started, and Swiss genius Bernard Herrmann, who had already developed a very strong and unique personal style, writing music for Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, among many others.

Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling

Bound by tight deadlines and even tighter financial limitations, the Twilight Zone composers were nonetheless highly motivated to create characteristic and effective scores with a striking atmosphere of otherwordly eeriness. Utilizing small ensembles of musicians instead of big orchestras, the composers often experimented with unusual instrumentation and electroacoustic/electronic instruments like the Novachord, electronic organs and the Theremin.

Composer Jerry Goldsmith

The first Volume features four scores ranging from hard driving, contrasted suspense and action music to strange arrangements of well-known musical idioms. Be it dramatic, sentimental, romantic - it's all in there. Even the cheap waltz from the 20s.
Remarkable are the Goldsmith (as there is no dialogue in this episode, except for the end, the music is of rare intensity) and the Van Cleave, with its generous use of the Novachord and Theremin.
Liner notes included as image files. Sound quality is so-so, but listenable. It's a rather old transfer from the original records.

1 Marius Constant: Main Title Theme
2 Jerry Goldsmith: The Invaders (1961)
3 Nathan Van Cleave: Perchance To Dream (1959)
4 Bernard Herrmann: Walking Distance (1959)
5 Franz Waxman: The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine (1959)
6 Marius Constant End Title Theme

[may or may not be reposted]

Another Kondo + a new HCE mix

This, from CoC visitor Tom7865 in the comments section of my post with chamber music from Jo Kondo:

posted this a while ago...

Jo Kondo self titled album (3 works) - vinyl LP rip (cp2 records-cp2/11).
... never released as CD and not available except in the darkest reaches of a few major university libraries......

1. "standing" performed by sound space "ark"
2. "sight rhythmics" performed by aki takahashi, piano
3. "under the umbrella" performed by nexus

soundspace "ark" founded in 1972 by aki takahashi (piano), hiroshi koizumi (flute), and yasunori yamaguchi (percussion) with additional members ayako shinozaki (harp) and yoshiaki suzuki (clarinet) added in 1976.

nexus performers were bob becker, bill cahn, robin engelman, russ hartenberger and john wyre. aki takahashi- piano

http://rapidshare.com/files/14188871/jo_kondo.rar

enjoy (tom7865)

Thanks, Tom7865!

***

Over on Hush! Caution! Echoland! there's a new mix out - "Pastorale" - give it a try, if you like what you're getting from "A Closet of Cursiosities".

Not so much of my own music in there - just two outtake tracks of electronics and bamboo percussion in the middle section and, closing the mix, "Pastorale 1", shimmering guitars all over.

You'll hear Nobukazu Takemura, as well as Toru Takemitsu, along with the light-generated music by Jacques Dudon (thanks to Continuo), two tracks by Burial, and a lovely tune from the Dutch 70s prog band Kayak. A piece of neo-primitive ritual music by an early Psychic TV leads into Synaulia's semi-authentic recreation of ancient Roman music. And much more...

China: Folk Instrumental Traditions

various artists compilation - China: Folk Instrumental Traditions

From the liner notes:

Both in imperial times and under the People's Republic of China, the popular culture of China has persistently been neglected in favour of official, elite culture. The confucian values of the imperial age have been replaced in modern times by the domination of a new elite, stressing urban, professional, secular, and Party-sponsored music-making: meanwhile the music still performed by folk musicians throughout the Chinese countryside is often ignored. The search for an unchanged ancient music may still be tempting in a country with such a venerable history: but if there are no living fossils, we also need to rid ourselves of the idea that tradition has been thoroughly destroyed in modern times.

Instrumental music is only one aspect of Chinese music: folk-song, opera, and ballad-telling are also rich living treasures. This series concentrates on ensemble music, whose contexts are often ceremonial or religious. (Recordings of the solo instrumental traditions are already quite accessible, such as the plucked zithers qin and zheng, and the plucked lute pipa.)




Although the living folk music of China remained largely unknown outside China until fieldwork began to be possible for foreigners in the mid-1980s, the Chinese themselves showed great energy in collection from the 1940s. While commercial recordings of opera and urban professional instrumental arrangements have long been common, very few recordings of folk instrumental music have ever been issued.

The Music Research Institute (MRI) of the Chinese Academy of Arts in Beijing preserves China's most comprehensive archive of recordings of traditional Chinese music, recorded in the field since 1949. The former Director of the MRI, Yang Yinliu (1899-1984), was not only the leading scholar of ancient Chinese music history, but a fine performer and an ethnomusicologist much concerned to document living traditons. He himself made many field-recordings of great folk musicians, often with his cousin and lifelong companion Cao Anhe. Some of these recordings are included for their musical and historical value, despite their less than ideal recording quality.


This series is a tribute to Yang Yinliu and the unsung Chinese collectors who strove to document the heritage in conditions which have often been most adverse, economically, logistically, and politically. It is the story of nearly fifty years of Chinese fieldwork, covering many of the major genres of Han Chinese instrumental music. Although most genres resumed in the 1980s and can still be heard in China now, this set includes some outstanding recordings from before the Cultural Revolution, when traditions were still thriving and some venerable folk musicians were in their prime.

Tracklisting:

CD I North China

1. Hua Family Shawm Band - Shuilong yin (Shanxi) {7:58}

2. Xu Zeng and former monks from Beijing temples - Xiao Huayan (Temple de
Zhihua) {2:49}

3. Hu Yusheng Ensemble - Yu furong (Hebei) [extract] {8:20}

4. Liu Yuanqing Shawm Band - Batiao long (Liaoning) [extract] {5:56}

5. Xu Yousheng Ensemble - Pu'an zhou suite (Shanxi) [extract] {7:19}

6. An Laixu Ensemble - Suite, ouverture (Xi'an) {7:33}

7. An Laixu Ensemble - Suite, section finale (Xi'an) {11:47}

8. Feng Mingxian Ensemble - Xiao Kaimen (Shandong) {3:42}

9. Li Guangfu Ensemble - Tai huajiao (Shandong) {9:07}

CD II South China

1. Zhu Qinfu Ensemble - Yifeng shu (Shifan gu, Jiangsu) {8:14}

2. Zhu Qinfu Ensemble - Xia xifeng (Shifan luogu, Jiangsu) {15:41}

3. Huang Qingquan Ensemble - Choudian zhuyan (Longchui, Quanzhou) {10:48}

4. Huang Qingquan Ensemble - Desheng ling (Longchui, Quanzhou) {8:27}

5. Shantou Folk Music and Performing Arts Troupe - Liuyao jin (Chaozhou)
{5:10}

6. Shantou Folk Music and Performing Arts Troupe - Liuqing niang (Chaozhou)
{4:00}

7. Shantou Folk Music and Performing Arts Troupe - Fan Lihua pozhen
(Chaozhou) {6:02}

8. Yi Zizhong, Song Hong and Song Yuwen - Shuangsheng hen (Cantonese music)
{2:57}

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