Hall Overton / Lester Trimble - Split Release (CRI 1972)

Notes (reprinted in spite of the fact that I find them really rather annoying) excerpted from the back cover (included).

Pulsations is the last in Overton's considerable catalogue and is probably the work that most perfectly fuses his own equal and opposite musical loves, concert music and jazz. In his words, it "explores various aspects of rhythm. Instead of avoiding the pulse, my intention was to write music based largely on a strong, steady beat." This is not, however, the primitive pulse of the typical jazz band but ranges from "straight-ahead propulsion, lag beat, silent beat, free time and doubling"". The moderately knowing listener will recognize characteristic jazz figures, along with others that are subtler, more deeply imbedded in the musical texture,  and also more personal to Overton.
In addition to its specific jazz references, Pulsations sometimes achieves a strange and dreamlike atmosphere that seems to represent the unworldly aspects of the jazz scene.
The work is dedicated to Thelonious Monk, the eminent jazz pianist,who is one of the many jazz people Overton worked closely with. It was commissioned by The Ensemble of New York.

The Ensemble; Dennis Russell Davies,conductor

In Praise Of Diplomacy And Common Sense  has been described as "a sonic happening", "an hallucinatory montage", "an ironic sequence." It has been compared to sections of James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.
To evoke such observations it would seem to be a new and unusual kind of theatre- one might call it "spatial sonic theatre"- which seeks through techniques of musical and verbal overlapping and interpenetration, to evoke the realities of a dramatic event and simultaneously, to make a philosophical comment upon them.
The composer writes:
"The libretto is a montage of news items culled mostly over an eight-day period from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, and Life magazine. It presents the simultaneous spectacles of a bloddy uprising in the Congo, the release of the Warren Report on the assassination of John F Kennedy, violent anti-American demonstrations in Egypt, a threatening contretemps between the USA and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, and other examples of human cruelty and intransigence displaying an apparent absence of true diplomacy or common sense from the national and international arena."

The Ensemble; Dennis Russell Davies,conductor; Richard Frisch,baritone

























Hall Overton- Pulsations (17:42)

Lester Trimble- In Praise Of Diplomacy And Common Sense (14:51)


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