An Announcement about Reposts

I know it's been a long while between new posts. Unfortunately, this post won't have anything new available as DrEyescope and I are very busy with our careers and various projects nowadays. I do not know when there will be anything new here. This post is about addressing reposts.

I just found out that ADrive is planning to discontinue its services for free accounts on November 16. (I also found out it was announced in September, but I haven't checked my email in a while.) That means that ADrive will be deleting all free accounts and all the files that are in those free accounts. It happens that I am one of those folks with a free account. I put in a lot of time over the past year or two reuploading a lot of files to ADrive so that they will stay up for a long time. All of those files will be gone on November 16 because ADrive wants to charge people for the privilege of using its services. It's a profit-making business foremost so I understand that's the way it has to be. However, it would have been great if it could grandfather the free accounts by letting them stay while not accepting any more free users since free users helped it by trying it and perhaps also helped to persuade more people to use it. I do not wish to sign up for a premium account with them therefore I will be finished with ADrive on November 16 as far as I am concerned.

If you have not yet gotten any or some older files, now is the time to grab everything you want while you can. Due to lack of time, I have not been able to keep up with what file-sharing services/cloud services/filehosters are out there. Just about all of the familiar names from the first generation in that industry (e.g. Rapidshare, Zshare, Badongo, etc.) are gone. The only ones I can name off the top of my head right now are Mega and Zippyshare. Anyone is welcome to offer suggestions of what to use.

I do not know what I will do or use after Nov. 16. It's likely there will be a lot of dead links here. I hardly have time nowadays to tend to this blog much less do a bunch of reups. As I already said, get them while you still can.

Dec. 9, 2015 UPDATE: The ADrive links are still active for the moment. Apparently, ADrive pushed back the date. I just found out that it said it will permanently delete all free accounts on January 1, 2016. If you still haven't got what you want, you still have some time left.

Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Cage, Mayuzumi: String Quartets

LaSalle Quartet - Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Cage, Mayuzumi: String Quartets

CD released in 1987

LaSalle Quartet:

Walter Levin - 1st violin
Henry Meyer - 2nd violin
Peter Kamnitzer - viola
Jack Kirstein - cello

The string quartet was one of the supreme achievements of an age when music came nearest to the nature of speech, an age when themes could be stated and discussed in a language that was both rich and clear. It was a conversational medium for a conversational art, and so successful as such that it has survived into a time of musical confusion enough to eliminate any possibility of Haydnesque discourse. Hence the problem which these four quartets (not to mention those of T.S. Eliot) all address: how to use a naturally discursive medium when the foundations of the language have fallen. All dating from 1949-64, these are quartets in which the first violin can no longer speak to the cello and expect to be understood.
The most drastic, radically opposed reactions to this linguistic disintegration are those of Cage and Lutoslawski, the one making the quartet into a single instrument to play "a melodic line without accompaniment", the other writing alienation into his music so that "each player performs his part as though he were alone". If harmonious counterpoint is not possible any more, then these are the obvious alternatives, of monody and of a polyphony of independent voices. The other two works here bear witness to the same dissolution - the Penderecki in its abundance of previously marginal effects, the Mayuzumi by having the players sit as far apart as possible on the platform - but both find ways to retain a more progressive continuity, in contrast with Cage's stasis and Lutoslawski's elusive fluidity. (Paul Griffiths)

tracks 1-4 originally released on LP in 1968
tracks 5-8 originally released on LP in 1976

Tracklisting:

1.  String Quartet: Introductory Movement  {8:29}
composed by Witold Lutoslawski, 1964

2.  String Quartet: Main Movement  {15:15}
composed by Witold Lutoslawski, 1964

3.  Quartetto per archi  {7:03}
composed by Krzysztof Penderecki, 1960

4.  Prelude for String Quartet  {11:10}
composed by Toshiro Mayuzumi, 1961

5.  String Quartet in Four Parts: Quietly flowing along  {4:18}
tracks 5-8 composed by John Cage, 1950

6.  String Quartet in Four Parts: Slowly rocking  {4:57}

7.  String Quartet in Four Parts: Nearly stationary  {10:38}

8.  String Quartet in Four Parts: Quodlibet  {1:33}

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La légende d'Eer

Iannis Xenakis - La légende d'Eer

CD released 2003

La légende d'Eer (diatope) 8-channel electronic tape

Played by Electronic Studio Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln

From the back cover:

Minimalist and wild, incisive and graphic, La légende d'Eer unfolds to the rhythm of the crackling of merging timbres in ductile electronic sound. Associated with a lighting device calling for one thousand six hundred and eighty flashes and four lasers, their beams reflected by four hundred mirrors, La légende d'Eer, ('Diatope') is an aural and visual experience - an epic score, a gesture of light and sound, in which the listener is invited to immerse himself in the 'corps sonore', as the composer suggests: 'I was thinking of someone in the middle of an Ocean. The elements are all around him, sometimes raging, sometimes calm.'

From a rough Google Translate translation of the liner notes:

Composed in 1977, The Legend of Eer is one of the longest electroacoustic scores of Iannis Xenakis.
To date, the composer wrote fourteen works of this kind, many of which have been designed in relation to the site of their release. For some, like Persepolis or Mycenae Alpha, this is a historic site open which was invested; for others, such as The Legend of Eer, Iannis Xenakis also imagine the place as a framework has broadcast. Imagine the place - in this case to the square in front of the Beaubourg Centre Georges Pompidou - and the band and light device that are associated with it Diatope meet the terms of a variety of polytope, a term that the composer used to denominate its musical and light installations. The Diatope Beaubourg represents a culmination in the series polytopes. In the inside of a shell whose plans were traces the composer, one thousand six hundred and eighty flashes are willing and four hundred mirrors variously reflect the rays of four lasers, and eleven speakers. In this show, the music and the lights are independent. The bright interventions and the course crees by displacements of lights are automated programs, but the meetings that occur with music - fixed, too, in its development - are fortuitous and each has different diffusion.

From notes by Richard Toop:

La Légende d'Eer [1977] marks a further stage in the alliance of music and architecture. In an interview to be found at the very end of Olivier Revault d'Allonnes' 1975 book on Les Polytopes, Xenakis is asked where he would like to locate his next 'spectacle', and he replies: "In the heavens and on the earth. Perhaps at Bonn or Paris (in the Beaubourg square). Remember the Myth of Er the Pamphylian (Plato's Republic, Book 10) and his column of light. As well as Poimandres (Hermes Trismegistus' Hermetics, Book 1), and the 'illuminations', the revelations of the Byzantine ascetics up to Gregory Palamas. As well as those of the Chinese and Japanese buddhists (Zen)."

In practice, it was the 'Beaubourg vision' that came good: Xenakis was asked to create a new 'polytope' on the square outside the Pompidou Centre, to celebrate the opening of the latter in 1978 (in the event, the premiere had to be delayed for several months). Though the resulting Diatope picked up some architectural threads from the Philips Pavilion of two decades before, there was at least one significant difference: here, for the first time, Xenakis was creating a space and the music for it, hand in hand, and seeking an architectural form (based on hyperbolic paraboloids) equally amenable to the reflexion of light and sound.

The title, The Legend of Eer, comes from the final pages of Plato's The Republic. Since so much of Xenakis' musical thinking has links back to his wartime experiences - to the mass movements of people and machines in the darkness, and to the extraordinary play of searchlights over cities under bombardment - it's hard to overlook Nouritza Matossian's parallel between the fate of Er, whose body returns to life after ten days, and that of Xenakis, who was initially assumed to be unsaveable after sustaining severe facial wounds. However, Xenakis insists he was "not inspired by the legend" and though he appended parts of Plato's text to his notes for the first performance (significantly omitting the passage on the Harmony of the Spheres!), he gave equal emphasis to other texts: Pascal contemplating Infinity in his Pensées, Hermes Trismegistus, and Jean-Paul Richter, as well as a recent [1976] Scientific American article by Robert P. Kirschner on supernovas.

Tracklisting:

1.  La legende d'Eer  {45:24}

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