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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