Various Artists-PIANO MUSIC IN AMERICA VOL 2: 1900-1945 (Vox Box SVBX 5303) 1976

Notes from the booklet (enclosed) by Lejaren Hiller:
This is the second of a series of three VOX BOX albums of music for solo piano written by American composers. The first, performed by Neely Bruce, contained concert and salon music or 19th Century America. the present album takes up where that one left off, roughly at the turn of the century, and continues to mid-century. The final album, to be recorded, as is this one, by Roger Shields, will contain music of the present- with emphasis on music of the avant-garde.

(Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, this projected album was never recorded-Dr I).

Specialists in the history of American music like Gilbert Chase (America's Music, McGraw-Hill) and H. Wiley Hitchcock (Music in the United States, Prentice-Hall) have found it convenient to divide the period represented here (approximately 1900-1950)
into three main periods; the years prior to WWI, the decade of the 1920's and lastly, the years of the Depression and WWII. The pre-WWI period closes a long period of musical growth in America, during which the profession of composing acquired respectability, symphony orchestras and other performance ensembles were established and the teaching of music began to be accepted as an academic discipline. The model for all this was Germany, so it was considered correct and proper that aspiring young performers and composers be sent to Germany to polish off their studies. I speak here of course of the concert world, not of popular music which flourished perfectly well on its own.This stage of music history culminates in the singular career of Charles Ives, who not only combined in his music all the diverse trends of his times, but also because of his experimental turn of mind, prophetically anticipated much of what was yet to come.

In the music of the 1920's the focus abruptly shifted away from Germany. In foreign study, France replaced Germany; also, experimentation, iconoclasm, anti-Romanticism and an interest in jazz replaced former ideals. Perhaps the most important American composer of this period was Edgard Varese, who cannot be included in this album since he wrote no piano music. Then, of course, the Depression came, and with it, artistic as well as economic retrenchment. Moreover, America became the refuge for nearly all of the most famous European composers escaping the Nazi assault. Not surprisingly, these displaced Europeans dominated American musical life in the 1940's and it wasn't until afterwards that newer and different native musical impulses began to assert themselves.

Piano Music In America Vol.2: 1900-1945

Side One:

Charles Ives:

a1-The Anti-Abolitionist Riots (before 1908)
a2-Some Southpaw Pitching (1908)
a3-"The Alcotts" from "The Concord" Piano Sonata No.2 (1909-15)

Edward MacDowell:

a4-Five Movements from "Woodland Sketches", Opus 61 (1896)

Side Two:

Henry Cowell:

b1-Exultation (1919)
b2-Invention (1950)
b3-Aeolian Harp (1923)
b4-Advertisement (1914/59)

Charles T. Griffes:

Two Movements from "Roman Sketches", Opus 7 (1915-17)
b5-The White Peacock
b6-The Fountain Of The Acqua Paola

George Antheil:

Second Sonata, "Airplane" (1922)
b7-First Movement-As fast as possible
b8-Second Movement-Andante moderato

Side Three:

George Gershwin:

Three Preludes (1926)
c1-Allegro ben ritmato e deciso
c2-Andante con moto e poco rubato
c3-Allegro ben ritmato e deciso

John Alden Carpenter:

c4-Impromptu (1913)

Wallingford Riegger:

c5-Six Movements from "New And Old" (1944)
-The Twelve Tones
-The Tritone
-Seven Times Seven
-Tone Clusters
-Twelve Upside-Down
-Fourths And Fifths

Side Four:

Carl Ruggles:

Evocations, Four Chants For Piano (1937-43, revised 1957)
d1-Largo
d2-Andante con fantasia
d3-Moderato appassionata
d4-Adagio sostenuto

Roy Harris:

d5-Piano Sonata, Opus 1 (1928)

-Prelude (Maestoso, con bravura)
-Andante Ostinato (Misterioso)
-Scherzo (Vivace)

Side Five:

Roger Sessions:

From My Diary (1939)
e1-Poco adagio
e2-Allegro con brio
e3-Larghissimo e misterioso
e4-Allegro pesante

William Schuman:

e5-Three-Score Set (1943)
-=circa 96
-=circa 40
-=circa 144

Aaron Copland:

e6-Piano Variations (1930)

Side Six:

Walter Piston:

f1-Passacaglia (1943)

Virgil Thomson:

f2-Piano Sonata No.3 (1930)
-Bold
-Softer (same speed)
-very soft and without accent (same speed)
-Gay, and getting gradually louder and gayer
-Sustained

Two Movements from Ten Etudes (1943)
f3-Parallel Chords (Tango)
f4-Ragtime Bass

Samuel Barber:

f5-Nocturne, Opus 33 (1949)
f6-Fuga, from the Piano Sonata, Opus 26 (1949)


Roger Shields-Piano
(...) Only briefly exploring the usual contest/concert circuit (winning a Busoni prize and the Kinly Award), Shields prefers the new, unusual, and seldom-played repertoire. Works of Lutoslawski, Syzmanowski, Antheil, Zez Confrey and promising young composers figure as prominently in his concerts as do the Liszt Don Juan Fantasy, Stravinsky's Petrouchka, the Hammerklavier Sonata of Beethoven and Chopin Mazurkas. During the past 5 years, Shields has worked as pianist for the Center of Creative and Performing Arts in Buffalo, New York,and has been artistic director of the East European Concert Series(...)
(notes from 1976)

(1)

(2)

(3) 

George Antheil/Henry Cowell/Leo Ornstein - THE BAD BOYS! (Hat Now) 1994

The Bad Boys! George Antheil, Henry Cowell, Leo Ornstein - Steffen Schleiermacher, piano
Hat Now 1994

Today is the 10th anniversary of the passing away of Leo Ornstein at the astonishing age of 109 years.

Notes from the booklet (enclosed):


It is Antheil- Futurist, Vorticist, self-made enfant terrible of the 1920's avant-garde who provides a name for this collection of piano works by three independently minded American composers. Indeed, Antheil wrote an autobiography at the age of 35, Bad Boy Of Music, that stands as the classical music world's equivalent to Charles Mingus's Beneath The Underdog, for sheer audacity and self-mythologization. "...I reached in under my left armpit in approved American gangster fashion," he writes of an early Eastern European performance, "and produced my ugly little automatic. Without a further word I placed it on the front desk of my Steinway and proceeded with my concert. Every note was heard, and, in a sense, I suppose I opened up the way in Hungary for modern music of a non-Bartok-Kodaly variety."
Antheil's most important work, both as a self-promoter and as a composer took shape in Europe (Berlin and Paris, especially) during the early 1920's. Travelling there in search of a lost blonde love named Anne Williams, he started playing piano professionally and soon became one of the first American students of Nadia Boulanger. Like much of the French avant-garde - Jean Cocteau, Darius Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky, Antheil's music fell under the influence of jazz, and the works presented here (both composed in 1922 or 1923) explicitly refer to that preoccupation. In 1927, impressed by the rhythmic complexity of Antheil's music, Pound wrote Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, a book that harmony should be thought of primarily as a rhythmic, rather than a tonal, concern.
Back in the U.S in the 1930s, Antheil turned his attention to opera and Hollywood film music, but these solo piano works and his performances of them had polarized and galvanized fans. "Riots came to be the order of the day at my concerts," he recounts in Bad Boy Of Music, "because I was one of the few pianists of that period always to end a concert with a modern group, preferably of the most 'ultra' order. In fact, I invariably closed with a piece of my own, the "Mechanisms,' the 'Jazz Sonata,' 'Fireworks and the Profane Waltzers,' "Sonata Sauvage,' or something equally cacophonous. I also played works of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Milhaud, Auric, Honegger, Ornstein."

The fiery ultramodern pianist Leo Ornstein was born in Russia, , in 1892, and came to the States at age nine. Better-known to many as a player than a composer (converse of Antheil), Ornstein too loved bombastic, mechanistic rhythms and was was also influenced by jazz. His own reportedly wild and outlandish performances of "Danse Sauvage," written in 1915, earned him intense notoriety, as did a 1914 London recital of his own work that he announced as "futuristic music." Hailed by some as the leading Futurist musician, Ornstein's piano music predates Antheil's by a decade- "Suicide in an Airplane" was composed in 1913; " Impressions de Notre-Dame" in 1914- and is contemporaneous with the earliest works represented here by that other piano ultramodernist, Henry Cowell.

The centerpiece of this collection is a set of short, brilliant studies by thai baddest boy- if also the most genteel- of the three, Henry Cowell. Born in 1897, raised in San Francisco, and always a West Coaster at heart, Cowell began his influential reconsideration of the piano as an instrument when he was literally but a boy. At age 13 he composed "Adventures in Harmony," which used his newly-coined term, "tone clusters." Later Bela Bartok would write to him asking for permission for the use of his "clusters.") This piece, like many of his later works, also made use of innovative techniques such as striking the keyboard with fists, forearms, and elbows, and in 1914 he demonstrated his new technique of placing objects directly onto the strings of a piano for what must have been a completely bemused Aan Francisco Musical Society.
(...) The compilation of Cowell's piano on Bad Boys, selected and stunningly rendered by Steffen Schleiermacher, ranges in date from the early 1910's ("The Tides of Manaunaun," "Anger Dance,") to the late 1920s ("The Banshee," "Tiger"). On one hand, these compositions set a course for composers such as Cage and Nancarrow (whose piano-roll pieces bring to fruition the call for mechanization of the Futurists, first heard in Ornstein and Antheil). On the other they predict many piano developments specific to improvised music, from the energetic deployment of clusters characteristic of Cecil Taylor to the internal surgery carried out on pianos by Nick Couldry, Carlo Inderhees, and Denman Maroney. In fact, Cowell clearly had improvisation in mind with many of his extended techniques. For instance, instructions at the top of the score for "Aeolian Harp" (1923) read: "Lento.In improvisatory style."
(...) Taken together with these historically important and musically rewarding pieces by Antheil and Ornstein, Cowell's piano music looks to the future we currently occupy,. A crucial link between Scriabin and Sun Ra, his wide-eared musical mind drew on music from all over the world, particularly classical musics of China, India, and Japan, which he is said to have known far better than he did the standard Western classical repertoire.
(...) these early piano pieces are startling reminders of his singular and motivational place in the front ranks of the avant-garde.
John Corbett, Chicago, June 1994 (thanks to David Grubbs for historical assistance).

The Bad Boys! Henry Cowell, George Antheil, Leo Ornstein

Henry Cowell (1897-1965):

Three Irish Legends:
1-The Tides Of Manaunaun 1912
2-The Hero Sun 1922
3-The Voice Of Lir 1920

4-Aeolian Harp 1923
5-Banshee 1925
6-Anger Dance 1914
7-Dynamic Motion 1913

Five Encores To Dynamic Motion:
8-What's This 1913
8-Amiable Conversation 1917
10-Advertisement 1914/59
11-Antimony 1914
12-Time Table 1914/15

13-Tiger 1928

George Antheil (1900-1959):

Second Sonata ("The Airplane Sonata") 1922
14-First Movement
15-Second Movement

Sonata Sauvage 1922/23
16-First Movement
17-Second Movement
18-Third Movement

19-Jazz Sonata 1922

Leo Ornstein (1892-2002):

20-Suicide In An Airplane ca.1915
21-Impressions De Notre-Dame (Op.16 No.1 ca.1915)
22-Impressions De Notre-Dame (Op.16 No.2 ca.1815)
23-Wild Men's Dance (Op.13 No.2 ca.1914)

Steffen Schleiermacher - Piano























(1) or (1)

Doris Hays (Plays Various Artists)-ADORATION OF THE CLASH (Finnadar 1979)

Doris Hays- ADORATION OF THE CLASH

Notes excerpted from the cover (enclosed) by Doris Hays:

Tone clusters: ideal rebellious gesture to topple the sacred Western muse off its sacred pedestal. A forearm bangs, and the tedium of linearity is broken, its intractable logic punctuated by the rude rough mass of second intervals- fingered, palmed, armed, and fisted for the clash.

Doris Hays: Sunday Nights (1977)
...Sunday Nights in Rossville, Georgia, at McFarland Memorial Methodist Church, when I was a teenager, and Mr Hudgeons led the hymn singing with his fist and the bass line. Sunday Nights is a recollection of those 4th and 5th intervals and tune fragments and a memory of the boredoms , tyranny and uncertain promise of church religion.

Henry Cowell: Piece For Piano Paris 1924
uses strumming, plucking, damping, and hitting the strings inside the piano (hence his term "string piano') in addition to fist, forearm and palm clusters.

Russell Peck: Suspended Sentence (1973)
Peck's own ideas about Suspended Sentence:
"...of desperate flight, a trip down blind alleys, trying to get started but can't get started. I was trying to write a piece that was purely pornosonic, had no structural coherence whatsoever. Hopefully this is not achieved. Definition of pornosonic: titillation of the senses without any deeper significance."

Ilhan Mimaroglu (1926) has written much music for traditional instrumental, as well as his better-known electronic music, which often contains collage, thick texture,overlay of different musical events. A surprise to those who know only the latter, his music for piano, string quartets, etc, is characterized by lyrical line and an expressive quality not often associated with composers of electronic music. Rosa reflects in its title and expressive intensity, as do all his compositions, Mimaroglu's deep passion for personal action towards the changing of society.

Morton Feldman: Vertical Thoughts IV; and Piano Piece (to Philip Guston) both composed in 1963. Marked extremely soft, both pieces record louder than they might be heard in live performance. Even at very soft dynamic levels, the minor seconds in this fingered cluster harmony prick the ear, often not lasting long enough to mellow out before the next vertical aggregate is quietly piled into place.

Leo Ornstein: Impressions De Notre Dame, I and II
Ornstein began his life as a piano virtuoso, but left public performance fairly early to give his time to writing music. His performances in the teens and twenties caused much excitement because of the music's dense harmonies, ferocious in loud passages; particularly one piece for which Ornstein is well known- Danse Sauvage or Wild Man's Dance.
In the past several years his music has been again brought to the attention of a larger public with frequency in performances of his keyboard music, notably his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra performed at Yale University in 1976.
Born in 1892 (or 1894) in Kremenchug, Russia, Leo Ornstein lives with his wife in Brownsville Texas.

(Addendum: Ornstein died Feb 24th 2002, aged 108 or 110 years.)
























Doris Hays-Adoration Of The Clash (Finnadar 1979)

Side One:
1- Doris Hays– Sunday Nights (5:17)
2- Henry Cowell– Piece For Piano Paris 1924 (5:32)

Side Two:
3- Russell Peck– Suspended Sentence (9:24)

Side Three:
4- Ilhan Mimaroglu– Rosa (5:10)
5- Morton Feldman– Vertical Thoughts IV (1:30)
6- Morton Feldman– Piano Piece (To Philip Guston) (2:52)

Side Four:
7&8- Leo Ornstein- Impressions De Notre-Dame (11:41)
7 – First Impression (5:09)
8– Second Impression (6:32)


(1)

Henry Cowell / Lou Harrison- Split Release (CRI)

Henry Cowell/Lou Harrison-Split Release (CRI)

Notes excerpted from the back cover (enclosed):

"No other composer of our age has produced a body of work so radical and so normal,so penetrating and comprehensive" wrote Virgil Thomson of Henry Cowell , and his music embraces "a wider range in both expression and technique than that of any other living composer".

In the fall of 1956, Henry Cowell and his wife Shirley Robertson Cowell, set out on a world tour made possible through the cooperation of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Department of State and the United States Information Agency. It was the intention of the Cowell's to bring to people in other countries further knowledge of American music and to collect and study
the music of other cultures as well. Starting in Ireland, they travelled through Germany and on to Turkey,the Near East and finally India and Japan.

At the special invitation of the government of Iran, the Cowells spent the winter in Tehran. Intrigued bt the special qualities of the music he found there, Cowell decided to compose a work which would express something of the characteristic quality of Persian or Iranian music. Though he has long been interested in the folk expression of other countries, Cowell has never incorporated direct quotation into his works.


Lou Harrison's Suite was commisioned by the Ajemian sisters in 1951. P Glanville-Hicks has written ,among notes describing this suite, that "the Harrison Suite is one of the most delicate and lovely American works of recent years. The sheer grace and joyousness of his style - rememiscent of India - both sacred and secular modes - cannot fail to charm all who hear it".
"The opening Overture is an Allegro in a festive mood of rejoicing: the solo violin draws long, clean lines across a backdrop of piano, tack-piano, celesta, tam-tam (gong), and harp, playing in Gamelan style. Formally, this Overture, as indeed all six section=s of this Suite- is quantitative music; rather than climactic, though high tension points are reached by exciting handling of the melodic curve or by elaboration, and sometimes sudden simplification of the instrumentation. Such devices take the place of the constructed musical climax ot traditionl Western musical thought."

The succeeding movements alternate between elegiac pieces of hushed tranquility and more busy movements which Harrison calls "Gamelans". The slow and quiet sections have been compared to "the acute stillness of high altitudes and their utter removal from time and place". The Gamelans are brilliant with jangling sounds and suggestions of Classic Indonesian and Balinese music(...)

Notes by Oliver Daniel


















Henry Cowell - Persian Set (1957) Dedicated to His Excellency Mohamed Hejazi Malidowle
Four Movements for chamber orchestra

1-Moderato
1-Allegretto
3-Lento
4-Rondo

(Leopold Stowkowski and members of his Orchestra)

Lou Harrison - Suite For Violin, Piano and Small Orchestra (1951)

1-Overture;Allegro
2-Elegy;Adagio
3-First Gamelsn;Allegro
4-Aria;Lento espressivo
5-Second Gamelan;Allegro moderato
6-Chorale

(Leopold Stowkowski and his Orchestra
Anahid Ajemian,Violin
Maro Ajemian,Piano)

re-up:
(1)

The Piano Music of Henry Cowell

Doris Hays - The Piano Music of Henry Cowell

LP released in 1977

Doris Hays - piano

produced by Ilhan Mimaroglu

recording engineer: Bernard Keville
RCA Recording Studios, Studio "A", New York, N.Y.

mastering engineer: George Piros
Atlantic Recording Studios, New York, N.Y.

The vitality of a musical culture is apparent from the way its traditions are investigated, tested, tinkered with and generally overhauled. Henry Cowell was one investigator who influenced countless composers and listeners through his compositions, his teaching and numerous concert tours around the world performing his piano music.

Henry Cowell was born in Menlo Park, California, in 1897. He began his experiments in sound production at the keyboard, using fists, forearms and palms to produce masses of adjacent seconds which he called tone clusters. His earliest-known piece using clusters is entitled Adventures in Harmony, completed when he was about fifteen. From that time into the thirties, Cowell wrote dozens of pieces using tone clusters in a surprising variety of ways. Sometimes the cluster is pictorially programmatic, as the ostinato bass clusters imaging the pulse of waves in The Tides of Manaunaun; or is used as accenting tone mass, in Advertisement; or, for special colorative effects as in The Voice of Lir.

Cowell also explored possibilities provided by the strings of the grand piano: damping strings at various nodes for timbre and pitch change (Sinister Resonance); scraping and rubbing the windings of bass strings (The Banshee); and strumming and plucking strings (Aeolian Harp).

Henry Cowell began concertizing outside of the U.S. in the twenties; he gave his first concert in Europe in 1923. It was after a successful visit to Russia in 1928 that the Russian government published Tiger and The Lilt of the Reel, a first in publishing for an American in Soviet Russia. In mid-1950s Cowell and his wife toured the Middle and Far East under State Department and The Rockefeller Foundation auspices. He composed symphonic works which carry the spirit of his impressions of oriental scales and rhythmic modes gathered during these trips and from childhood influences of Chinese and other cultures in California - Ongaku, the Madras Symphony, Persian Set, Concerto for Koto.

The relationship of dissonance to consonance and the functions of overtones in harmonic theory which Cowell had explored instinctively in his early tone cluster pieces, he then organized into carefully formulated ideas, published in the twenties as New Musical Resources, which was reissued in 1969 by Something Else Press. In 1927 he began the New Music Edition, a quarterly that published compositions of many composers who are now considered among the finest of this century, including Berg, Chavez, Copland, Vivian Fine, Ives, Dane Rudhyar, Ruggles and Ruth Crawford Seeger. He taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His wide acquaintance among living composers made of him a continuing contact center and information exchange on several continents.

Henry Cowell died December 10, 1965, at his home in Shady, New York. (Doris Hays)


Tracklisting:

Side One

1. The Voice of Lir {4:26}

2. Advertisement {1:35}

3. Anger Dance {1:32}

4. Amiable Conversation {0:48}

5. The Tides of Manaunaun {2:55}

6. Aeolian Harp {2:11}

7. The Hero Sun {3:44}

8. Tiger {3:14}

9. Six Ings {8:08}

Side Two

1. Dynamic Motion {3:26}

2. The Harp of Life {5:22}

3. What's This {0:51}

4. Sinister Resonance {2:53}

5. Fabric {1:16}

6. Antinomy {3:17}

7. The Trumpet of Angus Og {3:37}

8. The Banshee {3:13}

9. Maestoso {3:29}

10. The Lilt of the Reel {1:56}

(1)

Concert Percussion for Orchestra

various artists compilation - Concert Percussion for Orchestra

From the liner notes:

The seven compositions recorded on this disc date from the pioneer Thirties and early Forties, when American music was making gigantic strides toward the honored place in the world arena which it occupies today. The percussion ensemble was new then, and its exploitation was a major challenge to composer and auditor alike. But, although the idiom of the percussion ensemble had little precedent in Western culture, it was not brought to being as the result of any whim.

Stravinsky stands, to some degree, behind all this music. His SACRE DU PRINTEMPS of 1913 had awakened human sensibilities to a new world of rhythm, and his HISTOIRE DU SOLDAT of 1918 had opened the door to a vast range of instrumental effect obtainable through the soloistic use of percussion instruments. Henceforth the percussion was not to be a mere orchestral condiment, and its progress toward independent status was hastened by the interest - so marked in the Thirties - in the percussion ensembles of Bali and Java and the even stronger interest - also characteristic of that time - in the music of Latin America, wherein percussion plays so large a part. It is no accident that the oldest piece on this record is by the late Amadeo Roldan of Cuba and that one of the works by William Russell of the United States is in a Cuban vein.

Jazz and its uses of rhythm and percussion are another element in this story, although a relatively slight one. Of much greater importance was the development in the theater known, rather loosely, as Modern Dance. Percussion music was ideal as accompaniment to this form of choreographic art, and several of the pieces on this record were originally composed for recitals thereof, either in direct association with the dances or as interludes between them. One of the composers represented here, Lou Harrison, was once active as a dancer and another, John Cage, remains to this day associated with the Modern Dance theater of Merce Cunningham.

TWO RITMICAS (1930) by Amadeo Roldan

Conductor: PAUL PRICE

Performers: Zita Carno - claves; Gerald Jacobosky - claves, quijada; Richard Allen - claves, cencerro; Michael Rosenberg - claves; Sal Buccola - guiro; Don DesRoches - maracas; Ray DesRoches - bongos; Edward Cornelius - timbales Cubanos; Warren Smith - timbales orquesta; Damon Buckley - bombo; George Boberg - marimbula

CANTICLE NO. 1 (1939) by Lou Harrison

Conductor: PAUL PRICE

Performers: Ray DesRoches - sistrum, tambourine, 3 wood blocks, 3 high bells; Michael Rosenberg - gourd rattle, 3 dragon's mouths, 3 large glass bells; Edward cornelius - wood rattle, 3 claybells, 3 cowbells, morache; Warren Smith - windbell, triangle, suspended cymbal, brake drum, thundersheet, bell, gong, tam-tam; George Boberg - 3 high drums, 3 low drums, 3 muted gongs

THREE DANCE MOVEMENTS (1933) by William Russell

Conductor: JOHN CAGE

Performers: Paul Price - small triangle, large triangle, dinner bell, bottle, anvil, tom-tom; George Boberg - finger cymbal, suspended Turkish cymbal, suspended Chinese cymbal, pair of cymbals, tom-tom; Ray DesRoches - small wood block, large wood block, snare drum, tom-tom, bass drum; Zita Carno - piano, slapstick

OSTINATO PIANISSIMO (1934) by Henry Cowell

Conductor: PAUL PRICE

Performers: Zita Carno and Charles Burkhart - string piano; Ray DesRoches - 8 rice bowls; George Boberg - marimba, xylophone; Edward Cornelius - tambourine, 2 wood blocks, guiro; Damon Buckley - bongo drums; Richard Allen - 3 drums; Gerald Jacobosky - 3 gongs

THREE CUBAN PIECES (1939) by William Russell

Performers: Edward Cornelius - cencerro, maracas, guiro; Paul Price - claves, quijada; George Boberg - marimbula; Ray DesRoches - bongo drums, cencerro

DOUBLE MUSIC (1941) by John Cage and Lou Harrison

Conductor: JOHN CAGE

Performers: Paul Price - 6 water-buffalo bells, 6 brake drums; George Boberg - 2 sistrums, 6 sleighbells, 5 brake drums, thundersheet; Ray DesRoches - 3 Japanese temple gongs, large tam-tam, 6 cowbells; Edward Cornelius - 6 muted gongs, large tam-tam, water gong

AMORES (1943) by John Cage

Performers: John Cage - piano; Paul Price - 3 high tom-toms, 3 high wood blocks; Ray DesRoches - 3 medium tom-toms, pod rattle, 2 medium wood blocks; George Boberg - 3 low tom-toms, 2 low wood blocks


Tracklisting:

Side A

1. Amadeo Roldan - Two Ritmicas: I. No. 6 Tiempo de Rhumba {1:46}

2. Amadeo Roldan - Two Ritmicas: II. No. 5 Tiempo de Son {2:25}

3. Lou Harrison - Canticle No. 1 {3:57}

4. William Russell - Three Dance Movements: I. Waltz {1:35}

5. William Russell - Three Dance Movements: II. March {1:37}

6. William Russell - Three Dance Movements: III. Fox Trot {1:08}

7. Henry Cowell - Ostinato Pianissimo {3:18}

Side B

1. William Russell - Three Cuban Pieces: I. Havannera {0:52}

2. William Russell - Three Cuban Pieces: II. Rhumba {0:43}

3. William Russell - Three Cuban Pieces: III. Tiempo de Son {0:43}

4. John Cage and Lou Harrison - Double Music {5:35}

5. John Cage - Amores {9:47}
I. Solo for Prepared Piano
II. Trio (Nine Toms-Toms, Pod Rattle)
III. Trio (Seven Wood Blocks, not Chinese)
IV. Solo for Prepared Piano

(1)

The Kroumata Percussion Ensemble

The Kroumata Percussion Ensemble - The Kroumata Percussion Ensemble

I'm going to go on hiatus. It will probably be two or three weeks before I return. There are matters that need to be taken care of in the real world and I also would like to recover from the task of setting up the new version of this blog. Meanwhile, here's something to enjoy. Best wishes.

track 1 composed by John Cage

track 2 composed by Henry Cowell

track 3 composed by Torbjorn Iwan Lundquist

track 4 composed by Yoshihisa Taira

Tracklisting:

1. Second Construction {6:51}

2. Pulse {4:05}

3. Sisu {9:36}

4. Hierophonie {19:38}

(1)