DRAM News

During the fall months of 2011 Robert Ashley will be the subject of a great deal of activity in New York City.  In the first week of November, Incubator Arts Project in Manhattan will feature Robert Ashley’s chamber music, which is sometimes overlooked in deference to his massive contribution to opera.  This concert series is part of a New York city-wide celebration of Robert Ashley’s work taking place as part of the Performa 11 visual art biennial, and including a performance of his opera “That Morning Thing” at the legendary Kitchen performance space.  December will see a retrospective in Philadelphia of the work of the Sonic Arts Union, a cooperative group Ashley co-founded in the late 1960s.  And finally, Perfect Lives will be presented in Spanish this December at Irondale Theater, Brooklyn in a new production under the expert guidance of Peter Gordon and Alex Waterman.  Vidas Perfectas is a co-production between Issue Project Room and Ballroom Marfa in cooperation with Irondale Brooklyn and has received support from the NEA.  They are currently raising the additional funds needed through USA Artists. Ashley, now 81, has never been a musical figure that one could call sedentary or even under-recognized, but this recent increase in the presentation of his work still feels long overdue.

In this spirit, and to further celebrate the work of Mr. Ashley, whose music has been an important presence in DRAM since our inception through the label, Lovely Music, DRAM is featuring the music of Robert Ashley in the month of October. We are presenting the writing of Alex Waterman on the translation and re-telling of Ashley’s opera Perfect Lives and its new life as Vidas Perfectas, as well as a playlist of Ashley’s music on DRAM, highlighting his great opera tetralogy.

The music of composer Morton Feldman has seen a meteoric rise in popularity since his death at age 61 in 1987. His idiosyncratic, austere and assiduously applied method of working is notoriously difficult to categorize and analyze. The typical approach in talking about Feldman has often been historical, with a focus on Feldman's social connection with both the "New York School" of composers (with Cage, Brown, Wolff) and the "New York School" of Abstract Expressionist painters (e.g. Guston, Pollock, De Kooning, Johns, Rauschenberg). Is there another way of appreciating his work with an attempt to look at the musical materials for their own sake without the crutch of visual (or visual art) metaphors, amusing Cage-ian, Zen-like analogies or Feldman's oft-polarized personality and aesthetic?

In this two-part blog, I will be presenting a peak into some the musical mechanics of two disparate periods of Feldman's oeuvre (Early and Late).

DRAM would like to extend a very warm welcome to our guests fromwww.americansublime.org.  DRAM features the largest streaming archive of Morton Feldman's recorded output, and we invite you to explore the music of one of America's great iconoclasts in preparation for the groundbreaking American Sublime Festival: The Late Works of Morton Feldman.  The festival, taking place in Philadelphia between June 4th and June 12th features some of the most exciting performers of composed music in America performing the most exciting works from Feldman's late period.  Highlights include Joan LaBarbara's performance of Feldman's "Three Voices", written expressly for her, a Marilyn Nonken performance of Triadic Memories, and FLUX quartet's closing concert of the monolithic Second String Quartet.  More information and tickets can be found at the American Sublime website.

During the festival, DRAM will be featuring Morton Feldman's work for those attending the festival, as well as for all of our regular DRAM member institutions.  Composer and experimental bagpiper, Matthew Welch , will provide listeners with information on Feldman, his contemporaries, and those composers that pay direct homage to his language.

New World Records will take over as the curator of the prestigious experimental music venue, The Stone, in Manhattan from June 1st through the 15th.  The two week festival features many of the luminary composers and performers that have made the last 30 years of New World Records great, including Nick Didkovsky, Christian Wolff, Larry Polansky, Marty Ehrlich, and Tim Berne!

We regret to announce the death of Milton Babbitt, eminent composer and emeritus board member of New World Records.

We are delighted to announce the addition of Nine Winds Records to the DRAM database.

New World Records and DRAM regret to announce the death of composer Jack Beeson, who passed away on Sunday, June 6th, at the age of 88. 

We are excited to announce that DRAM now offers improved search capability. 

DRAM is delighted to announce the availability of twenty newly digitized LPs from the CRI label, the initial batch of approximately 400 CRI LPs that we will be making available over the coming months.

DRAM is pleased to welcome Einstein Records to its collection, documenting the early incubation period of the New York Downtown scene.