DRAM News

Tomorrow, September 5th, we mark composer John Cage's (1912-1992) birthday. One of the leading figures of the postwar avant-garde, through both his writings and music, Cage remains one of the most important influences on composers today.

In tribute to Cage, we have compiled a listing of his works available for streaming on DRAM.

The New York State Attorney General has formally approved the transfer of Composers Recordings, Inc. (CRI) to New World Records. CRI, a non-profit label devoted to works by American composers, shut its doors in 2003 due to mounting financial pressures, and its extensive back catalogue has since been largely unavailable. Founded in 1954 by composers Otto Luening and Douglas Moore, and Oliver Daniel of BMI, CRI issued nearly 800 recordings.

New World, also a non-profit specializing in American music, has begun preparing selected CRI back catalogue for re-release, and is now offering premium quality on-demand CD-Rs of the entire CRI CD catalogue.

New World Records is reissuing three historic titles from the CRI catalog: Ives Plays Ives (formerly CRI810/April 2006); Pioneers of Electronic Music (formerly CRI 611/April 2006); and Lou Harrison: Chamber and Gamelan Works (formerly CRI 613/June 2006).

Originally one of CRI's five best-selling recordings, Ives Plays Ives (NW 80642-2) includes forty-two tracks, representing seventeen works spanning the years 1933-1943. The disc includes tracking information and extensive historical notes, and has been painstakingly remastered to reduce surface noise.

Robert Carl's music doesn't fit into any neat category.

In writing about his own music it is clear that he doesn't subscribe to any one particular tradition, pointing out that "...the barriers between what's been called 'tonal' and 'non-tonal' (and I hate the word 'atonal') are artificial, and one of the projects of the new century is to understand the nature of the harmonic continuum within which we work. Thus all these works tend to move from a highly chromatic, dissonant, or purely 'sonic' worlds into more overtly tonal ones, whether diatonic or not..."

In the January 15 issue of The New Yorker composer and contributor Russell Platt posts his "Best of 2006" recording list. In the number three slot is New World 80634, Sebastian Currier, Quartetset/Quiet Time

"Currier is a subtle yet potent artist whose impeccable craft never overshadows his gifts for lyricism and surprise. The Cassatt Quartet plays these unexpectedly moving works with all the nimbleness and warmth that they demand."

This month, in addition to reissues of Morton Feldman's A Viola in My Life and a long-awaited CRI CD of the classic 1750 Arch LP New Music For Electronic And Recorded Media Women In Electronic Music—1977, New World releases Zummo with an X , (NW 80656), featuring music of composer and trombonist Peter Zummo.

Released by New World Records in 1998, Mary Jane Leach's Ariadne's Lament (NW 80525) draws on several sources of inspiration. The music reflects her love of early music—particularly its polyphony and modal harmonies. However, Leach's modal writing is adapted to a twentieth-century aesthetic: melodies and harmonies are treated more freely; focus is on the prolongation of a fixed collection of notes; and while the traditional treatment of consonance and dissonance is largely maintained, dissonances are permitted to float and persist in ways once unthinkable. So while she pays homage to the past, Leech's music has a freshness that is unmistakably modern.

From the 1960s onward, James Tenney (b Silver City, NM, 10 Aug 1934; d 2006) composer, author, and theorist, inhabited and helped to define a rarified niche---that of digitally synthesized music. Tenney, who was born in New Mexico, studied at the Juilliard School and with Varèse, Partch, Ruggles, Cage, Kenneth Gaburo, and Lejaren Hiller. He worked with Harry Partch in the 1950s, and taught some of the leading young composers, including John Luther Adams, Polansky, and Peter Garland. John Cage and György Ligeti considered him one of the most powerful minds in American music.

As a result of the diverse spatial experiments that span his working life, Henry Brant has given legs to the idea that spatial positioning is an unavoidable compositional decision, akin to rhythm or pitch. His profuse experiments give credence to the notion that space exerts specific influences on harmony, polyphony, texture and timbre. Initiated by Charles Ives, Brant has continued the American experimental use of space as a fourth compositional building block---joining pitch, rhythm and timbre in significance.

The son of a violinist, Brant began composing and performing with homemade instruments from the age of nine. He attended the McGill Conservatorium in Montreal, the Institute of Musical Art in New York, and the Juilliard Graduate School, and studied privately with Riegger, Antheil and Fritz Mahler. Early on, he made a living as a composer, conductor and arranger for radio, film, ballet and jazz venues, and worked for Benny Goodman and Andre Kostelanetz, among others.

Until recently, Edition Wandelweiser CDs have not been available for sale in the United States, and so this is a rare opportunity to hear this wonderfully austere and conceptual music for the first time.