aworks :: "new" american classical music

Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (2014). David Grubbs #book

A new book by David Grubbs coming out next month.

• "In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording." Duke University Press
• "David Grubbs is Associate Professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he also teaches in the M.F.A. programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts and Creative Writing." Amazon
• Related. Google Books
• " Yet a number of basic facts about his career would seem to contradict Cage's disparagement of records." Foundation for Contemporary Arts
• Twitter search. Twitter
• "What does it mean to think of various archival recordings – recordings released years or decades after they were made – as participating in an earlier era in which they effectively did not exist?" David Grubbs

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aworks listening log :: composers of the month

By January listening time:

1. John Cage
2. Arnold Dreyblatt
3. Morton Feldman
4. Philip Glass
5. Hyo-shin Na
6. Frederic Rzewski
7. Daniel Wohl
8. Dennis Johnson
9. John Cage/Lou Harrison
10. Christian Wolff

Others: "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Aaron Oppenheim, Armando Bayolo, Augusta Read Thomas, Benjamin Broening, Bernard Herrmann, Bertram Turetzky, Caroline Shaw, Charles Ives, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Chris Arell, Christian Ryan, Cliff Caruthers, Conlon Nancarrow, David Dramm, David M. Gordon, Dennis Johnson, Duane Pitre, Ethan Wickman, George Crumb, George Perle, George Walker, Halim El-Dabh, Harold Budd, Jacob Felix Heule, Jim Fox, John Adams, John Denver (!), John Williams, Joseph Hallman, Kathryn Alexander, Kotoka Suzuki, Laura Auerbach, Lee Hyla, Leo Ornstein, Liza White, Lou Harrison, Mark Olivieri, Matt Ingalls, Meredith Monk, Michael Byron, Milton Babbitt, Mohammed Fairouz, Ned Rorem, Odessa Chen, Pauline Oliveros, Peter Garland, Raphael Mostel, Ron Tucker, Scott Joplin, Stephen Mosko, Stephen Scott, Steve Kornicki, Steve Reich, Thomas Albert, Thomas Blum, Thomas Edison, TImothy Johnson, and Timothy Roy.

Proverb (1995). Steve Reich #orfeo #richardpowers

Nathaniel Rich reviews Richard Powers' novel Orfeo, about a fictionbal composer, Peter Els:

Orfeo begins in “the tenth year of the altered world,” or 2011, when Els is seventy. This makes him a few years younger than the so-called minimalists La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, and six years older than John Adams. Els admires all of these composers—the novel even includes an extended appreciation of Reich’s Proverb. As a character he seems modeled after them, at least in part. Like them, Els becomes a “Minimalist, with maximal yearnings,” who layers “ecstatic melodies over driving syncopations.” But professionally he is a minimalist in a different sense: in his entire life he has finished only a handful of pieces, and when the novel begins, he hasn’t written a note in eighteen years.

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Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector (1981). Terry Riley #ol

1. Dorian mode and a minor key extension of Rainbow in Curved Air.
2. A series of independent fragments, similar to In C.
3. "A high energy and lyrical modal quartet , the modular structure of which, allows the players to make important decisions affecting the overall shape of the work." 
4. For Terry Riley by Matmos uses rehearsals of the Kronos Quartet practicing Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector.