pARTy

Julio Estrada: Doloritas (1992) 

cuasi una ópera radiofónica basada en Pedro Páramo de Juan Rulfo 

Fátima Miranda en canto, Llorenc Barber en procesos sonoros y Stefano Scodanibbio en contrabajo, más las voces de Ernesto Gómez Cruz y Julio Estrada entre otros.

Back then it was a work in progress and the final version 'Murmullos del Paramo' appeared in 2006, it includes 'Doloritas' as a first of two parts. Though its full performance is on YouTube, I didn't find the performance as fine as the presented one, and the quality of sound and video is just poor. 

The thing I like the most about Doloritas is its unusual combination (well, especially for 90s) of non-musical sounds, traditional music (and mythology), and 'the original material'. All that helped to create the atmosphere maybe even more realistic and at the same time mysterious as the book itself: these whispers, scratches, ghost-like voices, and stunning double bass part performed by Scodanibbio, who actually confessed that he didn't like the opera.

For the record, Quotidianus (for string quartet and voice).

Pascale Criton & Silvia Tarozzi: Circle Process
Pascale Criton & Deborah Walker: Chaoscaccia

As usual a fascinating time at Tectonics yesterday. Exciting new orchestra pieces by Evan Johnson and Marc Sabat and amazing chamber music (incredibly played) by a composer unknown to me (and to most of the audience), Pascale Criton. Check her stuff out - really special.' (James Weeks on Facebook)

She's been active since 80s, mostly working with microtonality. Studied with Вышнеградский and Grisey. Circle process (2012) is one of the recent pieces composed in collaboration with violinist Silvia Tarozzi who uses a violin tuned 1/16th tones apart. This creates lots of micropolyphony effects as well as demonstrates timbral discoveries. The spectrogram is really captivating.

Chaoscaccia is a piece in the same vein written together with cellist Deborah Walker (1/16th too). 

Luigi Nono: Risonanzi erranti (1987)

per contralto, auto, tuba, sei percussioni e live electronics

testi di Herman Melville e Ingeborg Bachmann

One of the Nono's last pieces that was finished in several steps: first versions were performed in the beginning of 80s, and the definitive score appeared in 1987. 

Two performances are available, details are in the booklet, as well as pictures, drafts, and photos.

Christian Ofenbauer: Zerstörung des Zimmers/der Zeit (1999, String quartet version)

Arditti Quartet

An extremely ascetic piece by utterly unknown Austrian composer. Finished in 1999. The entire 50min long piece is written in pppp, strings create swishing/whispering sounds 

Why not quote Neos music:

'In Zerstörung des Zimmers / der Zeit 1999, this procedural course of events is opposed by large-scale stasis based on incidental music to Horváth’s Tales from the Vienna Woods; the title quotes the stage direction of the final scene from Brecht’s Fatzer material. No single tones or even rests are audible – rather, the quartet creates a sonic continuum that runs in extreme slow motion sempre pppp, again approaching its point of departure at the end. Continuous changes of colour (from the usual position to bowing on the bridge) and qualitative leaps (the completely noise-like bowing of the string behind the bridge) are thus cross-linked with widely spread-out, very slow glissandi, extremely dense tremolos at the tip of the bow and difficult harmonics. Just as concrete chords evade perception, harmonic language or the logic of progression in the traditional sense seems suspended. What is astonishing, at any rate, is how the glissandi remain almost inaudible because of their (at times) minute-long durations – instead disclosing themselves as the strangely intangible, never languishing inner tension of the sounds.'

There is also a version for piano.

Olga Neuwirth: Le Encantadas o le avventure nel mare delle meraviglie (2014/15)

for 6 ensemble groups, samples and live electronics

Intercontemporain/Pintscher

Large scale 'music theater' premiered in Donaueschingen in 2015. It hasn't been released since then, so it's a real chance to hear the work before its next performance, which will take place in Hamburg in April. Originally requires several speakers and spatial effects, but the recording is quite decent, and the piece itself is one of Neuwirth's most interesting works, which as usual doesn't lack irony. 

Frank Denyer: silenced voices + music for shakuhachi + whispers

From extremes of quietness to axe. Low density and almost inaudible overtones in most of the pieces. Two voices with axe is worth a try. Maybe Denyer is better known as a pianist who performed Cage, and Уствольская.

Frank Denyer & Juliet Fraser (voices), Jos Zwaanenburg (flute), Benjamin Gilmore (muted violin), Elisabeth Smalt (muted viola), Dario Calderone (muted double bass), Pepe Garcia Rodriguez (percussion), Bob Gilmore (axe), Jamie Man (conductor).

James Weeks: Tide + Mala Punica + Trio

Back to Weeks. Co-founder and conductor of Exaudi vocal ensemble. As a composer quite diverse and unpredictable. Say, Three Trios might somehow remind of chamber pieces by Crane, Mala Punica is a work for vocal ensemble and instruments, quite complex and virtuostic (with regards to voices especially).

Tide is three solo pieces – for cello with a special curved bow that enables the sounding of all four strings simultaneously, for clarinet with electronics, and for oboe d’amore – which may be played separately or as a trio. When heard together, as they are on the first disc here, they may be overlaid however the performers choose. The points of entry are left entirely free; the components are not so much simultaneous as coexistent, each independently working its own narrow furrow, following similar principles with different means. The three works end where they begin in a theoretically endless loop, with the option given to begin again; each is in fact an investigation of what it might mean to demarcate a long span of time. They all, in very different ways, draw an arc across duration.

Anton Lukoszevieze cello

Christopher Redgate oboe d’amore

Andrew Sparling clarinet in Bb

Pierre Jodlowski: Ombra della mente

for electronics, soprano and clarinet

Ensemble Accroche Note 

Devoted to Alda Merini

Uli Fussenegger: San Teodoro 8 (2014)

Since 40's Giacinto Scelsi has been interested in micropolyphony used ondioline (proto-syntheiser, but after ondes martenot), that has some fine settings but at the same time can produce only one note at a time, so Scelsi would record his music layer after layer, which then formed a vast archive that can be accessed in Rome. Fussenegger re-organized great number of ondioline recordings in the first part of the piece, though he managed to keep himself from over-editing. The second part is where instruments come into play: double bass (Fussenegger), double bass clarinet (Molinari), trombone (Svoboda) and electric guitar (Siewert).

Nuova consonanza/Egisto Macchi 

The first improvising composers coalition. Macchi has created Il Deserto the first ambient album several years before Eno and others.

Jandl songs by Stephen Chase

Gérard Pape (Beckett's 'A piece of monologue'): Monologue