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New Sounds

Saturday, October 01, 2005
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    The "California School"

    Was there really a California school of new music in the late 70s and early 80s? We'll hear works by John Adams, Ingram Marshall, Peter Garland, Chas Smith, Paul Dresher, and other composers whose music suggests that the question might not have a simple answer.

PROGRAM #2223, The California School? (First aired on 12/2/03)

ARTIST(S)

RECORDING

CUT(S)

SOURCE

Garland, Fink, Childs, Miller, Smith, Cox, Lentz

The Complete 10-inch series from Cold Blue

Michael Jon Fink: Two Pieces for Solo Piano [4:00]
Chas Smith: October 68 [4:30]
Rick Cox: These Things Stop Breathing, excerpt [4:00]
Peter Garland: Matachin Dances, #5 [2:30]

Cold Blue #0014 www.coldbluemusic.com*

Ingram Marshall

Alcatraz

Prelude - The Bay [6:30]

New Albion #040** www.newalbion.com

John Adams

Shaker Loops/Light Over Water

Shaker Loops- A Final Shaking [9:30]

New Albion #014** www.newalbion.com

Garland, Fink, etc…

The Complete 10-inch series from Cold Blue

Daniel Lentz: Slow Motion Mirror [4:30]

See above.

Paul Dresher

Dark Blue Circumstance

Dark Blue Circumstance [8:00]

New Albion #053. www.newalbion.com

*, ** - Find the recordings you've heard - go to the New Sounds Recordings Information page

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Twitchy Renaissance-Infused Minimalism

New Sounds

From the New Sounds Live concerts at Merkin Hall, Nico Muhly presents a series of new electroacoustic ensemble works, combining “twitchy Minimalism” and Renaissance polyphony. Hear brand-new works from "Mothertongue," along with other works, recorded live.

In Robert Moran's Kitchen

New Sounds

From October 30, 1989, the infamous "cooking show" with composer/raconteur Robert Moran. Recorded while cooking an Indian dinner in John Schaefer's kitchen, for reasons still not entirely clear. Along the way, we hear an "acoustic" version of Cage's 0:00 - for amplification of chopping vegetables and blender. And don't miss the teary conversation as onions are chopped. View the the recipes.

Michael Hedges and Michael Manring

New Sounds

The incredibly gifted and astonishingly original guitarist Michael Hedges left the planet much too soon in 1997. Avant-folk and ever-entertaining, Hedges made brilliant music with alternate tunings, harmonics and was known for striking the guitar’s body and strings with his fingers, palms and knuckles. His close friend and sometime collaborator, electric bass virtuoso Michael Manring, was a genre-bender, before music writers ever discovered that hyphenated term. He started out in the New Age bins, but moved all over with various projects, including the very first New Age-death-metal-jazz-funk-fusion record, among other things, with his “hyperbass”, (a fretless instrument which makes re-tuning mid-piece a little easier). On this October 10, 1987 edition of New Sounds, the two artists visited and played at the WNYC performance studios.

Caravan Variations

New Sounds

Like camels slogging through the sand, the exotic strains of “Caravan,” by Duke Ellington and his sometime trombonist Juan Tizol (with rarely heard lyrics by Irving Mills), have been played loose, fast, swinging, and/or slow by just about everyone. For this New Sounds program, it’s another of the occasional series of programs of Theme and Variations, where the premise is simple: take a single piece of music and explore what a number of musicians have done with it, through arrangements, deconstructions, and revisions of the original theme. This time around, it’s Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.” Listen to arrangements by Romania’s Fanfare Ciocarlia, Hungary’s Kalman Balogh & The Gipsy Cimbalom Band, the California Guitar Trio, the ska group Hepcat, banjoman Bela Fleck, Lebanese composer Rabih Abou-Khalil, and trumpeter/composer Jon Hassell, among others.