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New Sounds

Friday, January 11, 2008
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  • Bowed Piano Ensemble
    Bowed Piano Ensemble

    Stephen Scott's New York Drones

    For this New Sounds, the creator of the “bowed piano ensemble,” Stephen Scott, presents new music for bowed, plucked, hammered, and occasionally keyboard-driven piano. Most of the sounds are made directly on the strings of one open grand piano by ten players using a variety of materials and tools; nylon fish line, horsehair, guitar picks and fingernails, piano hammers, percussion mallets and specially-designed piano mutes. Scott’s latest, “New York Drones,” is a work dedicated to the composer Steve Reich in honor of his 70th birthday, and will receive its New York premiere on Saturday, October 28th in The Allen Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Frederick P. Rose Hall at 7:30 PM. In the work, Scott freely interprets the concept of drones to encompass not only long-sustained tones but also repeating patterns of rhythms on one pitch or repeating melodic and harmonic patterns in a single mode. We’ll also hear music from Scott’s song-cycle fantasy with the Bowed Piano Ensemble, Sounding Landscapes, which celebrates various landscapes, both physical and imagined, both natural and cultural, of Lanzarote, eastern-most of the Canary Islands. All this and more.

PROGRAM # 2599 with Stephen Scott (First aired on Fri. 10/27/06)

ARTIST(S)

RECORDING

CUT(S)

SOURCE

Stephen Scott & the Bowed Piano Ensemble

The Deep Spaces

Prelude [4:00] The Old Hall [2:30] O’er Vales That Teem With Fruits [3:30]

Not yet released. Due in 2007 on New Albion records www.newalbion.com*

Private tape

The New York Drones, excerpt [2:30]

Not commercially available.

Paul Dresher

Night Songs / Channels Passing

Channels Passing [10:00]

New Albion #003 www.newalbion.com*

Galeshka Moravioff

Verberences

Verberence #7 [7:00]

Musique Du Temple #VR1001 Info at www.galeshkamoravioff.com
To order, write to info@films-sans-frontieres.fr

Stephen Scott et al.

The Deep Spaces

Postlude [2:00]

See above.

Comments

  • [1] John C. Baker from Princeton, NJ January 11, 2008 - 08:51AM

    Riveted to your discussion yesterday about compression in recordings as I returned from a recording session in north Jersey. As a classcial engineer/producer, do workshops where this topic and "volume/loudness" is a passion. Have my hearing checked each year, and my aurologist tells me well over 50% of people she sees are teens, of which 50% already have permanent hearing loss, clearly caused by listening to pop sound compression at high volume on earbuds/phones. Thank you for bringing up the topic, as I fear our future generation of adults will ALL have the hearing problem every WWII fighter pilot suffers from due to high decible coninuous sounds battering their ears over many years.


This thread is closed.


Nico Muhly (www.myspace.com/muhly)

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.

Robert Moran

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.

Duke Ellington - www.dukeellington.com

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.

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