On Demand
New Sounds
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yes is a pleasant country
For this New Sounds program, listen to several different new music settings of poems by E.E. Cummings. Hear some from the collection of settings to soundscapes by Evan Sornstein, called Curium. It’s a suite of twenty-two Cummings poems, read by twenty-two different people evenly spaced around the world from Taipei to Glasgow, Sardinia to California. Speaking of Calfornia, we'll hear music from Cali-based Daniel Lentz - a work called The Crack in the Bell, based on a Cummings poem, which uses tape delay and repeated notes to create bent and curved textures of tones. Listen to a new music setting or two by wunderkind composer Eric Whitacre, whose close attention to E.E. Cummings’ poetry brings out the emotion underlying every word. Plus, music by Susanne Abbeuhl and Joan Baez, among others.
PROGRAM # 2610, The “Music” of E.E. Cummings (First aired on 11/28/06)
|
ARTIST(S) |
RECORDING |
CUT(S) |
SOURCE |
|
Joan La Barbara |
Singing Through John Cage |
Forever And Sunsmell [3:30] |
New Albion #035 www.newalbion.com* |
|
Susanne Abbuehl |
April |
skies may be blue; yes [7:30] |
ECM #1766 www.ecmrecords.com* |
|
Joan Baez (w/Peter Schickele) |
Baptism |
All In Green Went My Love Riding [3:30] |
Vanguard #VSD 79275. Available at Amazon.com* Or available on iTunes |
|
Curium |
Nowever |
yes is a pleasant country [4:00] when god decided to invent [1:30] love is a place [2:30] o by the by [3:00] |
Dynamaphone #001 www.dynamo-phone.comOr available on CDBaby.com |
|
Daniel Lentz |
The Crack In The Bell |
the crack in the bell [14:00] |
EMI/Angel #49180. Out of print, but try auction sites. There is a reissue of the piece available on a CD called “Wild Turkeys”, from Amazon.com |
|
Eric Whitacre |
Cloudburst |
hope, faith, life, love [4:00] i thank you God for most this amazing day, excerpt [2:00] |
Hyperion #67543 **
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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.
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