Here we have another cassette that was released by the Canadian magazine Musicworks that focused on Canadian avant-garde music since the late 70's. Musicworks was founded by Andrew Timar and John Oswald in Toronto. They released dozens of cassettes that
accompanied the Musicworks magazine that published on the relation between science, technology, ecology, sonic environments and music.
Music As Transformation was assembled by composer and sound artist Tina Pearson in 1983. It features edits and excerpts by different Canadian composers involved with experimental music, field-recordings, abstract composition and also contains sequences of spoken discourses. Amongst some of the composers that are present are R. Murray Schafer, known for his concept of acoustic ecology, David Mott, a baritone saxophone player and composer from Toronto and Gordon Monahan, a Canadian pianist, visual and sound artist.
The compilation creates its own unfolding narrative blending natural field-recorded sounds with avant-garde composition within an existential or reflective framework based on the experience of environments and life-cycles. It takes the listener on a subtle transformative trip through sounds of folk traditions, water, rain, fire and other ecological elements weaving in and out of those sound-spaces constantly going back and forth from improvisation and electro-acoustic music into the dark yet sunbursting universe.
A beautifully assembled piece that can't be titled anything else but Music As Transformation. It reminds me a bit of the music by Darren Copeland that was published on the blog some time ago. Even though the extensive tracklist is available, the cassette has been unindexed to maintain its natural flow.
Music As Transformation - The hypnotic focussing of the word mandala
Here we have a compilation cassette that was released by Canadian magazine Musicworks that focuses on contemporary avant-garde music since the late 70's and is still active to this day. They released dozens of cassettes that accompanied the magazine thoughout the decades.
Musicworks 46 starts with a piece of synthesizer played live by Henry Kucharzyk. The piece is composed by pioneering Canadian female electronic music composer Ann Southam. Since the early 70's she has been involved with electro-acoustic composition in combination with dance and choreography. Her album Sky Sails from 1973 which she made in collaboration with Seán Ó Huigín is a highly sought after record of electronic composition and modern composed collage. It's regarded as one of the more important recordings of Canadian experimental electronic music of the 70's.
The second part of the A-side continues with installation soundworks that were given the name "Very Nervous System". It's a multimedia installation focusing on bodily movements and sound recorded by Canadian artist David Rokeby. There is a sense of artificial interpretation of organic and natural sounds. Those themes are explored in pieces as Waterworks or Gamelaraga. That conceptual sonic exploration of pseudo-natural themes is also used by Fast Forward, a tribal rhythmic project by the American percussionist Paul Wilson, who in this case mostly uses a Trinidadian steel drum in different rhythmic manners.
The compilation ends with a contemporary composed jazz piece composed by Canadian violinist Malcolm Goldstein dedicated to the South African township of Soweto. The piece titled Soweto Stomp was written in 1985 to commemorate the Soweto uprising in 1976 and is dedicated to the black people of South Africa in their struggle for freedom and equality.
Orkest De Volharding (Orchestra Perseverance) is the oldest Dutch "Democratized" jazz and modern composed music orchestra that was founded in 1972 by probably the most innovative and important modern composer of The Netherlands, Louis Andriessen. He played together with many important Dutch jazz and improvisation musicians like Willem Breuker (who later also revolutionized Dutch free jazz with his legendary Willem Breuker Kollektief), Willem van Manen and Bernard Hunnekink and many others.
De Volharding was founded in the aftermath of the Nutcracker actions (Aktie Notenkraker): directed actions against the classical music establishment and its musical conventions. These conventions had to be cracked and hierarchical structures in music were criticized (for example getting rid of the conductor to give musicians their own space). During the late sixties and early seventies there were many emancipatory cultural movements and actions in Holland, in theatre there was Aktie Tomaat (Action Tomato: drama students going to the theatre to throw tomatoes at the actors). These sentiments partially derived from the legendary counter-cultural Provo Movement (1965-1967) that in its political urgencies, freedom thought and its critique of the capitalist state and economy (causing environmental problems etc.) can be seen as a precursor to Hippie movements worldwide. They pioneered the potential of happenings and subversive yet pacifistic actions to make political statements in The Netherlands.
Another reason for these cultural actions aiming at radically changing the values of society was the Vietnam War and the discontent with post-war conservatism. At that moment lots of people saw the direct results of the west-block (capitalism) versus east-block (communism) and for many young people in the west socialist and Marxist ideas became subversive, but also more appealing as a result of the cruel Western warfare and the undesirable excesses of capitalist society (environment, social inequality etc). Orkest De Volharding also had many musical pieces favoring the socialist side. They did the music for many theatre plays of the left-wing cultural sphere.
In 1977 De Volharding did this album called "In Het Woud Is Veel Te Doen", meaning: "In The Woods There Is A Lot To Do" ("En La Selva Hay Mucho Trabajo Por Hacer"). The music was composed by Bernard Hunnekink and played by Orkest De Volharding. The music on this record is actually a soundtrack created for an Uruguayan Children's movie with the same title. On the A-Side of the record we can hear the instrumental version and on the B-side again the same piece accompanied by the Dutch lyrics (to my ears still less interesting than the instrumental, even though I speak Dutch).
The text is for children and it's about wild animals in the forest that are being captivated by a hunter that wants to bring them to the Zoo. Later they manage to escape by boat and the story concludes with the moral that says: "Nobody should be ever taken from his or her home. Never again like how it used to be before." Not sure if this is also a metaphore for something in the Uruguayan political history: probably.
The music reminds me of many Dutch modern composed records I posted in the first years of the existence of this blog. It even reminds me a bit of certain compositions by Ennio Morricone, who also should have had a small influence on Louis Andriessen. The album also reminds me of the "Alemania-Bolivia" tape that No Longer Forgotten Music just posted: strange conceptual music for, and partially by Children about the differences between a children's life in Bolivia as opposed to a children's life in Germany. Actually the German political Krautrock band Floh De Cologne also did a concept album about the Chilean coupd'état in the early 70's called "Mumien". There were many examples of albums that were conceptually and musically combining the Latin American and Western European world within their 1970's (political) context.
There are lots of nice drawings of animals for children included on the record cover that I cut up and all put in the video below. I end with the liner notes from the sleeve about them:
These drawings were not made to be published: Actually they were a sort of dialogue. The only way in which a comrade could think to break through the bars of his jail cell. As such he managed to send out a little black pigeon with a little red beak. And with a message of battle and hope it reached his little daughter. Every mother, every father everyone who is being incarcerated in a "Zoo" at the moment could have made these sketches. Every one of them hopes to see their children. They all know: "How much there is still to be done in the forest". To this parent and their children we dedicate this story.
Update:
I was invited by students of the Amsterdam University and the EYE Filmmuseum to a private screening of this animation film and many other films from the Cineclub Vrijheidsfilm, cinema militante, archive. I will update the information about this release soon. You can watch En La Selva Hay Mucho Trabajo Por Hacer in its original Uruguayan version below:
Károly Binder is one of Hungary's most prominent jazz pianists. He is known for his rhythmic and unorthodox style of playing as well as for his experiments with the prepared piano. Binder takes the piano as a starting point but also uses many percussion instruments on the side. His first albums In Illo Tempore and Kontinentspiel that came out in the 80's in Hungary are great examples of Eastern European free jazz with lenghty pieces exploring rhythms while taking the listener into a world of its own. That is what usually matters: it's not just the plain exploration of sound. The sound is able to birth the existence of an own world. A bit comparable to the Pierre Courbois album I posted a long time ago.
Oriens & Occidens was recorded in the southern Hungarian cities of Baja and Szekszárd in 1995. On the album Binder works together with the Italian percussionist Federico Sanesi from Milan who was greatly inspired by oriental rhythms and percussion instruments like the Indian tabla and Javanese Gamelan. The result is an interesting musical meeting of cultures and free exploration of jazz, rhythm and non-western percussion instruments.
The music is played quite gently most of the time and tends to create an oriental background atmosphere that doesn't demand an overly focused attention from the listener. At times the music breaks loose from this atmosphere reminding me of certain moments of Embryo's Reise or of the British-Indian jazz album Cosmic Eye. Oriens & Occidens seems to fit this great European jazz tradition where Indian and oriental sounds are being combined with free jazz. Some examples of this tradition are the German project Jazz meets India, the British project Curried Jazz as well as the music of the Reform Art Unit from Austria.
In any case, this is a nice album of mid-90's Hungarian-Italian contemporary jazz meeting the orient.
After Opus '70 which I posted a while ago here's Opus '71, another showcase of modern composed Dutch composition this time from the year 1971. The Opus series started out in the mid-sixties and went on all the way to the end of the eighties. They were promotional copies send to foreign radio stations to show contemporary developments in Dutch music. For this reason every composition has an introduction in English. The Opus series were not regularly for sale which makes them quite hard to find.
The featured composers on Opus '71 are Ton de Leeuw, Peter Schat, Jan Vriend and David Porcelijn. Their pieces are quite freeform and spacious resulting in unexpected sound movements and strange sonorous adventures. I like these compositions because I can listen to them in a less rigid way than regular classical music because of their improvisational components. Also due to the use of electronic instruments and electric guitars in some of the pieces a multi-layered sound is created. Especially programme 2 is very weird and takes on some strange imaginative conceptual ideas in music which you can read about on the insert.
It's remarkable that even here in Holland there isn't that much public interest or exposure for this type of Dutch music and composition. The Opus series create a great opportunity to dig into the surprising world of Dutch modern composed music of which many compositions are already quite forgotten.
This record here is a contemporary composed avant-garde album from Venezuela. It was created by one of Venezuela's most important modern composers Juan Carlos Nuñez and the famous playwright and one of Latin America's most important telenovela writers José Ignacio Cabrujas. Among Cabrujas' work are soap opera adaptations for the famous Venezuelan novels Doña Bárbara and Canaima written by Venezuelan writer (and once president) Rómulo Gallegos. It's interesting that men so famous created this pretty unconventional musical piece. During this album Nuñez leads the orchestra and plays the piano and synthesizer, whilst Cabrujas wrote the lyrics.
The album is a thematic homage to the city Caracas and showcases a combination of spoken word poetry, modern composed pieces, latin motives and invocative sound impressions. Some of the pieces contain Venezuelan instruments like the cuatro. It sheds light in an impressionistic and unconventional way on the daily life of Caracas but also shows its profound depth and the serenity that lives underneath the city's hectic character. Ofcourse this particular feeling lives on in today's Caracas as well.
The first side is a bit crackly, but this is quite impossible to find in any condition I'd say, mainly because of its limited copies.
This cassette is a compilation of some of our favorite Italian composers (some of them were part of Il Gruppo Nueva Consonanza): Egisto Macchi, Ennio Morricone, Giorgio Carnini, Alessandro Alessandroni, Sandro Brugnolini and Miriam Bordoni. Some of these composers are known for creating soundtrack and library music for great Italian (B-)movies from the sixties and seventies.This time a set of songs based on biblical themes was put together by papal record label Paoline which still exists today. So what exactly happened here?
Risonanze was a series of three based on biblical themes that came out both on cassette and vinyl. I think most of the songs existed before on other library records or albums by these composers. But somehow they got compiled together on this series to resemble biblical subjects and notions placed in a religious framework. Surely these recordings are older than 1979, but this cassette apparently came out late seventies (or at least the record according to Discogs).
It almost feels like this series was published as souvenirs from Vatican City or as some sort of religious paraphernalia just like a small statue or postcard. In any case, this series contains beautiful music and does create a sacral and sometimes serene atmosphere, although it also goes into freaky psychedelic music sometimes. Furthermore I know that during the early seventies lots of Italian records with a Christian concept leaning towards prog-rock, electronic music or folky stuff came out. If someone could point me out to some of the more interesting ones I'd be very happy.
Sadly we don't have the first volume of the series, but volume three will follow shortly! Stay tuned!
As promised in the first post of Hungarian electronic music, here's the second one that came out in Hungary compiling some of the electronic music composers that were active in the seventies and eighties. I have to say that this one is probably the key record for Hungarian electronic composed music and in my opinion even more incredible than the other one.
Five Hungarian composers are present here: Iván Székely, Miklós Csemiczky, Máté Victor, Lászlo Király and István Szigeti. Some of these composers have published some solo records in Hungary which are really worth it to check out. The music ranges from electro-acoustic pieces to really intense electronic pulsating sounds intwertwined with singing of Hungarian vowels. It never bores and is really versatile while still creating the feeling that it's a whole, which is an amazing effort done for a compilation.
The first piece For Alrun by Iván Székely was recorded live in 1975 during an electronic music showcase in Bayreuth. The record starts and ends with two Hungarian folk songs to complete the musical journey:
Népdal: Gyere ki te gyöngyvirág
Mert feljött a holdvilág, jaj
Majd kimegyek hajnalba Magos fejű kalapba, jaj
Folk Song:
Come out, you lily,
For the moon has risen, jaj
I'll go out at dawn In a high-topped hat, jaj
Weöres Sándor: Lied:
Várlak a déli sugárban,
várlak az éji sötétben,
várlak a télben, a nyárban
várlak a földön, az égen
Lied by Sándor Weöres:
I await you in the noon sun,
I await you in the dark night,
I await you in winter, in summer
I await you on earth, in the sky
After the first Bass Clarinet Identity I posted a while ago, we finally get to hear the second one by Dutch Bass Clarinet virtuoso Harry Sparnaay. The same circle of composers and musicians are on here creating three pieces in which the Bass Clarinet (obviously) plays the main role.
On this particular record the electronic pieces are no longer present, but are replaced by choirs and more acoustic contemporary classical composed ones. Therefore this record might be the closest to classical music on this blog. Fortunately this does not mean that the music is dull. The A-side consists of a 30 minute piece called Soirée Musicale composed by Spanish composer Enrique Raxach and invokes unexpected sound-bursts of entangled string and wind-instruments in a landscape of haunted spheres. The other pieces by Dutch composers are more minimalistic in which Sparnaay's Bass Clarinet gets more freedom to explore its possibilities. The whole is actually a bit more conventional musically, but still creates something eerie and unexpected. It's a nice continuation of the Harry Sparnaay universe on this blog.
Ton de Leeuw (1926 - 1996) was a Dutch composer who had studied ethnomusicology under Dutch composer Jaap Kunst (known for his studies of traditional Indonesian music in the aftermath of Dutch colonialism). De Leeuw is considered one of the most renowned modern composers of the twentieth century from Holland. He also studied in Paris under Olivier Messiaen and mystical Gurdjieff pianist Thomas de Hartmann. De Leeuw pioneered as one of the first Dutch composers to experiment with electronic sounds. This record came out for the occasion of De Leeuw's sixtieth birthday.
It contains two pieces, the first one Litany of Our Time (1969-70) is a modern composed collage of sounds and words spoken in Dutch and English. It's an interesting diverse piece sung in a sometimes very Rock In Opposition-like way. Reminding me of Sally Potter´s or Maggie Nichols' voice. The lyrics are quite cynical. From the liner notes:
"Litany is unusual among my oeuvre in that it was inspired directly by a personal experience. The subject matter of the eight tableaux chiefly derives from the 4 november 1969 issue of "The Times", purchased on that day at London Heathrow Airport to while away the time prior to departure. The backdrop against which the different scenario's unfold then, is this: the airport, a crossroads of communication, yet a place where people pass each other by like so many disembodied entities. Offsetting this we have the newspaper: the immediate source of information from the outside world and mouthpiece of reports whose reality the consciousness can scarcely grasp. This quality of dislocation has its counterpart in the structure of the piece. Images loom towards us, fragmented as though through a mist; texts often indistinguishably blurred; music voicing the existential isolation of modern man and the mumblings of his litany. These evocations should not, however, be interpreted in the light of an artistically slated form of reportage, a dramatisation of reality or a piece of social criticism. What "Litany" records is not so much particular events in themselves but the manner in which our minds absorb them; minds divorced from a capacity for true fellowship with the outside world and a meaningful communication with fellow humanity at large. The instrumental component is not designed for background effect, but represents a voice in its own right."
The second piece is an electronic one which title refers to a characteristic of the work of Dutch painter Rembrandt.
This is one of Hungary's greatest compilations of electronic avant-garde music together with this one which I will post later if it's not around somewhere. There are five Hungarian composers of electronic music present here: Zoltán Pongracz, Péter Eötvös, Iván Patachich and a combined piece by Máté Victor and Péter Winkler. A great piece on here is "Mese", meaning fairy tale, in which the sentence Egyszer volt, hol nem volt, meaning Once upon a time - the classic opening line of a fairy tale - is being processed looped and cut-up.
As you can guess electronic music from behind the iron curtain is quite an obscure thing. Nevertheless, many composers from the countries of the ex-eastern bloc had the possibility to travel to the west so they could study with people like Karlheinz Stockhausen or others. Usually these things were considered legitimate in the name of science, academy or high art. Also almost every big city in Eastern Europe had an experimental radio or television station studio in which they experimented with sound. From Warsaw to Bratislava to Beograd they all had their own kind of Radiophonic Workshop. Loads of cool Hungarian modern composed avant-garde stuff here.
This record has been uploaded to youtube, but has less than a hundred views and my copy happened to be in slightly better condition. This blog may lose a bit of its orthodoxy just to be able to keep on going with new material. Sometimes it might be available somewhere, but as a worse rip or practically not to be found. I will post some of these recordings by doing my own rips and I will shed my own light on those releases.
Next stop is another modern composed record by Dutch bass clarinetist Harry Sparnaay. Ladder of Escape consists of six compositions for bass clarinet by composers from all over the world. There is a Korean, Dutch, two Australian, American and a Spanish composer present on this record. An earlier Sparnaay album on this blog can be found here.
Ladder of Escape is a kind of metaphor for the way in which Sparnaay helped to promote and free the bass clarinet of its conservative and dull image. Ladder of Escape is also a piece on here dedicated to the memory of Spanish Catalan painter and artist Joan Miró. Most of the compositions are solo pieces on the bass clarinet. The composition I uploaded below is a long piece called For Bass Clarinet and Tape composed by Australian composer Martin Wesley-Smith. It has a hectic almost RIO or Zappa-esque touch to it and merges the bass clarinet with electronics.Very nice.
Though perhaps a curiosity of the past, the bass clarinet has now thrown off its chains. Through its limitations it has fought its way to freedom. Indeed, if the bass clarinet was formerly regarded as a chained instrument, it needed a Houdini like Harry Sparnaay to free this "low-keyed lady" under the instruments from her isolation.
Friedhelm Döhl (born 7 July 1936 in Göttingen) is a German composer and professor of music. He has composed many works of avant-garde music created for piano, chamber groups, voice and electronics.
This record, which was published through the artist label of well known Swiss fluxus-artist Dieter Roth, has two sides of long pieces for piano. The A-side contains the piece "Odradek" composed for two open and prepared pianos and performed in 1976 in Basel, Switzerland. It's an improvisational piece which according to the liner notes could not get captured entirely on vinyl. Therefore the beginning and ending contain almost only silence. The B-side has the improvisational piece "Black & White" which was recorded in 1977 in Basel for Dieter Roth.
This recording contains very minimalistic piano based sounds in which the piano itself is used in a very unconventional manner. A true "artist-record".
So it's finally time for something modern composed on this blog. At first glance this looks like a quite dull classical record cover, but wait, who is peeking through the pillars of the post-apocalyptic ruins? It's Harry Sparnaay! Sparnaay is a very renowned Dutch bass clarinetist, composer and teacher. At this particular record Sparnaay plays solo pieces as well as with pianist Polo de Haas under the name Fusion Moderne.
This record shows his mastering of the instrument through five pieces composed by mainly Dutch avant-garde composers. At times the instrument itself is not recognizable any more and tends to go towards some real drone-like music. Some pieces like the 18-minute-long Mountains have electronic tape manipulations and synthesizer additions.
My favourite piece here is the haunting Chimaera from 1974 where they use weird background tape-noise in combination with the bass clarinet. On the liner note it says: "The confrontation between the two (clarinet and tape-noise) works like an exorcism in which the soloist tries to exorcise the inscrutability of the background with his background." Sounds good.
This is some nice modern composed electro-acoustic stuff which you don't see that often in combination with a bass clarinet.
