Mode label

John Cage's artwork, 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs, appeared in the October 6, 1977 Rolling Stone magazine: a gala issue celebrating their move to New York. He constructed his 'waltzes' through chance operations as a series of 49 multi-colored triangles superimposed on the Hagstrom map of New York City. Later, he published a score for "performer(s) or listener(s) or record maker(s)" with the exact street locations depicted by each point of the triangle. Cage was an inveterate New Yorker and after his death in 1992, Don Gillespie, a long time colleague, decided to celebrate his memory by videotaping each of the 147 locations indicated in the score. An impartial rotating camera was used to capture every location, the durations of each determined by the I-Ching.The result is a joyful, Cagean celebration of the sounds and the, sometimes unexpected, sights of New York City: and a time capsule travelogue of how it appeared in the years 1994-95.

ADDITIONAL FEATURES:

the names of the actual locations you are viewing can be shown on the screen using your remote control's SUBTITLE button.

By using your remote control's alternate camera ANGLE button, you can toggle between the film, a detail map of the location you are viewing, or a full view of the map indicating the 3-point triangulation of the current Waltz.

16-page booklet with essay by Don Gillespie and a complete list of each Waltz location.

Bonus AUDIO realisation of "Waltz #9", recorded by Gillespie in March 1979.

This release is the first complete recording of all of Cage’s works for organ, plus 4’33” (on this DVD version only).

The organ is ideally suited to Cage’s aesthetic — its multitude of stops make it the ultimate prepared instrument. The fact that sound emanates from a number of pipes placed at discrete locations in space nicely accords with Cage’s idea of the separation of sounds in space. And it represents vast possibilities that could be released as sound through the use of chance operations. For this reason Cage’s organ music occupies a small but quite important place within his output.

For Some of 'The Harmony of Maine' Cage selected 18th-century American hymns by Billings, Law, and Belcher and altered them by extending certain tones and removing others through chance operations so as to attenuate the functional harmony underlying them. Here and there, melodic fragments from the original hymns remain. The 1978 and 1987 works were written for the German organist Gerd Zacher, an important champion of new music.

American organist Gary Verkade, a student of Gerd Zacher, is on the faculty of the Musikhögskola in Piteå, Sweden. He has appeared at major festivals and concerts throughout Europe and the USA. Verkade was one of the registrants in the first German performance of Some of 'The Harmony of Maine'. The DVD allows the listener to enjoy the sounds of the spectacular organ and its acoustic in surround sound while viewing Tim Chu’s painterly films of the organist with the up to six registrants needed for some of the pieces.

Includes booklet with trilingual notes by Rob Haskins.

DVD BONUS:

– Gary Verkade discusses performing Cage on the organ, how “chance” is applied to the performances and gives musical examples (31 minutes)

Performance of 4'33"

Dedicated stereo and 5.1 surround mixes.

Violin and viola players whisper over their instruments. A guitarist waits with the closest attention for the moment to make a gesture we might easily have missed. The tuba player rises to go over to the open piano, there to send sounds echoing into its interior. Two cellists, bowing with heavy pressure down near the tailpiece, produce an urgent rasping. From the timpanist comes the sudden fortissimo that seems to shock the music to a standstill… Renowned German composer Helmut Lachenmann’s music is expressive in extraordinary ways, requiring the performers to play their instruments via unusual techniques, making for both compelling listening and viewing.

Lachenmann performs in and supervises these recordings with Ensemble Signal, one of America’s leading New Music ensembles. In addition to performing as narrator in „…Zwei Gefühle …“. Lachemann also is the soloist for three of his piano works.

These studio recordings followed an intensive four-concert tour of this programme. Lachenmann taught each musician of Ensemble Signal individually on his language of techniques for this project. Liner notes by Paul Griffiths.

First in a series of Lachenmann on Mode Records.

The DVD version features all of the music with full video in 5.1 Surround Sound (Dolby and 24-bit DTS) as well as a dedicated stereo mix.

DVD BONUS: 20 minute documentary of Lachenmann in conversation with Seth Brodsky (Assistant Professor of Music at The University of Chicago), filmed at New York’s Miller Theatre.

This DVD documents the pioneering percussion works from the French school of theatre music, written for and championed by the legendary Parisian group Trio Le Cercle. These are 'French pieces', mostly written by non-French composers whose most important work took place in Paris in the 1970's and 1980's. The cultural friction between immigrant artists and a French culture that embraced them without completely welcoming them is apparent with every note. This is the music of outsiders with a story to tell, where questions of belonging, control, and place are central.

Many of these works are renowned in the percussion repertoire but their combination of theatre (visual, choreographic, architectural), with percussion makes little sense as strictly audio recordings. The visual aspect is essential to their experience. All receive their first commercial video release performed by percussionist Aiyun Huang, who studied with the members of Trio Le Cercle, giving authoritative performances of these works for solo through quartet. Each work is given a unique visual treatment. Liner notes by Steven Schick and Aiyun Huang. Among the highlights:

Vinko Globokar’s '?Corporel' for a percussionist performing on her body as the instrument is visually arresting, and often discomfiting, as we watch the percussionist strike, rub, caress and slap herself.

In Georges Aperghis’s 'Le Corps à Corps', a disjunctive treatment of text soon renders it useless as a vehicle for narrative, but creates instead an extraordinarily rich source of vocal incantations and drones that run parallel to the colourful hand-drumming.

Mauricio Kagel's two works are large pieces of absurd theatre. In an ultimate example of the burning issues of control and anarchy that raced through Paris of the late 1960’s like wild fire, Kagel’s 'Dressur' draws a pointed comparison between the control over horses in the practice of dressage and the control over performers necessary to effect a concert. 'Dressur' asks three percussionists to engage in a series of seemingly pointless and sometimes painful set of tasks.

(surround sound with full video)

John Cage’s vision of the future of music was first shaped by an ntense creative period from 1935-1942, when he wrote many of the seminal works of percussion chamber music featured here. When he composed these works, the young Cage was basically the same age as the members of Third Coast Percussion.

This release includes all three of the groundbreaking 'Constructions'. 'First Construction' (in Metal) utilises dozens of metal instruments which are beaten, scraped and shaken, creating an other-worldly mixture of resonant sound unlike any heard before it. 'Second Construction' prominently features one of Cage’s greatest inventions, the prepared piano.

Finally, 'Third Construction' brings the greatest degree of complexity and the widest range of instrumental timbres yet, creating one of the first landmark pieces in the percussion chamber music literature.

-There are very few recordings of the early works 'Quartet' and 'Trio'.

-The surprisingly beautiful sounds of everyday objects come forth in Third Coast Percussion’s recording of 'Living Room Music', recorded onsite at the futuristic Ford House in Aurora, IL, designed by one of America’s most iconoclastic architects, Bruce Goff, in 1947. Third Coast utilizs the house itself as an instrument for the first movement.

All works dynamically directed and filmed by Ross Karre. The DVD features surround and stereo audio. Hailed by the Chicago Reader as “one of the finest new-music ensembles in the country,” Third Coast Percussion's performances have swiftly gained national attention for effortlessly combining the energy of a rock concert with the precision and sophistication of classical chamber music.