ZZYRUS: 20th Century Classical

Showing posts with label 20th Century Classical. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Olivier Messiaen – Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jésus

Solo piano stuff. I found this online and don’t have any info about the performance, but it’s a lot better than the shitty Naxos Records version that I own.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ymlwniomjih
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?0hmzykknzo4
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?4qqqwm2nmm5

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Karlheinz Stockhausen – Kontakte

Thanks to the eloquent writers over at Allmusic.com:
In the late 1950s, Stockhausen became increasingly influenced by the aleatoric music of American composers like Morton Feldman and John Cage, as well as by American jazz. These influences are evident in Kontakte, though it is a work that clearly belongs to the European avant-garde tradition. It also presages developments in Stockhausen's own style, including elements -- such the addition of instrumentalists to an existing tape composition -- central to his later works.
The title refers to the moments of "contact" between the electronic sounds on the tape and the live performers. The tape consists of percussion sounds altered by different electronic means, including a ring modulator, a reverberator, and an impulse generator. The instrumental parts intertwine with the taped sounds, creating a wildly diverse array of textures and timbres over the course of six sections, or "moments." The moments are determined by events on tape, but the instrumentalists also participate in the transition from one moment to the next by changing character. Each moment contains six subdivisions of intensity, from "just noticable" to "violent," that refer to variations in acoustical phenomena including volume, speed, and register. The pianist and percussionists must respond and interact carefully with the tape, ensuring a proper balance of dynamics and intensity.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ojynjgtvwnz

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Harry Partch – Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po (1995)

Partch based this, one of his earliest extant works, on the texts of the 8th-century Chinese poet Li Po. Written between 1931 and 1933, The Seventeen Lyrics were composed for Intoning Voice and Partch's creation the Adapted Viola, a hybrid consisting of a cello neck grafted onto a viola's body, its open strings tuned one octave below a violin. Performing the work on this 1995 recording are tenor violinist Ted Mook and intoning voice Stephen Kalm. (allmusic)

“The Lyrics by Li Po are set to music in the manner of the most ancient of cultured musical forms. In this art, the vitality of spoken inflection is retained in the music, every syllable and inflection of the spoken expression being harmonized by the accompanying instrument. The music accompaniment, or, more properly, complement, in addition to being a harmonization, is an enhancement of the text-mood and frequently a musical elaboration of ideas expressed” (http://www.sequenza21.com/index.php/952)

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ondmjrnzzjj

Iannis Xenakis – La Légende d'Eer (1978)

The music of Iannis Xenakis can shuttle seamlessly between extremes: from ancient mythology to modern science, from the intensely visceral to the impossibly cerebral and from private insight to public spectacle. Few of his works spanned these poles as effectively as his landmark electro-acoustic tape piece, "La Légende d'Eer. Written for the opening of the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris in 1978, "La Légende d'Eer" is a sweeping 45-minute work that takes its title from the myth of Er as recounted in Plato's "Republic." The music is a dense futuristic assembly of materials including non-Western percussion and constructed noise, and a dizzying array of computer-generated sound derived from Xenakis's complex theories of probability. (http://www.moderecords.com/catalog/148xenakis.html)

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ynmzzwmnmoz