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“What is very little heard in European or Western music is the presence of sound as the voice of nature. So that we are led to hear in our music human beings talking only to themselves. It is clear in the music of Tan Dun that sounds are central to the nature in which we live but to which we have too long not listened. Tan Dun’s music is one we need as the east and the west come together as our one home.” —John Cage

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To see, to hear Stefano Scodanibbio is indeed an unforgettable experience. It is, in fact, a transcendental experience. In the hands of Stefano Scodanibbio the double bass is no longer a separate object, but instead becomes an extension of the performer's body, in this sense accomplishing the "oneness," or the identity of the whole, affirmed by Zen Buddhism and embraced by Cage. The impeccable and virtuosic technical skills Scodanibbio displays are enough to produce awe, but technique alone, however unusually mastered, cannot generate the extraordinary intensity of his performances.

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The Sunday Times Henze is best known for bulky stage works, but his catalogue includes much chamber music, of which this disc provides an enjoyable selection. Two items are operatic spin-offs: Ein kleines Potpourris aus der Oper "Boulevard Solitude" is three movements for flute, vibraphone, harp and piano, and is followed by a violin-and-piano Sonatina, based on his children's opera Pollicino. The sturdily dissonant Toccata mistica, for piano (Ciro Longobardi), is linked to the oratorio The Raft of the Medusa, and Neue Volkslieder und Hirtengesänge, scored for bassoon, guitar and string trio, to music Henze wrote for Oedipus Rex. Carillon, Récitatif, Masque is a glistening little opus for mandolin, guitar and harp.

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New Albion Described by The Village Voice as ''the world's premiere string piano virtuoso'', the performances by Margaret Leng Tan comes across as very strong in light of the typically disengaged continuity of Cagean long silences. Joan La Barbara's chaste tones provide additional contrast. "The Perilous Night" was written for the prepared piano, John Cage's now classic invention from the late 1930's, where various objects inserted between the strings of a grand piano act as mutes which completely transform the timbral characteristics of the instrument. "The Perilous Night", one of Cage's more complex preparations, calls for a piano to be heavily muted with materials ranging from the standard bolts, nuts and weather stripping to bamboo slivers.

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As a teacher to some of America's most renowned composers including Milton Babbitt, David Del Tredici, David Diamond, Miriam Gideon, Andrew Imbrie, Frederic Rzewski, George Tsontakis, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, among others, Roger Sessions could easily be perceived as the grand daddy of American modern music. And yet, he remained an anomaly among his contemporaries. While many of his colleagues (second-generation modernist composers who matured between the world wars) viewed the first explosion of modernism as a mandate (or at least an excuse) to chart largely divergent paths―pursuing the "ultra-modern," searching for an American idiom, rooting around for a "new objectivity," or transforming expressionism into an overtly political movement―Sessions resolutely maintained a conservative and comprehensive vision of American musical culture. He believed in the capacity of music to transcend the "specific, individual and conscious" and, presumably, all incarnations of parochial fashion. Not surprisingly, then, Sessions channeled his thought into music for ensembles and genres associated with the culmination of the central canon of European music, especially favoring the orchestral symphony-he wrote nine, over a fifty-year period.

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For a half-century now, as composer, conductor, instrumentalist, scholar, educator, administrator, jazz historian, and general activist, Gunther Schuller has been a unique and indispensable factor in our musical life. The three works on this disc, all composed within the space of a few months in 1993 and 1994, can hardly fail to be recognized as music of intensity, power and compassion, and indeed Schuller has acknowledged that they have a profound personal significance for him: two of the works bear loving testimony—in the most direct sense—to a unique and irreplaceable factor in his own life. They are memorials to his wife Marjorie, who died in 1992.

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It's been said that Roger Sessions continued where Schoenberg left off or, better yet, he wrote what Schoenberg never composed. You may easily recognize in this CD the same densely contrapuntal language that characterized Schoenberg's orchestral music. He was often referred to as a “difficult” composer. Nicholas Kenyon, reviewing the premiere of the ninth symphony for the New Yorker observed that it was a “tough, dense score and, as with so much of Sessions’s music, difficult to like at first hearing. But, something compels one to listen and to listen hard…. The most striking aspect of the music is its constant state of flux, its perturbed restlessness.”

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Only gradually has the music world come to realize how individual George Perle's music is, what a flexible musical language he has developed, and how different that language is from serialism. Perle never writes down to an audience and never worries about "accessibility," but he is a firm believer that "a piece that 'makes sense' will reach one, at some intuitive level, even at first hearing." Perle's divergence from mainstream twelve-tone music came early. In 1937 he borrowed the score to Alban Berg's Lyric Suite through which he discovered Schoenberg's twelve-tone system; but instead of regarding the row as an inviolable ordering of the twelve pitches, he considered it a modified scale that the composer could move around in at will. By the time he realized his mistake, he had discovered so many possibilities in his own, more flexible system that, as he said, "Schoenberg's idea of the series seemed so primitive compared to mine." Perle persevered in developing a "twelve-tone tonality," method of using the entire chromatic spectrum that corresponds closely to the major/minor system of traditional tonality.

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"Andreas Haefliger is a musician first and pianist second. He is a pianist to watch but, more importantly, he is a pianist to listen to." ―Chicago Tribune The works on this disc comprise Sofia Gubaïdulina's complete solo piano output. They come from her early mature period in the sixties and seventies, yet they pre-date her international rise to prominence that occurred in the eighties and nineties. Though they lack the unusual instrumental disposition Gubaïdulina often revels in, these piano works bear all the hallmarks of spiky rhythm and harmony, unusual instrumental colouring, and hardy Russian poeticism, that are so richly apparent in her other music.

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This superb disc brings together music by composers dedicated to exploring the varied and distinctive colours of the classical accordion, in definitive interpretations by the outstanding acclaimed accordionist David Farmer, who gives a fascinating recital of 20th-century Russian and Finnish works, including music never before heard on disc. A highly-celebrated figure in contemporary music, the prolific Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina has written many times for the accordion. De Profundis (1978) deals with human suffering and redemption, ranging from dark clusters to ecstatic chorale passages. The accordion's full capacity is explored, with delicate filigree motifs heard alongside a pounding bass passage orchestral in proportion. Et Exspecto is a very beautiful and virtuosic work taking the Resurrection as its inspiration, given its world-premiere recording on this disc.

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Forget Sousa and clown marches. This is an otherworldly drone experience. A cavernous panorama of sonic exploration: delicious deep drones; spiraling swells of brass shifting like seismic plates. Like LaMonte Young’s Well-Tuned Piano, Stuart Dempster’s trombone drones, or Main’s Firmament, Tom Heasley’s digitally manipulated tuba conjures up a distant cosmos that we can only hope to visit.

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The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was the first electronic music center to be established in the United States. From 1959 to the late 1970s, it was one of the premiere sound facilities in the world. The vast majority of pieces composed at the Center—approximately three hundred—were composed during this period. Some have become classics of music history. This selection, drawn from those seminal years, is an excellent overview of the wide variations in musical style and aesthetic that was encouraged by the Center’s guiding spirit, Vladimir Ussachevsky. Charles Dodge’s Earth’s Magnetic Field is a relaxed, expressive piece in which he captures a sense of radiance. The New York Times called it one of the “ten most significant works of the 1970s.” Ingram Marshall’s Cortez manipulates a speaker’s voice to create a brooding meditation on an apocalyptic poem by poet-friend Snee McCaig. Alice Shields was a young member of the Center’s initial team. Musique concrète sound sources and the composer’s prerecorded voice form the basis for Dance Piece No. 3 (1969) and Study for Voice and Tape (1968).

Ligeti’s Cello Concert―particularly when combined, as here, with Lontano―offers a wonderful introduction to the maestro’s music, and Siegfried Palm, to whom the work is dedicated, is its ideal interpreter.

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AMG This time our intrepid new music crew are found enchantingly mucking around underground in the Cistern Chapel, Fort Worden Cistern, Olympic Peninsula, Washington...exploding a balloon ("Balloon Payment") to demonstrate the natural reverberation time of the space, making suspended vocal ("CCCC" / Cistern Chapel Chance Chants) and unusual instrumental sounds, and dropping percussive stuff. Lovely and mysterious.

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Cedille Records celebrates composer Elliott Carter’s 100th birthday (December 11) with Oppens Plays Carter, the only fully-complete CD survey of Carter’s solo piano works, including two world premieres, performed by one of his leading interpreters — American pianist Ursula Oppens. The disc features Carter’s pivotal Piano Sonata (1945–46), the breakthrough work in which Carter found his voice and projected the scope of his talent, and his transcendental Night Fantasies (1980), written for a group of four pianists including Ms. Oppens, who gave the premiere. Seven shorter pieces written between 1994 and 2007 complete the disc, which concludes with the world premiere recording of Carter’s virtuosic Caténaires (2006), a harmonically compelling, fiendishly difficult, toccata-like succession of rapid-fire 16th notes.