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All Music Guide Beethoven's late music occasionally presents little moments of sublime terror, of miniature oracle and epiphany: a familiar form abruptly falters, a chord or gesture rudely cracks in two, and the comfortable surface rips and expels an alien sound―something utterly strange, inexplicable, irreducible. It hangs in front of the ears with the tonnage of destiny, eked out in frightfully direct but indecipherable words. And then the outburst swallows its own chaos and wraithfully withdraws. Wolfgang Rihm was savoring and submitting to such moments when he wrote his vast expressive juggernaut Music for Three Strings in 1977, at age 25. He clearly quotes certain cipher-like phrases from Beethoven's last string quartets, but a Beethovenian spirit haunts Rihm's work in more than isolated instance. In particular, he seems to perform an autopsy on the new expressive world opened up by Beethoven's last quartets, especially the obsession with expressive rupture, the notion that the moment of greatest expression is also the moment of tearing, of rip and rift in the musical fabric.

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The German piano duo of Degenhardt-Kent are among George Crumb's preferred pianists. Here they had the unique opportunity to work with both Crumb and Brown on this composer supervised disc, awarded four stars by France's prestigious Le Monde de la Musique. The works range from piano 4-hands (expanded to 6-hands in some movements!) for Celestial Mechanics, to 2 pianos (Zeitgeist) and on to 3 spatially distributed pianos for Corroboree.

When pianists Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles first met in 1978, they certainly had that aggressively modernist definition in mind. Both were members of Steve Reich and Musicians; both were fascinated with minimalism; both were drawn to the cutting edge of New York’s downtown new-music scene. Since their first concerts, arranged with Reich’s help, the duo-pianists were expanding their repertoire, moving back through the twentieth century and embracing new music of a broader stylistic range and it is from those works that U.S. Choice is drawn.

Professor at both Princeton and Juilliard, Milton Babbitt is—by almost unanimous consent—America's most important composer of twelve-tone music. Yet for over three decades Babbitt's music has been more talked about, often in heated controversy, than heard or understood. Sextets, Babbitt's first solo string piece since the Composition for Viola and Piano. Written twenty years later, The Joy of More Sextets represents, in comparison with its predecessor, the ever-increasing lucidity of Babbitt's late style. Built of trichords (groups of three pitches), fragmentation becomes no longer an issue. Like all of Babbitt's mature music, Sextets is written in twelve-tone system, but to listen to it intelligently one must put aside common misconceptions of how twelve-tone music works—such as the idea that octaves are forbidden, or that no note can be repeated until the other eleven have been stated.

Getting to know Milton Babbitt’s music is like discovering a new world. For more than forty years Babbitt has been publishing compositions that explore the ramifications of Arnold Schoenberg’s epochal insight, and each successive work opens up new vistas or reveals striking new perspectives within the twelve-tone universe. The present recording spans Babbitt’s compositional career, touching on most of the musical veins that run through his work. The variety of his compositions is immediately apparent from their diversity of ensemble and scope; their underlying communality emerges upon greater familiarity. On first hearing, An Elizabethan Sextette and Playing for Time would appear to have little in common; yet they contain identical underlying abstract structures. About Time employs a simple variant of the same structure, and Groupwise contains structures closely related to those in the aforementioned works. Briefly put, these underlying structures are contrapuntal webs of twelve-tone rows, craftily woven together to yield a maximal variety of ways of combining segments of different rows into collections of the total chromatic. Supple enough to afford a wealth of different interpretations both of detail and mode of presentation, these contrapuntal networks nevertheless preserve certain recognizable large-scale attributes in all their incarnations.

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Andante Pierre Boulez's masterpiece, Pli selon pli, is a portrait of Mallarmé, whose Surrealist approach is aptly mirrored by Boulez's post-serialist musical language. The verse is a succession of vivid, picturesque, even sinister images unfolding cheek-by-jowl and making no linear sense — it's a series of non sequiturs, inviting you to contemplate the poetic images both alone and in juxtaposition with each other. This verse can engage listeners on a highly personal level, because no two encounters with its imagery are likely to yield anything close to the same reaction. Boulez's natural mode of expression could hardly be more distant from functional, essentially predictable harmony, so his music lends itself to Mallarmé's poetic cognitive dissonance—particularly given the composer's keen sense of color and proclivity for ejaculatory solos, duets and (for lack of a better word) instrumental collisions.

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Without further ado, allow me to resurrect what has been out of circulation for nearly two decades. To this day, it remains downright puzzling but still profoundly beautiful.

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All Music Guide Other Minds Records presents the definitive recording of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano, originally released on LP by 1750 Arch Records, newly remastered in spectacular sound, representing the most faithful reproduction of what Nancarrow heard in his own studio. This is the only available recording utilizing Nancarrow’s original instruments: two 1927 Ampico player pianos, one with metal-covered felt hammers and the other with leather strips on the hammers. Nancarrow's Studies is a cycle of work unique in many respects, not the least being its seeming indivisibility from itself. As the primary text of the music is a hand-punched piano roll intended to be played on specific, Ampico model player pianos, it does not lead to a wide range of options in terms of interpretation. As such, with such narrow parameters, one might think that all compact disc representations of Nancarrow's player piano music are created equal, but they are not so. This particular recording stems from master tapes made in Mexico City for release on the 1750 Arch label in the 1970s and '80s, with Nancarrow's own specially retrofitted pianos, in Nancarrow's studio, and with the composer himself picking tempos and working with producer Charles Amirkhanian to achieve ideal results. These recordings were considered state of the art at the time and still sound great, and can certainly be considered definitive. While the differences might be slight, they are still significant, particularly in regard to tempo choices, which can either make or break this music, and breaking it isn't hard to do at all. Hearing them played back on Nancarrow's pianos also affords an additional layer of articulation missing from many reproductions; one of Nancarrow's pianos was fitted with metal hammers, resulting a clattery sense of attack, whereas the other had hammers covered with leather strips for a more mellow sound. Make no mistake about it: the Other Minds set truly represents what Nancarrow himself wanted you to hear when it came to his player piano music, and he did have very specific ideas about that. —Uncle Dave Lewis

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It's been said by Stockhausen that Klavierstücke were his "drawings". In the short span of ten years between the ages of 24 and 33, Stockhausen was stimulated by such eclectic subject matters as “electronic music”, “pointillistic music”, “spatial music”, “group form”, “chance”, “silence”, “noise”, “notation”, “statistical composition”, “musical processes”. These were Stockhausen’s pioneer years, wherein many of these elements were meticulously applied to his music which brought him world-wide recognition. The first cycle of the Klavierstücke, numbers I-IV, are ascetic miniatures written in Paris in 1952-3 when Stockhausen was studying with Messiaen. During this time he was evolving from “point” music to “groups” – or gruppen. “VI” exploits factors largely outside the control of composer or musician, its overall structure governed by the natural periods of sound decay and reverberation. “XI” displays Stockhausen’s first thorough-going application of aleatory principles, the score comprising irregularly distributed groups of notes which the pianist plays randomly within certain parameters: the pianist decides what order to play the groups in, but the score contains instructions in each group which affect the way that the next, whatever it might be, is realized.

You can say what you will about Cage, Feldman, Wolff, and Earle Brown as much as you like (I know I did), but if you have yet to hear Stephen Scott's Vikings of the Sunrise (New Albion, 2006) you don't know what you're missing out on. The Deep Spaces is a song cycle based on the words and music of famous poets and composers (including Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Liszt), inspired by the natural beauty of Lake Como in Northern Italy. As in his Vikings album, his 10-member Bowed Piano Ensemble is featured in this disc working the interior of a grand piano with all kinds of objects, notably rosined sticks and nylon threads, in intricate manual choreography to summon forth puzzling spectral halos and unprecedented harmonies. In recent years, Scott has added a new twist to his music—the voice of Victoria Hansen—which has shifted the focus of his compositions towards the exploration of different kinds of melodic material. Scott's settings for Hansen have a graceful savoir-faire, the delicate arpeggios and percussive caresses centering on her never-invasive timbre, the whole often sounding like the soundtrack to a fairy tale, especially when the Ensemble tears your heart out with those unpredictable harmonic shifts and tangential bass lines so typical of Scott's work.

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Daniel Variations is, in the composer's words, "a memorial and remembrance" of the slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whose abduction and brutal murder in Pakistan in 2002 was chronicled in the book A Mighty Heart, which in turn became a feature film. Steve Reich combined texts by Daniel Pearl together with the texts from the Old Testament Book of Daniel to produce a somber and yet uplifting tone accompanied by pulsating music for strings, piano, and percussion. Reich explains: “Daniel Variations is in four movements using texts from the Biblical book of Daniel for the first and third movements and from the words of Daniel Pearl, the American Jewish reporter, kidnapped and murdered by Islamist extremists in Pakistan in 2002, for the second and fourth movements.” The texts/movements are: 1. I saw a dream. Images upon my bed & visions in my head frightened me (Daniel 4:2, or 4:5 in Christian translations) 2. My name is Daniel Pearl (I'm a Jewish American from Encino, California) 3. Let the dream fall back on the dreaded (Daniel 4:16, or 4:19 in Christian translations) 4. I sure hope Gabriel likes my music, when the day is done. Daniel Variations was premiered in 2006 in New York City.

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This is the second of two volumes of Twelve Etudes by William Bolcom, which were originally written for Paul Jacobs, whose untimely death in 1983 brought the project to a halt. Bolcom has now completed the set and extended the dedication to include the pianists John Musto and Marc-André Hamelin. The career of William Bolcom (b 1938) has led him from the West Coast (Mills College and Stanford University) to Paris (Milhaud and Messiaen) and New York in the late 1960s, where he contributed to the ragtime revival. Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) began his life as a composer writing "music for the struggle" in the late 1920s against the rise of Hitler. Battle Piece was to have been the first of a series of works for solo piano entitled Encouragements, a project Wolpe began in 1942, during the darkest days of World War II. On the title page of the first version, Wolpe wrote: "Battles, hopes, difficulties/new battles, new hopes, no difficulties." Thus Battle Piece belongs to the genre of Kampfmusik that forms such an important part of his life's work. Hamelin weaves through these disparate pieces with astonishing ease.

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Boomkat Within the space of his short, yet incredibly illustrious career, Nico Muhly has contributed his talents as an arranger to recordings by Bjork, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Rufus Wainwright and The National, while also enjoying a successful sideline as a composer in his own right, presenting works in conjunction with a variety of high profile orchestras - he even finds time to work as a performer and conductor for Philip Glass on his various film soundtracks. Mothertongue is the sophomore solo effort from Nico Muhly, following up on the wide acclaim of his 2006 debut, Speaks Volumes, and marking a further step towards genre cross-pollination and a more avant-garde approach to the conventions of composed music. By this point, any notions of comfortable, conservative Americana are out the window and you're confronted by a highly experimental clash of vastly different musical schools. Quite unlike anything you're likely to encounter, this second album from Nico Muhly shows even greater ambition than its predecessor, establishing a language that's far removed from the kind of easy-going post-Blue Notebooks modern composition that's become so widespread. Very highly recommended.

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Toivo Tulev, as one of the principal figures in Estonian music today, contributes to a wide range of styles. Like Arvo Pärt, Tulev studied Gregorian chant and early polyphony and its influence on his music has been profound, though not always obvious. But unlike his Estonian predecessor, he has seen the world change with the fall of the Soviet Union right at the time when his music was beginning to be performed, and he has contributed strongly to the stylistic pluralism that characterizes Estonian musical establishment. Paul Hillier directs this world premiere recording.

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This disc features one of Perle's earliest surviving compositions Pantomime, Interlude and Fugue (1937). Also included are his 1971 Fantasy-Variations, which combine an improvisational (but precisely notated) musical rhetoric with a more tightly structured variation format; Six New Etudes (1984), a companion set to Perle's immensely successful Six Etudes of 1976 (recorded by Bradford Gowen on NW 304); Suite in C (1970), and the fiendishly difficult Short Sonata (1964). In 1986, Perle received the Pulitzer Prize in music and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship—honors confirming his belated emergence as one of today's most distinguished composers

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This is volume 5 from The Society for Electro-Acoustic Music (SEAMUS), featuring some well-known names from the electronic avant-garde circle in the United States. Each year, a CD compilation is released of what SEAMUS National Conference attendees vote as the 'best of show'.