The lushness and easy melodiousness of these four orchestral works is almost startling, given Ziporyn’s (b. 1959) history, but it is certainly not an unpleasant surprise. An essential element in the texture of this music derives from the large percussion section, reflecting the composer’s intense and life-long interest in gamelan music. ... The gamelan world does not dominate the current release, but it is nearly always lurking in the shadows, if it is not now and again bursting through in a more exuberant fashion.

Meredith Monk's (b. 1942) music has been linked to the sacred vocal works of Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century mystic abbess and composer. It's often been said that Monk's voice can sound simultaneously ancient and new. She certainly belongs to a group of singer/composers who reacted to the vibrato-laden ornate antics of 19th-century opera, and sought to return to the clarity found in medieval ars nova and chant, as well as Eastern European folk traditions. I remember the poet Robert Pinsky once saying that if you want true inspiration, don't look back one generation or even two, but delve way back into the distant past, to the origins of language and art. Monk has created timeless music.

Robert Erickson (1917-1997) is one of the most interesting and neglected American composers of the latter half of the twentieth century. This recording features compositions from 1963 to 1977 that embody the characteristics for which his work became most recognized: a heightened interest in the atmosphere of a piece, an obsession with timbre, ways of varying the sound of a work with experiments in new technique, and explorations into the new worlds uncovered through the invention of tape recording.

Like the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, much of the music here has a quality of timeless lament, of inconsolable sorrow. Tenderly human in expression yet superhuman in scale, it seems to contemplate our condition from a very great height. Mr. Marshall (b. 1942) enhances this effect by interweaving conventional instruments with prerecorded, computer-manipulated sounds or with live devices, like digital delay. The fusion of electronic manipulation and human intention is seamless but never slick.