The emergence of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique in the early 1920s not only presented an altogether new conception of pitch in music, it also prompted a dramatic and widespread shift in the fundamental thinking surrounding Western concert music. Its latent quasiscientific implications precipitated a number of new systems of composition. As composers foraged for newContinue reading “The Idiosyncratic Musicality of Marc Sabat”
Genre Archives
Ulrich Krieger / Trio Kobayashi. Winters in the Abyss.
From George Frideric Handel’s Water Music to Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s “Surf’s Up,” water and its properties have long fascinated prominent composers and been reflected in their work. In Winters in the Abyss, German-born, Los Angeles-based Ulrich Krieger has dived deep with his creativity, producing an hour-long portrait of marine layers from just below theContinue reading “Ulrich Krieger / Trio Kobayashi. Winters in the Abyss.”
Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain
Jump into an early version of Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, and you land in dark and turbulent, almost infernal terrain. Sounds are dense and blur into one another: trumpet amplified to distortion levels; prerecorded tape of unidentifiable noises; dense, rapid drumming of indecipherable rhythms. Later versions add more orderly elements: passages of stable pitchContinue reading “Nate Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain”