Don't let the ugly cover fool you. There's a reason why this album is long out of print. No doubt, the ugly cover has something to do with its demise. But this sinfully delectable album would have surely pleased only the most hardcore matrons of ondes martenot, who usually have coarse palate anyway―and rightly so in my opinion. All of the works featured on this mind-blowing disc deserves to be heard at least twice but the piece by Serge Provost is especially notable.

Wikipedia
Rzewski (pronounced zheff-skee) attended Harvard and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt. In 1960, he went to Italy, a trip which was formative in his future musical development. In addition to studying with Luigi Dallapiccola, he began a career as a performer of new piano music, often with an improvisatory element. A few years later he was a co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum. Musica Elettronica Viva conceived music as a collective, collaborative process, with improvisation and live electronic instruments prominently featured. Bringing together both classical and jazz avant-gardists like Steve Lacy and Anthony Braxton, MEV developed an aesthetic of music as a spontaneous collective process, one that was shared with other experimental groups of the same period such as Living Theatre and the Scratch Orchestra.
The experience of MEV can be felt in Rzewski's compositions of the late sixties and early seventies, which combine elements derived equally from the worlds of written and improvised music.

David Lang's "the little match girl passion," for vocal quartet doubling on percussion instruments, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. It's a strong, striking piece with a surprisingly potent emotional punch. Part of its effectiveness derives from the story itself, which is so achingly poignant that it can hardly fail to raise a lump in the throat. The text is primarily compiled from the story by Hans Christian Andersen and from familiar sections from Bach's "St. Matthew Passion," which sound fresh and new in English translation.

The pieces in this album were realized from “How To Discover Music In The Sounds Of Your Daily Life”, a procedural score for research and composition with environmental sounds. The environmental sounds heard in “Country Boy Country Dog” generated all the melodies, harmonies and rhythms through electronic “transforms”. These intermediate transforms were then used to create orchestra pieces played back in the environment, completing a circle. (From the Liner Notes.)

Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and Berio's Folk Songs, classics of the twentieth century repertoire, inhabit entirely different aesthetic spheres, but their pairing is apt; the earthiness of Folk Songs is an ideal foil to Pierrot's strange otherworldliness. Hearing them together is revelatory because the juxtaposition accentuates the strength and individuality of each, and somehow they just seem to fit musically. This recording is also unique in separating the three sections of Pierrot with jazz interludes played by pianist Maria Baptist. They are not conventionally "jazzy" and have an intelligence and complexity reminiscent of Ligeti's Etudes. Konstantia Gourzi, who conceived of this pairing and the jazz interpolations, conducts the ensemble opus21musikplus. The variety and subtlety of tonal and expressive colors (and dialects, too) mezzo-soprano Stella Doufexis brings to the Berio are exactly what the work demands, but it has rarely been heard with such vividness. Doufexis' interpretations are nuanced and psychologically insightful; her performances are among the finest recorded versions of both works. Neos' sound is immaculate, immediate, and intimate. Highly recommended. ―Stephen Eddins, Rovi

George Crumb has long been America’s celebrated ancient voice of children of all ages. Once the voice of flower children, he set texts by Lorca in 1970 for soprano, boy soprano and the ethereal bent notes of an exotic percussion ensemble, abetted by harp, oboe and musical saw. It proved a quicker, surer, safer magical mystery tour than drugs (although they were then a common helpmate at Crumb concerts anyway).

Although the compositional style of Lou Harrison (1917-2003) evolved and matured during his long and productive life, he held fast to a number of basic aesthetic principles: a devotion to beautiful melody; the foregrounding of rhythm, melody, and counterpoint over harmony; a preference for just-intonation tuning systems; and the integration of influences from diverse world musics. On the present disc, which includes works from 1939 to 1987, all of these characteristics are in evidence.

МusicWeb
From the opening deep rumblings of this disc, it is immediately clear that this is something unusual. Comprising six works for hyperbass flute and tape, the environmental concern is obvious from the title. Each work concerns a glacier that still exists, using sound to describe the life-force of nature which is inherent in these landscapes. The instruments used are quite extraordinary. The hyperbass flute, an invention of the performer and composer Robert Fabbriciani, is the largest and lowest member of the flute family. Combined with a tape part of natural sounds and pre-recorded hyperbass flute, these compositions are soundscapes which are full of imagery and suggestion - the first track even made me start shivering! The sounds really are incredible, and I felt an urge to take the disc to a recording studio to hear the low sounds through speakers of a higher quality than my home stereo in order to get the full effect.

Amazon
This CD starts with a selection of nine songs by Ives. While they're performed with the customary skill and musicianship one expects of DeGaetani and Kalish, the real reason for purchasing this disc is the piece by George Crumb, "Apparition", written expressly for DeGaetani and Kalish.

"Mikhashoff's tango collection tells us much abut this seductive dance, but just as much about the personalities confronting it." (The New York Times)
Some performers are not only great interpreters, but also inspire composers to go in a direction they may not have otherwise considered. Internationally known as an interpreter of 20th century piano music and a specialist in American music, Mikhashoff was one of those performers, who through his enthusiasm for new music and his innovative undertakings, such as the Tango Project and the Waltz Project, advanced musical thought.

New World
Nearly 35 years separate this work from the large-scale Piano Concerto completed in 1985. Harrison's fascination with exotic musical sounds and designs led him to the actual building of Oriental instruments, including two complete gamelans. This activity, in turn, led him to a consideration of the manner in which instruments are tuned, and of systems of intonation in use throughout the world in the past and present.

Nimbus
This disc unites works by two distinctly original American composers who, while maintaining their own identities, share many similarities. To begin with, both men live on the West Coast: Alan Hovhaness in Seattle, Lou Harrison just outside Santa Cruz, California. This is more than an accident of geography: the Eastern seaboard has been the traditional centre of American musical life and both Hovhaness and Harrison are, to a degree, outsiders. They follow no leaders, lead no followers. Yet such is the appeal of their work that they have brought the musical mainstream to them rather than bending their aesthetics to public or professional taste.

Inspired by Berg's concerto using similar techniques (just not your otherwise mundane twelve-tone) is Lou Harrison's Concerto for Violin and Percussion where the violin (the only seminal instrument that stands out with a definite pitch―only without inversion) plays only three intervals: the minor 2nd, major 3rd and major 6th. Inversion, in the musical lexicon, is defined as a way to sustain the same interval(s) while playing different pitch(es), be they exact or modified, to fit into a scale or mode.

This composition―the first version written ca. 1908, revised after 1914, but published only in 1981―belongs to a group of studies which, as far as is known, was to contain at least 27 pieces of which many however remain uncompleted or are lost. These studies seem to have been less a formal cycle than a loose collection of single compositions in which Ives was able to pursue spontaneously certain conceptions and experiments without having to relate them to an encumbering, traditional form. The subtitle, 'Even durations - unevenly divided", indicates a rhythmic phenomenon that emerges when in a particular meter (measure) through a shift of accent (syncopation) the sense of meter changes to new strong beats and these are eventually perceived to be the main pulse. Another shift of accent can lead back to the original meter or to a new one, a process one can call metrical modulation. Because here Ives in one voice―one hand―allows the original meter to continue, two parallel but different meters are established and thereby two distinct tempi (for example a 4/8 pulse against 9/16 at Bar 10ff., or 4/8 against 3/8 in the passage beginning at Bar 83ff.).