JULIUS EASTMAN (1940-1990): Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla for 4 Pianos, TOMASZ SIKORSKI (1939-1988): Listening Music and Diaphony for 2 Pianos.

Catalogue Number: 07R058

Label: Dux

Reference: 1188

Format: CD

Price: $18.98

Description: This release brings together two composers from opposite ends of the minimalist spectrum. Both had troubled lives, both had pronounced self-destructive tendencies that manifested as substance abuse and bizarre behavior, and both died prematurely at the age of forty-nine. Had Eastman not possessed an almost unparalleled capacity for alienating people, he might well, by now, be as much an icon of minimal music as Riley, Reich or Glass; his idiom is as individual and approachable as any of them (though more socially aware and confrontational than - well, most composers, really). Evil Nigger (the militantly black, flamboyantly gay, iconoclastically unconventional, counterculture composer had a penchant for, let us say, provocative titles) is as exhilarating as minimal music gets. A fragment of a minor scale and a chorale-like snatch of melody repeat obsessively over rapid-fire repeated notes, with manic, obsessive energy. These remain as demonic idées fixes throughout the work, gradually expanding their range of pitch registers, entering at different pitches, sometimes at grindingly discordant intervals, until at times an overwhelming density of cacophonous texture is briefly exposed, like a terrifyingly inescapable rapid flow of lava, anchored by sporadic unison statements of the "chorale" theme (announced by Eastman counting in his legendary performance from the Pick-Staiger Concert Hall at Northwestern University, which may or may not have been cues necessitated by rehearsal constraints, and which have been adopted by some, but not all, of the handful of subsequent performers as part of the music). The sudden intrusion of a strident alarm, which is swept up and absorbed into the tumult, heralds the last section of the piece. Gay Guerrilla builds up a succession of increasingly dense chords, and then superimposes clashing intervals and repeated notes in various registers over them in tolling subdivisions of a steady, continuous pulse. Eventually a chant-like tune emerges, aggressively hammered out against the chordal background as the piece advances threateningly and recedes in a succession of waves of accumulating and dissipating texture. Sikorski's pieces, just as obsessive, are, by complete contrast, hypnotically meditative and non-confrontational. Listening Music consists of little overlapping gestures moving in and out of phase that form a repeating pattern, awash in pedal, that gradually slows, suggesting a distant carillon of bells gradually winding down. Diaphony begins with a more focused, up front variant of the same idea, stopping and starting its sequences of gestures like a malfunctioning music box; the second half consists of broken fragments of a chiming chord.. Lutoslawski Piano Duo w/Joanna Duda, Mischa Kozlowski (pianos - Eastman pieces).

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