DRAM News

New World Records is reissuing three historic titles from the CRI catalog: Ives Plays Ives (formerly CRI810/April 2006); Pioneers of Electronic Music (formerly CRI 611/April 2006); and Lou Harrison: Chamber and Gamelan Works (formerly CRI 613/June 2006).

Originally one of CRI's five best-selling recordings, Ives Plays Ives (NW 80642-2) includes forty-two tracks, representing seventeen works spanning the years 1933-1943. The disc includes tracking information and extensive historical notes, and has been painstakingly remastered to reduce surface noise.

By 1933 Ives had retired from his insurance business and had largely finished his autobiographical Memos. He had heard performances (mostly very disappointing) of his instrumental works, but not of his piano works. While on an extended European vacation, he introduced himself to recording, at the Columbia Graphophone Company in London. Over the course of a decade that included four sessions, Ives recorded seventeen pieces, including the early March No. 6, the rejected Largo for Symphony No. 1, and the "improvisations," which indeed may have been freshly created in front of the microphone in 1938. But most of the music recorded---the Four Transcriptions from "Emerson"; the Studies Nos. 2, 9, 11, and 23; and the "Emerson" movement of Sonata No. 2 for Piano: Concord, Mass.---is closely related to Ives's early, unfinished Emerson Overture for Piano and Orchestra (circa 1910-1911).

All of the music on Pioneers of Electronic Music (New World 80644-2) is the result of the pioneering work of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and its composers. Of the seven composers most closely associated with the Center from its early years, six are represented on this disc. In addition, New World 80644-2 presents Pril Smiley's Kolyosa (1970) in a newly remastered version taken from a better source tape supplied by the composer.

In 1950, the Columbia University Music Department requisitioned a tape recorder to use in teaching and for recording concerts. In 1951 the tape recorder arrived, an Ampex 400; and Vladimir Ussachevsky, then a junior faculty member, was assigned a job that no one else wanted---the care of the tape recorder. This job was to have important consequences for Ussachevsky and the medium he developed: electronic music was born. Over the next ten years, Ussachevsky and his collaborators, with the path-breaking support of the Rockefeller Foundation and encouragement from two of the country's leading universities, established the first large electronic music center in the United States, the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. The Center, which Ussachevsky directed for twenty years, became one of the best-known and most prolific sources of electronic music in the world. The guest composers and Columbia-associated composers who produced pieces at the Center include Bülent Arel, Luciano Berio, Mario Davidovsky, Jacob Druckman, Arthur Kreiger, Daria Semegen, Pril Smiley, and Edgard Varèse. Ussachevsky's own students at the Center included Jon Appleton, Wendy Carlos, Charles Dodge, Robert Moog, Alice Shields, Harvey Sollberger, and Charles Wuorinen.

Lou Harrison: Chamber and Gamelan Works (New World 80643-2) features newly commissioned liner notes by Dr. Leta E. Miller, a noted Harrison expert and the author (with Frederic Lieberman) of Composing a World: Lou Harrison, Musical Wayfarer. All works represented on this disc---Concerto in Slendro, Main Bersama-Sama, Threnody for Carlos Chavez, Serenade for Betty Freeman and Franco Assetto, String Quartet Set, and Suite for Percussion---are illustrative of Harrison's major contributions to twentieth-century American music: "the development of the percussion ensemble as a viable performance medium, the linkage of Asian and Western musical styles, and the exploration of just intonation tuning systems."

Harrison, who died in 2003, firmly believed in "music's power to create cultural bridges." To that end he wrote music that was full of expansive melodies and rhythms and reached a wide range of concertgoers.