DRAM News

CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc.) LPs Now Available on DRAM

Posted on Wednesday, January 20, 2010

DRAM is delighted to announce the availability of twenty newly digitized LPs from the CRI label, the initial batch of approximately 400 CRI LPs that we will be making available over the coming months. Never before issued in any digital format, these titles have been functionally unavailable for more than two decades. Each album includes the original liner notes, and all are also available as premium-quality on-demand CD-Rs from New World Records. The first group of twenty albums includes music by Charles Amirkhanian, Jack Beeson, Easley Blackwood, Julian Carrillo, Theodore Chanler, Mario Davidovsky, Robert Erickson, Ben Johnston, Kenneth Gaburo, John Melby, Quincy Porter, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Robert Ward. We will add approximately 15-20 LPs each month, and intend to have all titles available by the middle of next year. (After the first two groups of releases, the remainder of the titles will be issued in numerical sequence.)

CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc.) was founded in 1954 by Otto Luening, Douglas Moore and Oliver Daniel. Moore was a well-established American composer, Luening was just beginning his work with Vladimir Ussachevsky, with whom he would help found the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1958, and Daniel was a promoter for such American musical luminaries as Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison. Dedicated to the promotion of new music by American composers, CRI released over 600 recordings on LP, cassette and CD over its 49 year history, including works by Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Harry Partch, Ned Rorem, Roger Sessions and Charles Wuorinen, to name just a few. Ownership of the CRI catalogue was assumed by New World Records in 2006, since which time New World has worked to maintain the availability of many CRI titles that had gone out of print or, with the current project, had never before been digitized.

The complete list of CRI LPs made available in this first batch is as follows:

Schuller/ Blackwood: Chamber Works

Theodore Chanler: The Pot of Fat

Lester Trimble: Symphony/Five Episodes/Louise Talma: La Corona

Davidovsky: Synchronisms/Sollberger: Chamber Variations

Robert Ward: Sacred Songs for Pantheists/Symphony No. 3

George Crumb: Night Music I/Robert Erickson: Chamber Cto.

Quincy Porter / George Barati

Quincy Porter: String Quartet 3/Oboe Quartet

Karl Weigl: Songs with String Quartet/String Quartet No. 5

Julian Carillo: Mass for Pope John the XXIII

Harvey Sollberger/Fred Lerdahl: Chamber Works