Tyondai Braxton

Second Inversion hosts share a favorite selection from this Friday’s playlist. Tune in during the indicated hours below on Friday, June 3 to hear these pieces. In the meantime, you’ll hear other great new and unusual music from all corners of the classical genre 24/7!

Tyondai Braxton: Casino Trem; Bang on a Can All-Stars (Cantaloupe Music)

cover The composer Tyondai Braxton has been busy with some interesting projects. We hear of a lot improvised electronic music performances in Brooklyn, and a 2013 installation piece at the Guggenheim Museum that featured a quintet of musicians sitting cross-legged on sci-fi ovular pods – some interesting stuff. His Casino Trem from Bang on a Can All-Stars’ Field Recordings is a rich tapestry of every electronic color of the rainbow, and makes me feel like I’m in the middle of an installation just listening to it. – Geoffrey Larson

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 11am hour today to hear this piece.

Stephen Sondheim: Johanna in Space (arr. Duncan Sheik); Anthony de Mare, piano (ECM Records)

1444893095_cover This arrangement is born from Sondheim’s epic horror musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. In the musical, a handsome sailor spies a young woman (Johanna) at her window and in song he declares his love, learns her name, and promises to come back for her. Later, Sweeney Todd (Johanna’s father) sings his own version of “Johanna” as he imagines what she’s like as a grown woman. In Sheik’s arrangement the two versions combine and take on an unearthly vibe created by the layering of dozens of guitar improvisations via a tape echo. It’s within this echo that Anthony de Mare’s delicate and sleek piano deftly drifts. – Rachele Hales

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 1pm hour today to hear this piece.

Nick Brooke: Chokoloskee (Innova)

826cover I absolutely love it when music conjures specific images. Nick Brooke’s Chokoloskee is one such piece. Written as a an alternate-reality “tableaux” on the town of Chokoloskee, Florida as part of the album Border Towns, the composer describes this work as “surreal Americana.” For me, this music is the sound of the memory of a legendary summertime party; not the objective sounds of the party in real-time, but what my recollection of the party sounds like, as experienced as an aural memory.

This piece incorporates radio samples, historical and field recordings, as well as “live” performance into a lively and pleasantly strange mashup. Aside from being riotously fun, this piece accomplishes the composer’s goal of “blurring the line between recording and live performance.”

All in all, Chokoloskee is a refreshing listen. I suggest using it to assist the planning of your next outdoor party. – Seth Tompkins

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 5pm hour today to hear this piece.

John Cage: Dream; Bruce Brubaker, piano (Arabesque Recordings)

51cEChNX7tL When you hear the name John Cage, you probably think of prepared pianos or philosophical musings, complete and utter sonic chaos, or maybe just 4’33” of silence. But Cage was actually a very thoughtful, introspective composer and thinker—and in few works is that made clearer than in his solo (unprepared) piano piece “Dream.”

Composed on a single treble clef staff (which is extremely unusual for piano), “Dream” features hardly any left-hand accompaniment at all. Instead, the utterly translucent melodic line drifts slowly and freely from one sustained note to the next, with pedal blurring all of it into a beautifully simple and ethereal dreamscape.

The piece was originally written as a piano accompaniment for a dance by choreographer Merce Cunningham, Cage’s life partner and frequent collaborator. Like so many of their cherished collaborations, “Dream” has since become a quiet, hidden Cagean gem—a soft and gentle reminder to immerse ourselves in the sounds around us, both in waking and in dreaming life. – Maggie Molloy

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 6pm hour today to hear this piece.

by Maggie Molloy

You’ve probably heard countless buskers playing bucket drums and other found objects on city streets—but you’ve never heard anyone bang on a can like this before.

The Bang on a Can All-Stars are a six-member amplified ensemble known for exploring the furthest reaches of the classical music world, with an affinity for imagination, experimentation, multimedia music performances, and all things avant-garde.

The one of a kind ensemble is comprised of cellist Ashley Bathgate, bassist Robert Black, pianist Vicky Chow, percussionist David Cossin, guitarist Mark Stewart, and clarinetist Ken Thomson, and their wide-ranging repertoire spans from the minimalist musings of Philip Glass and Steve Reich to the computer music compositions of Paul Lansky and Tristan Perich.

But the All-Stars’ latest project combines an even more colorful palette of creative influences. Toeing the line between music and sound art, “Field Recordings” is a new multimedia project which combines music, film, found sound, and obscure audio-visual archives to create a dialogue between past and present art traditions.

(Purchase links and more information from Cantaloupe Music)

“It’s a kind of ghost story,” composer David Lang said of the album. “We asked composers from different parts of the music world to find a recording of something that already exists—a voice, a sound, a faded scrap of melody—and then write a new piece around it.”

Lang is one of the co-founders of Bang on a Can, along with Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon. The three appear as featured composers on the new 12-track album, along with Florent Ghys, Christian Marclay, Tyondai Braxton, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Todd Reynolds, Steve Reich, Bryce Dessner, Mira Calix, and Anna Clyne.

The album begins with a performance of Julia Wolfe’s “Reeling,” a lively piece based around a sound clip of a French Canadian vocalist. He sings in a twirling, sing-song style with no lyrics, his melody taking on the role of a fiddle or banjo soloing in a folk reel. Little by little Wolfe adds more instruments to the mix, creating an increasingly chaotic and computerized sound, like a record being rewound and replayed over and over, speaking to the album’s overarching theme of manipulating recorded sound.

The next piece on the album is nothing short of an absolute treasure. Florent Ghys’s “An Open Cage” uses as its basis excerpts from John Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse),” a poetic five-hour diary recorded by Cage himself a year before his death. In Ghys’s piece, a solo pizzicato bass line dances within the rhythms of Cage’s calm and serene narration, painting his deadpan delivery with a funky groove and a distinctly contemporary color. The lively bass line creates an undeniably catchy duet with Cage’s witty and obscure observations, and the piece grows in musical force, gradually adding more instruments until finally a small chorus of voices appears, echoing Cage’s words.

Christian Marclay’s “Fade to Slide” is equally experimental. The multimedia piece is a dramatic exploration into the rich sounds and distinctive timbres of the world around us, featuring everything from water splashing to record playing, bike riding to gong ringing, glass breaking to soup eating, perfume spraying to bagpiping. Yes, even bagpiping.

Marclay specializes in creating sonic collages from found footage, as evidenced by the imaginative—and at times humorous—combinations of recorded sounds in both the audio and video versions of the piece. (The video version is included in “Field Recordings” on a DVD along with five other multimedia pieces.)

The All-Stars also pay tribute to one of the biggest names in contemporary classical: Steve Reich. The album features the ensemble’s own arrangement of “The Cave of Machpelah,” an excerpt from Reich’s multimedia opera, “The Cave.” The slow-moving and ambient piece features an interesting mixture of musical timbres, with wispy, high-pitched cello strings skidding above a deep, droning bass, muffled recorded sound, and a bowed xylophone.

The album ends with a performance of Anna Clyne’s “A Wonderful Day,” the first in a series of short electroacoustic works combining recordings of Chicago street musicians with live instrumental ensembles. This particular piece features the raw, slow voice of an elderly man singing a sweet and poignant tune, surrounded by the muted sounds of the city and the All-Stars’ gentle accompaniment.

Each piece on the album uses recorded sound in a different and distinct way, but they all have one thing in common: they combine music of the past with music of the present, thereby crafting a new vision for music of the future. And in doing so, “Field Recordings” opens up a colorful new can of worms in contemporary classical music.