David T. Little & Third Coast Percussion Release "Haunt of Last Nightfall"

by Ted Gordon on Feb. 26, 2014, 12:14 p.m.

New Amsterdam Records has just released an exciting new album of music by David T. Little, featuring Third Coast Percussion, along with Eileen Mack, Melissa Hughes, Andrew McKenna Lee, and Toby Driver. The album, "Haunt of Last Nightfall", deals with the massacre of El Mozote, El Salvador in 1981. One of the works featured on the album, "Last Nightfall," is available from PSNY. Little writes,

"It is based on the experiences of Rufina Amaya (1946-2007), a mother of three, and among the only survivors of El Mozote. Containing scenes from each day of her ordeal, the work explores an emotional reality that she may have experienced as she left her decimated family and village behind, crawling on her belly through briars and mud, toward her unwanted new life."

Check out a preview of the album here: 

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Alex Mincek at the Avant Music Festival

by Ted Gordon on Feb. 19, 2014, 3:05 p.m.

On February 28th, New York's Avant Music Festival presents an evening of premieres and recent works for percussion and saxophone by Alex Mincek, featuring Mincek on saxophone, Ian Antonio on percussion, Greg Chudzik on bass, as well as members of Talujon percussion ensemble. The program includes four works: V (2012), Nucleus (2007), Out of Thin Air (2013), and the world premiere of Trio (2014). Many more of Mincek's works for small ensembles are available through PSNY, including Stems for solo piano, now available in print. 

In 2013, Mincek won the Herb Alpert Award, awarded by the Herb Alpert Foundation and CalArts; now he heads to CalArts for a residency, culminating with a portrait concert in early March. Check out a recording of Nucleus on his 2011 CD on Carrier Records: 

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The "Lost" Works of Morton Subotnick: Ascent into Air

by Ted Gordon on Feb. 11, 2014, 4:16 p.m.

Morton Subotnick has enjoyed an expansive career as a composer and technical innovator for decades, and his touring schedule has grown extensively in the past decade, as he is recognized for his pioneering role in electronic and electro-acoustic music. Equally appreciated by fans of concert and electronic music, Subotnick is a legend in his own time. If you haven't yet, check out this lecture he gave at the Red Bull Music Academy:

Lecture: Morton Subotnick (Madrid 2011) from Red Bull Music Academy on Vimeo.

We're happy to announce the publication of several of Subotnick's "lost" works-- works that have been otherwise unavailable until now. The first of this series is Ascent into Air, commissioned and premeired at IRCAM in 1981, with Peter Eötvös conducting. 

Scored for pairs of clarinets, trombones, celli, pianos, percussion, and computer-generated sound, this work uses the metaphor of an amphibian's ascent from water to air as a dialectic metaphor for the evolutionary role of technology in art in the late 20th century. The amphibian represents art's double-inhabitance of two modes of existence, two modes of communication: one in water and one in air. As technology evolves in artistic practice, music finds itself in a similar position, inhabiting two modes of existance at the same time. Dialectically, "Ascent into Air" produces a synthesis of Subotnick's vision of the aesthetic and technical possibilities that contemporary music can afford us.  

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