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A premiere recording from the Talujon percussion ensemble of The Plains at Gordium by composer Petr Kotik, whose pioneering work as founder and leader of the S. E. M. Ensemble has been a stalwart champion of the Avant-Garde from it's inception, at the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, SUNY/Buffalo, in 1970 to present day. Well-loved recordings by the S. E. M. Ensemble (Julius Eastman Femenine, The Entire Musical Work of Marcel Duchamp, Morton Feldman For Philip Guston) are easy to find. That has not been the case for Kotik's own music. This beautiful recording of a relatively recent work by Kotik provides a beguiling, labyrinthian entry into Kotik's own musical vision. Petr Kotik's notes on The Plains at Gordium When Alexander the Great came in 333 B. C. to the Phrygian city of Gordium (located in what is today central Turkey), he was confronted by a puzzle no one could solve. Alexander apparently solved the puzzle, but all that survived from the story is a parable, a legend of the Gordian Knot. In the summer of 2004, many issues I was facing seemed mysterious and unsolvable. This may be why the legend of the Gordian Knot came to my mind when deciding on the title of the piece. The Plains at Gordium was composed from June to August 2004 and is dedicated to Charlotta Kotik. The incentive to compose the piece came from a percussion group in Brno, Czech Republic, who asked me for a piece of music. Not being a commission-disciplined composer, I wrote a piece for six percussionists, while the Czech group, DAMA-DAMA had only four members and could not perform it. The size of the piece also defies the scale of a standard percussion piece, 1,290 measures over a 108-page score. The Plains at Gordium belongs to a group of compositions that I started in 1971. All of the music is based on a steady pulse. Although the various pieces, for example There is Singularly Not
