Various - Music for Sextet - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

2009 two CD , documenting links between avant-garde music and art in the 20th Century. Mentored by Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau from 1917 to 1923, the celebrated group of young French composers known as Les Six comprised Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Taillefaire. This 150 minute re-mastered double CD set features selected piano and orchestral works by Les Six composed between 1915 and 1945, including collaborations with Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Marcelle Meyer and Denise Duval. All selections were recorded between 1928 and 2007, including some personally performed or conducted by the composers themselves. The booklet includes archive images and detailed historical notes by James Hayward.

Characterized by orchestral flavors and electronic infusions, SYNCHRONIES by composer James Dashow blends contrasting musical conventions to be symbiotic an approach indicative of Dashow's ideologies of outward facing themes contributing to a singular purpose. Enjoy the precision and unique timbre proposed by electronic elements juxtaposed with classical instrumentation that challenges performers and delights listeners. James Dashow has had commissions, awards and grants from the Bourges International Festival of Experimental Music, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Linz Ars Electronica Festival, the Fromm Foundation, the Biennale di Venezia, the USA National Endowment for the Arts, RAI (Italian National Radio), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Rockefeller Foundation, Il Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte (Montepulciano, Italy), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Prague Musica Nova, and the Harvard Musical Association of Boston. In 2000, he was awarded the prestigious Prix Magistere at the 30th Festival International de Musique et d'Art Sonore Electroacoustiques in Bourges.

Navona Records presents European/American composer Svjetlana Bukvich's latest masterpiece EXTENSION, a multifaceted collection of pieces that use technology, music, and the motions of dance to both deconstruct and reimagine ideas of genre and cultural division. In EXTENSION, listeners traverse ten innovative pieces that are both deeply personal and universal. Bukvich describes herself as aiming for a Inchno-genre-borderless-flowInch with her music and, on a larger scale, in the structures of human society. Indeed, she captures that spirit immensely hybridizing musical languages from American minimalism, art and progressive rock, and German classicism, to Italian polyphony, Russian romanticism, jazz, and ethnic idioms, she creates a cinematic, 'fictocritical' sound that is entirely unique but at once familiar. From the opening whispers of the electric violin in The Beginning to the evocative title track Extension which mingles both voice and synth, the album is a sweeping conversation between the natural and technological, the language of sound and the language of numbers. The piece Once You Are Not a Stranger appears in three iterations instrumentally, vocally, and as an orchestral reprise. The meditative return of the piece emphasizes the expression of it's title - in the acceptance of profound loss and the redemptive possibilities that extend out of it, there is no division, and no one is a stranger. The composer herself knows the world's need for connection all too well - her past includes an escape from her home in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina in the midst of the Civil War before finding her way to America where she continued her pursuits in media arts. In her youth Bukvich has lived in Ethiopia and Scotland, experiences which also influenced her sonic ideas. EXTENSION offers an opportunity for reconnection through dismantling, rebuilding, and exploring concept