FELDMAN, MORTON - COMPOSING BY NUMBERS - THE GRAPHIC SCORES 1950-67 (CD)

Performed by The Baron Workshop. "When Feldman met Cage in the winter of 1949, they quickly established a friendship based upon a similarity of intent and a mutual respect for the work each was doing. Soon thereafter, Feldman showed a string quartet he had been writing to Cage. Cage's enthusiasm for this work, and delight in Feldman's being unable to explain 'how' he had written it, gave Feldman an all important 'permission' to follow his intuition. This period of time marks the beginning of Feldman's 'graph music', so named because it was written on graph paper, but also because it is part of a larger movement in 20th century music during which music notation departed from the traditional staff notation and began to incorporate a great deal of graphic symbols. In these 17 works, Feldman was working towards a vision of plasticity and freedom. One hears in these works the micro-polyphony of later Ligeti, noise which he later rejects, and often a ferocity within the sound/performance --characteristics which he eschewed in his later work. Of the 17 works he composed in the graphic style, this recording offers a total of 13 of them." 'Projection' (complete), 'Intersection' (complete), 'Marginal Intersection', Out of 'Last Pieces', 'The Straits of Magellan', 'In Search of an Orchestration'. (LABEL INFO)