The eMusic Dozen: Contemporary Classical from New World Records

Yes, this is the highest of the so-called high modernism, but it's not gonna kill you to try to figure out what's going on here. And what's going on is not what the title would lead you to expect. "Sextets" refers not to a group of six players (the music is for violin and piano), but to the six-note phrases that run through the piece. Babbitt could've (and probably would've) been a mathematician if he hadn't become a composer (and with his love of puns, maybe a side career in the Catskills nightclubs), and the danger is that the mathematical workings of notes on paper would be less engaging to the ear; but Babbitt's music, when played well, has a clarity and lucidity that makes each phrase seem inevitable. And that is the key -- Babbitt's music is as challenging to the musician as it is to the listener, and all too often, performances of his music have been by musicians who sound as if they're counting furiously.

Terry Riley's piece "In C" is usually hailed as the work that, in 1964, ushered in Minimalism. Riley became known for his keyboard works, often with tape delays and electronic effects (which inspired the Who's anthem "Baba O'Riley"), and for his love of Indian classical music and the sounds of the Near East, but this relatively recent collection reminds us that he often used to play the sax. "Assassin Reverie" features the Arte Sax Quartet, playing with some fairly provocative taped sounds (helicopters, gunshots); "Uncle Jard" pairs the saxes with Riley himself on keyboards and voice. He has been teaching Indian raga singing since the early '70s, and that tradition blends to surprisingly good effect with the jazz-blues piano-playing that the young Terry Riley played to support himself. Rounding out the album is Riley's sequel to "In C," a 1965 work called "Tread on the Trail," a work made up of small cells repeated by the players -- in this case, twelve overdubbed saxes.

One of the defining sounds of modern American classical music is the use of electronics, whether it's the light amplification that John Adams uses on the orchestra in his operas or the full-frontal electric assault of Glenn Branca. Subotnick was a pioneer in the field back in the '60s -- and has somehow managed to remain a pioneer in the 21st century. This album features two works from the late '80s/early '90s, a particularly fertile time when Subotnick was exploring the interaction of live ensembles and a computer music system that could respond in real time to that live band. The best of these works is Subotnick's "The Key to Songs," but these works are in the same vein. In fact, "All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis" is for the same group, the California EAR Unit, along with voices that intone words from one of Max Ernst's surrealist writings; the work is full of contrasts, most notably between the slow opening and the wild dance suite that follows.

The late Robert Miller offers four very different, but distinctly American approaches to the piano. Cage's prepared piano is essentially an East-meets-West percussion device. But an even earlier precursor to Cage's keyboard revolution is the music of Henry Cowell. He wrote pieces for the strings of the piano, the best of which are probably "The Aeolian Harp" and "The Banshee," both of which are here. Ben Johnston is a pioneer in microtonality and alternative tunings, and his "Sonata for Microtonal Piano" will challenge listeners who believe those 88 keys should never leave those 12 old equal-tempered notes. Conlon Nancarrow is best known for his keyboard works that were so intricate and layered so many rhythms above each other that he never expected humans to be able to play them. Miller presents three of the Player Piano Studies, which have a warped sense of humor; listen closely and you'll hear elements of stride and other forms of mid-century pop lurking among the off-kilter lines.

Since the 1970s, La Barbara has been creating works for her own voice, usually overdubbed in the studio, that have freed the voice from its usual role as the carrier of a text. "Voice Is the Original Instrument" was the manifesto-like title of one of her earliest LPs. This is a collection of sophisticated soundscapes built around the sound of La Barbara's extraordinarily flexible voice, aided and abetted by a global cast of instruments. On "Calligraphy II/Shadows," an arsenal of traditional Chinese instruments add intriguing color to La Barbara's vocals which are, as always, hard to pin down to any one particular tradition. The piece has a stately, almost courtly charm. That voice is up front again in the wild and dramatic title track, with a large contingent of percussive noisemakers.

This is a very important record. Bresnick's reputation as a composition teacher has soared in recent years, following the startling success of his students, who include all three of Bang on a Can's founders. Bresnick's legacy as a teacher is secure, but it has threatened to overshadow the fact that Bresnick can just flat-out write. For proof, listen to his "Fantasia on a Theme by Willie Dixon," inspired by Cream's recording of the great American bluesman's "Spoonful." Using rock instruments like electric organ and guitar, as well as drum kit, it is evidence of an American composer whose ears are wide open -- and evidently have been for quite some time. Or, "Tent of Miracles," which uses overdubbed sax to wild effect -- but which is structured very much along the lines of an Indonesian gamelan's interlocking rhythms. The biggest piece is "Grace," essentially a double concerto for two marimbas, which simply should not work as well as it does.

One of music's most eccentric figures, Partch rode the rails as a hobo during the Great Depression, turned his back on conventional music notation and, eventually, on conventional music instruments and modes of singing. Captivated by the rhythms and the microtonality of American speech, he devised an entirely new way of dividing the octave that allowed for a kind of declaimed, pitched speech, and then created over the years the unique instruments that to this day are known collectively as the Partch Instrumentarium. Indie-rockers who think they invented the DIY approach may be surprised to find that Partch, an outsider's outsider, pressed his own records and sold them through the mail. This particular volume of his collected works is particularly strong: "Barstow" is a collection of hobo inscriptions from a highway railing near the eponymous California town (and requires a Parental Advisory sticker for crude language) that is possibly his most accessible and good-natured work.

Crumb might best be described as music's answer to the painter Anselm Kiefer: he specializes in dark, nocturnal works that draw much of their power not from the notes, but from the aura of mystery that surrounds them. A remarkable colorist, Crumb will ask his performers to stretch the limits of what they and their instruments can do. This often involves minute changes of, for example, fingers on a string, or breath on a flute's mouthpiece, or paper on a piano's strings. For this reason, many of his works call for amplification, as in the haunting "Vox Balaenae" ("Voice of the Whale") for electric flute, cello and piano, with crotales (ancient cymbals -- a favorite recurring sound in Crumb's works). This may be Crumb's best-known work, and is meant to be played by masked musicians who are lit in a way that suggests the deep darkness of the open sea where the whales sing their eerie songs.

Alaska's JLA again, with a piece that somehow sounds like it was written in, and possibly about, the wide, apparently empty expanses of the Arctic. The title grows from the 14th-century tract called Cloud of Unknowing – a mystical treatise by an anonymous Catholic monk which bears a strong resemblance to the spiritual approaches of the Sufis and the Tantric Buddhists, among others. With that idea as a starting point, Adams has created another album-length work that, like "For Lou Harrison" above, suggests the sound world of a deceased giant of the American avant-garde -- in this case, the timeless stillness of Morton Feldman's later works. Its 17 instruments play "a few elementally simple sonorities and gestures," as JLA says. "My aspiration here was not so much to compose a piece of music, as it was to evoke a wholeness of music, a sounding presence somehow equivalent to that of a vast landscape."

New World Records reissued two different LPs here -- the Feldman is a useful document for anyone interested in hearing the development of what would become a singular voice in American music (Feldman's almost mystical choral piece, "Rothko Chapel," is a genuine classic of American classical music). But the real winner is the Cage collection, played by Jeanne Kirstein. Cage invented the prepared piano by putting metal, rubber, and wood on the piano strings as a way to evoke the gamelan-like sonorities of a percussion ensemble. The focus on rhythm meant that melodic and harmonic materials were stripped down to the barest essentials, and the result was pieces like "Bacchanale," "The Perilous Night," and "Tossed As It Is Untroubled." That same approach worked well in the "Suite for Toy Piano," which has spawned, half a century later, a whole subgenre of keyboard works.

Not to be confused with the Pulitzer Prize-winning, opera-writing Bay Area composer John Adams (though he always is), John Luther Adams is based in Alaska. A recovering drummer himself, JLA (as he is almost universally called) shared Lou Harrison's interest in the idea of using simple means to create music of immediacy and beauty. This album-length work, in nine continuous sections, floats over a cloud of harmonies that belies the activity beneath the surface, where four different tempos cycle through the piece. Lush and processional in nature, it does not sound like Lou Harrison, but it makes an effective, and affecting, statement about the late composer's importance to his younger colleague.

The late Lou Harrison had no time for the thorny academia of the classical avant-garde. Oh, he knew how to do it, and early works show him duly following the many rules of the day. But at some point, Harrison decided such music wasn't speaking to him, and was unlikely to speak to many listeners either. One transformative moment for him in the 1930s was hearing an Indonesian gamelan, the ringing, metallic percussion orchestras of the Javanese courts. That sound would color his lyrical, melodic music for the rest of the century, and this album might be the finest single disc of his music. Can't-miss highlights include "Main Bersama-sama," for French horn and small gamelan; the "Threnody for Carlos Chavez," for viola and the same gamelan; and the "String Quartet Set," inspired by medieval peasant dances and Turkish court music, and played by a then-emerging ensemble known as the Kronos Quartet.