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        The Mutable Beauty of Bach's B minor Mass
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        The Mutable Beauty of Bach’s B minor Mass

        By Justin Davidson, eMusic Contributor

        Bach's B minor Mass is a masterpiece that by rights shouldn't really exist. A setting of Catholic liturgy by a Lutheran composer, it seems to have been willed into being for no clear purpose. Though it's a work of formidable coherence, Bach tinkered with it over the course of 20 years, gathering its bits and pieces practically until his death. Meanwhile, musical fashion had moved on, and the younger generation surely thought of him as… more »

        Classical Music For A Modern World
        7

        Classical Music For A Modern World

        By Seth Colter Walls, eMusic Contributor

        Sure, we play Bach, Beethoven and Mozart -- though we also dig the early music of Tallis, chance works by Cage, arias from Verdi and John Adams, as well as the composers on New Amsterdam records. Everything here was released after 2008, too, which is another way of declaring that notes written down on paper are still some of the most exciting ones to hear in all of contemporary music. more »

        Interview: Joel Frederiksen
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        Interview: Joel Frederiksen

        By Jayson Greene, Managing Editor

        The contemplative, pastoral folk music of Nick Drake is oddly timeless. Listening to an album like Nick Drake's Pink Moon, it is difficult its creator anywhere other than perched beneath a shady tree in an English countryside, miles from civilization. It was this pre-modern whiff that attracted the operatic bass singer and lute player Joel Frederiksen. Frederiksen, a noted interpreter of Renaissance lute music, stumbled across Drake in his earlier coffee-shop folk-singer days, and never forgot… more »

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        Music of Elliott Carter, Vol. 9 album cover Play
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        2013 | Bridge Records, Inc. / The Orchard

        Elliott Carter, Elliott Carter, Vol. 9

        2013 | Label: Bridge Records, Inc. / The Orchard
        Daniel Felsenfeld By Daniel Felsenfeld eMusic Contributor

        There are ghosts on this record. Of course, the gaping maw left by the recent death of Elliott Carter — just shy of his 104th birthday, mind you — still echoes. But there is another spectre here, that of Charles Rosen, not only one of Carter’s staunchest advocates and one of the world’s great writers whose topic happened to be classical music, but among our accomplished and special pianists. So it is unsurprising that the collaboration on Carter’s ferocious mid-’60s Piano Concerto is one for the books, and Bridge has… more »

        Lang: Death Speaks album cover         Play
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        Cantaloupe Music

        David Lang, Death Speaks

        Label: Cantaloupe Music
        John Schaefer By John Schaefer eMusic Contributor

        First, I feel it’s important to say that, as of this writing, David Lang is nowhere near death. I see him walking through the neighborhood from time to time and he is his usual cheery, deadpan self. And yet the Bang on A Can co-founder has produced an incandescent string of pieces in recent years focused exclusively on death and dying. His Pulitzer Prize-winning Little Match Girl Passion gravely watches a poor young girl freeze to death as passersby ignore her. His yet-to-be-recorded Love Fail takes an oblique look at… more »

        Clayton: The Julius Eastman Memory Depot album cover         Play
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        New Amsterdam

        Jace Clayton, The Julius Eastman Memorial Depot

        Label: New Amsterdam
        John Schaefer By John Schaefer eMusic Contributor

        In his performances as DJ/rupture, Jace Clayton has been part of that experimental breed of DJ/producers who draw on the sounds of the classical avant-garde. But while names like Edgard Varese, Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen have become hip in DJ culture, Clayton has turned to one of music’s true outliers, the gay African-American composer Julius Eastman. (Both his sexual orientation and race figure prominently in his titles.) The Julius Eastman Memorial Depot is neither a mash-up nor a straight remix. It is a recasting and reimagining of two of… more »

        New Impossibilities album cover         Play
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        2007 | Sony Classical

        Yo-Yo Ma & Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The Silk Road Ensemble, New Impossibilities

        2007 | Label: Sony Classical
        John Schaefer By John Schaefer eMusic Contributor

        Cellist Yo Yo Ma’s musical adventures along the Silk Road continue with perhaps his biggest project yet: an album with his Silk Road Ensemble, made huge by the addition of a little band called The Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Since beginning this extraordinarily productive series of concerts, recordings and educational programs in 2000, Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Project have traced the lineage of the Western classical tradition back through the trade routes that brought people, instruments, and techniques from Central Asia into Europe, usually through Venice, during the… more »

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        Classical Music For A Modern World
        7

        Classical Music For A Modern World

        By Seth Colter Walls, eMusic Contributor

        Sure, we play Bach, Beethoven and Mozart -- though we also dig the early music of Tallis, chance works by Cage, arias from Verdi and John Adams, as well as the composers on New Amsterdam records. Everything here was released after 2008, too, which is another way of declaring that notes written down on paper are still some of the most exciting ones to hear in all of contemporary music. more »

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