A wistful and gentle tone~color study, as might be expected from the title. Bass clarinet is played off against vibraphone and extended marimba (often bowed), with additional wisps of color from auxilliary percussion played by the clarinettist.
Duration: 13'.
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An unaccompanied solo for contrabass. Slow and quiet, it builds tremendous (and quite unexpected) tension from the suppressed violence implied by the numerous extended techniques required of the soloist.
Duration: 15'.
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A one-movement string quartet, very much "in the wood" as stacks of fifths (modeled on the sound of the open strings) float serenely past, and eventually drift up into the stratosphere.
Duration: 14'.
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A rattling, percussive work, not at all how one normally thinks of guitar music. Rapid thrumming of repeated chords makes an effect almost like tomtoms, except for the subtleties of harmony and a low dynamic level. Intensely absorbing!
Duration: 15'.
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Orchestral music is García's strong suit, and this piece is characteristic of his output in this area. The single movement is loosely divided into four sections, each built around a single musical texture and strongly contrasted to all the other sections. Since the music of each section slowly evolves toward a destination never reached, García likens them in his title to voyagers--always in progress, never arriving.
Duration: 15'.
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The title means "strings, winds, and voices," which suggests the multiplicity of roles taken by tuba and mandolin in this unique duet. The mandolin plays a quiet, repetitive, slowly evolving background reminiscent of the "silence of the Druids" in Ives' Unanswered Question. The tuba sometimes joins in, sometimes comments discretely, but more often charges brutally through the mandolin texture like an elephant through the parlor, then lapses into silence for a few bars. A highly original and dramatic piece of chamber music!
Duration: 11'30".
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Like asteroids in different orbits, piano and viola influence each other's motion while never quite coming into contact with each other. Sparse and spooky, with lots of plucked harmonics for the piano.
Duration: 15'.
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"Fragments of the past" are indeed evoked by the surprisingly traditional-sounding textures of this piece. Chords based on the sonority of the open strings of all the instruments rotate, repeat, drift in the usual fashion of this composer--but end up sounding almost like Vivaldi at times...
Duration: 20'.
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Live and taped violin sounds quietly blend, separate, fuse, forever halfway between monologue and dialogue, until finally the live violinist is left to finish alone.
Duration: 15'.
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Drifting, ethereal, and unearthly, this music will put listeners in mind more of electronic music than of Ben Franklin's "Glassychord."
Duration: 6'.
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A calm sea--but no voyage at all, just long, lonely swells, soft to very soft, many on multiphonics. As so often with this composer, there is an increase in activity toward the end, but the languid and introspective mood is never broken.
Duration: 6'.
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The piano provides irregular chiming patterns at various speeds while 4 different sizes of flute (one player) drift slowly past like clouds. A highly hypnotic score.
Duration: 15'.
Listen to a RealAudio sample from this work
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"Morton" is of course García's mentor, Morton Feldman. This homage for 12-part mixed choir will remind many of Feldman's own Christian Wolff in Cambridge, but is more substantial in dimensions and considerably more urgent and apprehensive in tone.
Duration: 13'.
Listen to a RealAudio sample from this work
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One of García's many chamber works featuring solo contrabass, this time accompanied by string quartet and three percussion. The mood throughout is mysterious and otherworldly, as suggested by the percussion scoring, which features only windchimes and musical glasses.
Duration: 15 1/2'.
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No quotations or stylistic pastiche here, but rather the indirect suggestion, through mood, structure, and form, of the procedures and esthetics of the piano music of the past. A very finely balanced and exquisitely crafted homage to the weighty historical underpinnings~~hidden or not, acknowledged or not~~that underlie any new piano piece.
Duration: 6' - 7'
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Strongly hypnotic! One of those pieces where listeners discover at the end that they've been holding their breath. Circular breathing skills are demanded of the soprano sax soloist, who blends almost imperceptibly into prerecorded sounds.
Duration: 12'.
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A highly atmospheric piece, in which the guitar provides rhythm and texture while the flute "holds up the sky" with wispy scales and long, isolated notes. The mood varies depending which flute is used, the piccolo (urgently "tropical"), the alto flute (languorous), or the regular flute ("grounded" and sensible).
Duration: 14'.
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The titular "shadows" are provided by the piano's sustain pedal, which remains depressed throughout. A slow, irregular pattern of chords unfolds, each leaving a shadow of resonance behind like a ghost to haunt its successors, until the piece suddenly breaks into motion half way through. What was shadow now becomes impressionist blur, as the initial harmonies return with increased urgency and tighter structure that imperceptibly builds to the end.
Duration: 18'.
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One of the tangos commissioned from many composers by pianist Yvar Mikhashoff for "The Tango Project." This one gives just the skeleton of a hint of a tango--hemiola rhythms with no clear meter--and eventually even that dissolves away.
Duration: 3'.
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These three pieces, each about 12 minutes long, may be played separately or as a set. Primarily meditative in tone, they feature extended dialogs between the live contrabassist and another on tape. The taped contrabass sounds are modified in various ways, so that the live player becomes a focussing center, keeping the music on track and constantly pulling the taped sounds back from pure abstraction.
Duration: 36'.
Listen to a RealAudio sample of this work
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Built mostly of lazy broken chords and extended tremolos, this guitar piece takes its name from the scordatura tuning used throughout.
Duration: 9'.
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A solo guitar work. Chordal, driving, and repetitive, it will remind many listeners of the early minimalists. Its sonorities are built almost entirely out of harmonics, whence the title.
Duration: 11'.
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A languid and serene piece for voice, clarinet and piano. Though largely wordless, eventually a short text emerges:
Viajando por el universo sin raíces en la tierra,
el producto de experiencias muy ajenas y diversas,
leal a la humanidad silenciosa sin deber a algo mas.
(Traveling through the universe without roots in the ground,
a product of distant and diverse experiences,
loyal to a quiet humanity without compromise to anything else.)
Duration: 15'.
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