11-16: DJ Screw Chapter 70 : Endonesia 1997 - Quicksilver Messenger Service Fillmore West 1971 - Sonny Rollins Saxophone Colossus 1956 - Richard Strauss Vier letzte Lieder : Popp / Tilson Thomas 1993

1628 – Paolo Quagliati (Italian composer & organist)
1667 – Nathaniel Schnittelbach (German composer & violinist)
1775 – Marian Paradeiser (Austrian composer)
1924 – Alexander Arkhangelsky [Алекса́ндр Арха́нгельский] (Russian composer & conductor)
1935 – Kurt Schindler (German-born American composer & conductor)
1984 – Vic Dickenson (American jazz trombonist)
1987 – Zubir Said (Indonesian-born Singaporean composer)
1993 – Lucia Popp (Slovakian soprano)
1994 – Dino Valente [Chet Powers] (American rock singer, songwriter & guitarist, Quicksilver Messenger Service)
2000 – Ahmet Kaya (Kurdish singer, Bağlama player, composer & poet)
2000 – DJ Screw (American hiphop DJ, "The Originator" of Chopped and Screwed technique)
2000 – Joe C. [Joseph Calleja] (American rapper, associate of Kid Rock)
2001 – Tommy Flanagan (American jazz pianist)
2007 – Grethe Kausland (Norwegian actress & singer)

IVES THANKSGIVING SPECIAL: Symphony 2 / Bernstein 1958 - Thanksgiving & Forefathers' Day / Tilson Thomas 1986

Okay, so I'm a little late with this. However, you know very well that you'll be gnawing on that bird and all the trimmings not just for the remainder of this long weekend, but well into the foreseeable future.

10-24c: Carl Ruggles Complete / Tilson Thomas 1980 - Oistrakh : Khachaturian | Sibelius Concertos 1965 - Oistrakh / Richter : Shostakovich | Franck Sonatas 1969

1971 – Fernand Quinet (Belgian composer & conductor)
1971 – Carl Ruggles (American composer, conductor, violinist, teacher & painter)
1974 – David Oistrakh [Дави́д О́йстрах] (Ukrainian violinist & conductor)
1976 – Richard Sturzenegger (Swiss composer & cellist)
2005 – Joy Clements (American lyric coloratura soprano)
2007 – Petr Eben (Czech composer, organist & pianist)
2008 – Moshe Cotel (American composer & pianist)

Another THREE-parter today. Don't miss out on this part! One of the best presentations (by MTT, who's always so good at such repertoire) of the complete (and very few) works of Carl Ruggles, that great but loquacious American modernist of the early-to-mid 20th century. And some of the finest recordings made by David Oistrakh, one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century, a great bulldog of a player with an enormous tone and technique and hot-blooded form of expression.

Well, there was a write-up! I'll leave it to you to find out more about Moshe Kotel, and his owner, Ketzel the composing cat...

09-03: Morton Feldman : Coptic Light / Tilson Thomas 1995 | Rothko Chapel / New Albion 1990 - Harry Partch : The Bewitched 1957 / CRI - Canned Heat : Living the Blues 1968 - Noah Howard : The Black Ark 1969 - Coleman Hawkins : The Hawk Flies High 1957

1708 – Christian Liebe (German composer & organist, teacher of Andreas Silbermann)
1714 – Pietro Antonio Fiocco (Italian composer & choirmaster)
1790 – Thomas Norris (English organist, composer & singer)
1811 – Ignaz Fränzl (German violinist & composer)
1871 – Václav Emanuel Horák (Czech composer, church musician & teacher)
1914 – Albéric Magnard (French composer)
1944 – František Drdla (Czech violinist & composer)
1946 – Paul Lincke (German composer & violinist, "Berliner Luft")
1946 – Moriz Rosenthal (Polish pianist, composer & wit)
1951 – Robert Hernried (Austrian composer, musicologist & music editor)
1960 – Joseph Lamb (American ragtime composer)
1963 – Frico Kafenda (Slovak composer, teacher, pianist & conductor)
1964 – Joseph Marx (Austrian composer, teacher & music critic)
1970 – Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson (American blues-rock singer, songwriter, guitarist & harmonica player, Canned Heat)
1974 – Harry Partch (American experimental composer, instrument inventor, music theorist & hobo)
1981 – Mafalda Favero (Italian operatic soprano)
1984 – Dora Labbette (English operatic & concert soprano, mistress of Sir Thomas Beecham)
1985 – Johnny Marks (American writer of many Christmas songs, e.g. "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer")
1985 – Papa Jo Jones (American jazz drummer)
1985 – John Herbert McDowell (American composer for dance, theater & film)
1987 – Morton Feldman (American experimental composer)
1994 – Major Lance (American R&B & soul singer)
2007 – Carter Albrecht (American rock keyboardist & guitarist, Edie Brickell & New Bohemians)
2010 – Noah Howard (American free jazz alto saxophonist)

Well, what a banner day for good, old-fashioned, solid American experimental composition... it's a tradition that started with Charles Ives and Henry Cowell, and continues up to this very day! We have Harry Partch and Morton Feldman, both pooping on September 3rd. Partch - gay, iconoclastic, and a man who spent much of the Great Depression as a train-hopping vagabond - stretches our ears with his unequal 43-note scale that maps closely onto an 11-limit just intonation (a tuning system which is derived from acoustically pure intervals through the first 11 partials of an overtone series, if that's any easier for you to understand), and the truly weird-looking and even weirder-sounding instruments he had to design and build himself so that one could play in this scale. A few of them are seen above in our little Partch mini-collage: the Cloud Chamber Bowls, the Chromelodeon, the Bamboo Marimba, the Adapted Viola, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Gourd Tree. Partch's collection of exotic instruments continues to be curated and used in performance by Dean Drummond and the ensemble Newband.

In contrast, Feldman (a member of the so-called "New York School," which also includes John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff) stretches our musical perceptions in a very different way, requiring us to recalibrate our relationship to musical sonority and musical time. (Feldman has his own mini-collage up there. He was a curiously photogenic and charismatic individual - I love how even the Iranian teen next to the gong seems intrigued by the man. Go here to look at some rarely-seen vacation slides of Feldman.) He came to prefer softer sounds only, finding them more interesting than louder ones. This causes the sound of "silence" - really, the ambient sounds of the space, especially those of the performers themselves moving around, breathing, etc. - to be bumped up in Feldman's sound-world. In his mature style of the late 60s and thereafter, a Feldman work consists of dissonant yet delicate patterns and textures that evolve so slowly they almost create an effect of complete stasis. This is extended over longer and longer time-spans throughout the 70s, culminating in the String Quartet II of 1983, which takes several hours to perform. So both Partch and Feldman are composers who require some major adjustments to the ways we're accustomed to listening to and processing music. To some, maybe frightening... to you and me, full of the excitement of discovery... (Read more about both Partch and Feldman below)

There's so much more to say about so many others (like jazz drummer Jo Jones... no, not "Philly" Joe Jones, but "Papa" Jo Jones - people have been getting the two of them confused for 60 years, and the situation isn't helped by the fact that they died not just in the same year, but within four days of one another), but I'll just have to say "Remainder of write-up pending" for now...