Jeffrey Mumford (b.1955)
two Elliott Carter tributes - II. a celebration of Elliott (2006)

This is the digital-only bonus track from the album Tempo e Tempi by Pina Napolitano.

"For some time, I have concentrated my concert and recording activity around modern and contemporary music and its connections with Classical and Romantic repertoire. The reasons for this choice are simple: the need to study in-depth the music of this and the last centuries comes from our inevitable immersion in the present, and the comforting observation that classical music is not dead, but is very much alive, growing and transforming just as much and together with the other arts and sciences. 
Contemporary classical music is alive, and it is difficult: its complexity must be accepted by both listener and performer. It needs careful listening, sometimes toilsome and repeated – it is not ‘background’ music. But at the same time, it communicates in a direct language: that of beauty. There are various levels at which contemporary music, like all music, can be understood. In my opinion, the most important level is the most superficial one: that of expressiveness and imagination. This level does not require specific preparation, only open ears and minds, and confidence in the composer and the interpreter. 
Historical perspective can help us: think of something familiar today, for example, the last sonatas of Beethoven, whose 250th anniversary we celebrate this year, and the reaction of his contemporaries, the shock of hearing a sonata end with the Arietta in Op. 111 or the recitatives alternating with fugues in Op. 110. Perhaps their reaction is comparable to that of today’s listeners to Carter’s Night Fantasies (although it is from 1980), the piece around which I programmed this album. Great art is always something new, something that shakes us and explores unknown territories. Night Fantasies, in Carter’s own words, wants to ‘describe’ the activity of the mind suspended between slumber and wakefulness: fragments of thoughts, memories, neuronal activity, firing connections and disconnections, REM states of sleep and dreams; all of this comes to mind listening to and playing Night Fantasies. And then the form, also Beethovenian: are not many of Beethoven’s sonatas fantasies?
Let us think of the heterogeneous materials of Op. 110, of the alternation of slow and fast sections, of the strange first movement, a sort of thoughtful introduction. Let us think of the declamatory style of many parts, where one might hear people who cry or argue, and let us think of the drama in Carter, in which the polyphony of rhythms and articulations seems to allude to a diversity of contrasting voices. Last but not least, let us think about rhythmic transformations, what Carter termed ‘metric modulations’, that constitutes the connective tissue of his music, whose origin has been traced directly to Beethoven. 
Two Thoughts about the Piano, among Carter’s last compositions for the instrument, explore two territories in piano writing: the use of pauses, ‘interruptions’ of sound, and that of a long monodic line of rapid-fire notes. Do these two pieces not find a parallel in Beethoven’s explorations of the sonic possibilities (and impossibilities) of the piano in Op. 111?
It seemed to me that the best way to celebrate Beethoven’s anniversary was to show how the classics are always alive because they continuously generate, nourish, and produce the present. In turn, through the present, they are reinterpreted, reread, and recognised for their forward-looking greatness."
Pina Napolitano

10 - Jeffrey Mumford - Two Elliott Carter Tributes - II. A Celebration Of Elliott

Odradek Records is a democratic classical cooperative, non-profit and artist-controlled label and concert association, promoting new artists and fresh repertoire.

Entrance to our roster is through anonymous demo.

Our dream is utopian: to separate music-making from markets and create a just system of pure artistic meritocracy.


Odradek Records is not just a new record label. Odradek Records is the first wedge of a larger project, proposing a new way to produce and enjoy classical music. We think that the current model undermines the true essence and significance of music. We think that a model centered on just a few big names, the great concert halls, a limited repertoire that is necessarily restricted by the bonds of popularity--a model that makes its selection of new young performers from the anti-musical system of competitions, the success of which is often obtained through extravagant histrionics rather than the correctness or subtlety of interpretation--and finally, a model that is subject to the exploitation of the marketplace, and which obliges the majority of musicians to pay enormous sums to record CDs, for which the profits then go largely to the record company, thus depriving many very worthy but not wealthy musicians from the possibility of recording--is not only a model that is far from art, but is a model that even itself is in crisis. 

Ideally, music just as other primary goods, should not fall subject to the markets. We know that in a strict sense, this is utopian, but it is precisely this tension towards an unreachable utopia that guides our project.

Odradek Records is a non-profit seeking label. Once production and distribution expenses are recuperated, all of our proceeds go directly to the artist. Odradek Records selects its artists solely through the criterion of utmost quality of the recording and the interest of the proposed program. We don’t want to exclude, but rather include: we are not interested if you have won important competitions or not, neither if you have performed in important halls or signed with major labels. We are not interested in your age or where you come from. The only thing that interests us is whether you play your instrument to a very high and professional level. With us you can record Chopin, but you can also record: Berio, Scelsi, Copland, Carter, Webern, Schoenberg, Ligeti, Kurtag, Ives, and many others.

Our recording studio avails itself of the greatest technical instruments available today.

The distribution of our CDs is guided by an innovative criterion of transparency and flexibility in setting prices.
The rights of the composers and of the artist are protected by Creative Commons copyright (sometimes referred to as “copyleft” policy) because we want to render legal and free all those things that almost everybody already illegally does anyway.

We consider that the distribution of our music is not a one way street, but instead a dialogue. Only the presence of an active public gives true life to an artistic product. Write us. In the comments section you can leave opinions, suggestions, and criticisms of our music and our project. If you want to you can sign up as a “Friend of Project Odradek”, indicating your name, your profession, where you are from, and why you support Project Odradek. Send us your thoughts on the state of music, culture, and the arts: we’ll publish them on our blog.

If you like us, help us spread the word by linking to us from your blogs, sites, and through your social networks.

Odradek Records does not only produce CDs. We are convinced that the truest fruition of music happens in live concerts. For this reason we organize itinerant music festivals, moving from city to city, to promote our disks and music.

And finally, a word about our name: we borrow it from Kafka. Like the worried family man in Kafka’s tale, we are also worried. We are worried that music might become always more and more an odradek, an indefinable and incomprehensible being, whose voice sounds falsely, like the voice of one who is “without lungs”, a being without form, disturbingly replicating that which was once alive, that can plastically become whatever is wished for by those who posses the instruments of power and control. We wish for the cage-like railing surrounding the man of Kafka’s drawing to become instead an instrument to play - we would like to transform our prison into our liberty. 

We would like to restore music to its true role, that of artwork, and restore musical interpretation to its true function, the only one that opens itself towards the possibility of a future: that of a field of research.

Welcome to Project Odradek.