The Pimpleton Procrasturbation Ensemble performs INCANDESCENT PUTREFACTION by Gary Lloyd Noland. For more information on the composer, please visit his website at: garynolandcomposer.com

INCANDESCENT PUTREFACTION

The Pimpleton Procrasturbation Ensemble performs "A Stern Prussian Head - Governess Follows to a T the Rigorous Codes of Practice Laid Out in Obsolescent Victorian-Era Toilet-Training Manuals for Micro-Regulating the Excremental Excretions of her Young Charges, viz. the Sons & Daughters of Prosperity-Gospel-Banging Fundamentalists and their Belarusian Mail-Order Brides" by Gary Lloyd Noland. For more information on the composer, please visit his website at: garynolandcomposer.com

A Stern Prussian Head - Governess Follows to a T the Rigorous Codes of Practice Laid Out in…

"vo piangendo io tra voi" was written in response to the sonnet "Strani rupi, aspri monti, alte tremanti" by the 16th century Neapolitan poet Luigi Tansillo. “Strani rupi” is one of a pair of sonnets written in the aftermath of the volcanic eruption of the Campi Flegrei on the 29th September 1538, which dramatically altered the surrounding landscape and caused the formation of Montenuovo.

In true Petrarchan style, the poet imagines himself wandering round the post-eruption landscape, contrasting his own sorrows with the desolation that he sees around him. The guitar represents the landscape, presenting a 27 bar grid in five defective versions. The saxophone represents the poet. Its music divides the grid into five subsection, each of which makes a different journey through nine different variative types.

I composed "vo piangendo io tra voi" between May and July 2021 for the Duo Galeano/Javaid, with funds made available by Artists Scholarship North Rhine-Westphalia. The Duo gave the work’s first performance at Kraftwerk, Chemnitz on 19th October 2021.

This recording is of a performance given at LOFT, Cologne by the Duo Galeano/Javaid on March 7th 2023.

vo piangendo io tra voi

An amalgamation of opposites.  Rhythmically, a kind of regular, slow, breathing pulse gets elaborated with entropic details.  Harmonically, an atonal tone cluster undergoes variations that make every note function as a leading tone.  While the piece feels like it rises and rises, if you listen to the whole and start over, you'll hear that it ends just where it begins, like the pedestrians on Escher's staircase.

A Slow Climb In Difficult Weather, for piano

The title of my piece is derived from a series of sketches of river views in J.M.W. Turner's “Trieste, Graz and Danube Sketchbook” of 1840, described by the artist as having been "begun in the  moonlight at St. Michael’s" (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-views-near-arnsdorf-sankt-michael-and-spitz-on-the-river-danube-stift-sausenstein-d30030). Art historian Cecilia Powell  has written that these sketches possess the quality of “rugged silhouettes”. The work is an attempt to suggest Turner's moonlit night journey along the Danube and the views he experienced in  music that mirrors the fragmentary, elusive, almost abstract nature of his sketches.  Views of Arnsdorf and Sankt Michael on the River Danube was written between 15th and 21st May 2024 and is based on material originally drafted in August 2020. It is dedicated to Sara Minelli.
This recording is the work's first performance, by Antonella Bini at Sala Piatti, Bergamo on 10th May 2025.

Views of Arnsdorf and Sankt Michael on the River Danube

Composer, mathematician, visual artist. 
Seeks collaboration with performers and choreographers.

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British composer James Erber was born in 1951 in London of an Austrian father and an English mother. After studying Music at the Universities of Sussex (BA, 1973) and Nottingham (MA, 1975), he was appointed Music Editor at Peters Edition, London. He left Peters Edition in 1979 and began work as a freelance editor, writer and translator.  Still largely self-taught as a composer, it was at this period he produced his first acknowledged score, "Seguente" for oboe and piano (1976-1978, revised 1980). The guidance and encouragement he received from Brian Ferneyhough (whom he had met at Peters Edition) prompted him to a serious study of composition, firstly with Jonathan Harvey at the University of Sussex (MPhil in Composition, 1983), then from 1981 to 1982 with Ferneyhough himself at the Musikhochschule, Freiburg-im-Breisgau. In 1984, at Ferneyhough’s suggestion, he made the first of five visits to the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, winning a Stipendienpreis in 1988. From 1982 to 2016, he combined activity as a composer with teaching and lecturing. Since 2016 he has been able to concentrate solely on composition. 
James Erber's work reflects a wide range of interests, including Renaissance and Baroque music, the music of South-East Asia, Jazz, blues, Mediaeval and Renaissance philosophy, Kabbalah, green politics, recent scientific developments, film noir, Jacobean tragedy, the Gothic novel and historical slang.  His music is multi-layered and complex (especially from the point of view of rhythm and form). Its complexity is, however, combined with harmonic clarity and lyricism as well as a tenuous sense of optimism and a concern with intellectual and spiritual continuity.
It has been performed and broadcast widely by soloists such as Pavlos Antoniadis, Antonella Bini, Mario Caroli, Diego Castro Magaš, Matteo Cesari, Franklin Cox, Gianpaolo Antongirolami, Gleb Kanasevich, Carin Levine, Ian Pace, Jonathan Powell, Nancy Ruffer and Michele Selva, as well as by ensembles including 175 East, the Arditti Quartet, Duo Galeano/Javaid, Exposé, ELISION, Lontano and NOISE. James Erber’s music has been recorded on NMC, Metier, Centaur Records (USA) and Convivium Records. Many of his scores are available from Composers Edition. In July 2022, his complete writings on music (1978-2021) were published by Vision Edition under the title "Fragile Continuities".

Resides in Portland, Oregon. Grew up in Berkeley, CA. Born in Seattle.  PhD, Harvard. “Gary Noland is one of the great composers of the 21st century.”—JACK RUMMEL, KGNU 88.5 FM, Boulder CO, “...iconoclastic, stylistic potpourri standards of giddy humor, no holds barred soup to nuts and high spirits.”—ROBERT LEVIN, pianist, musicologist, composer, "...a fleet-fingered, ebullient performer ... bright, witty and engaging.”—CHRISTIAN CAREY, SPLENDID MAGAZINE, “...distinctive, inventive ... subversive ... You can hardly be indifferent to Noland’s music and so I would urge you to try it.” —ROGER BLACKBURN, MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL, “...set in a dizzying harmonic language that loops uncontrollably through a wide-ranging gamut of possible and impossible tonalities ... The general effect is like watching wet paintings of 19th Century musical memorabilia drip into frazzled 21st Century oblivion...” —ALLEN GIMBEL, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, “Mr. Noland writes as a ‘time traveler’ in styles long abandoned by most composers as well as styles so new as to not have been imagined but by him. This he accomplishes naturally, convincingly, with originality and true passion. His command of all musical languages and his ability to traverse musical time is nothing less than remarkable. Listen!”—DONALD MARTINO, Pulitzer Prize winning composer, “...mind-bending spiraling of focus which is truly breathtaking ... spectacular...”—CHARLES AMIRKHANIAN, composer, sound poet & radio producer, “I'm amazed at your harmonic skill. Haven't seen or heard anything like it from any one else—except yours truly—certainly not from your generation. It falls somewhere between Strauss and Mahler. Especially like how you are able to slip in and out from the tonal to the atonal—or near atonal...”—GEORGE ROCHBERG, American composer, Pulitzer Prize finalist, “...court jester to the classical establishment...”—PAYTON MACDONALD, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, “...florid and juicy...” —RICHARD BUELL, THE BOSTON GLOBE, “...an incredible aural web ... a great ostinato of American kitsch. Sul pont never sounded so good.”—RUSSELL STEINBERG, composer, conductor of the LOS ANGELES YOUTH ORCHESTRA, “...I am bowled over by the expertise of your music: you use certain elements from the 19th century and from jazz, etc., and just at the moment when I am about to say, OK, what else is new?, you do a number of things, such as speeding up, becoming wildly dissonant, modulating to a distant continent, stopping completely and throwing some kind of total surprise ... you seem to know exactly when to do what and how much. I don’t know anybody else who can do it!” —ANDREW IMBRIE, American composer, Pulitzer Prize finalist, “... remarkable stuff...”
—MAX MORATH, American ragtime pianist, composer, actor & author, “...a loony composer from Oregon...” —MAX SHEA, WMUA 91.1FM, Amherst, MA, “Gary Noland is one of those 21st Century composers seeking to forge a new aesthetic based on older models that do not traffic in serialism or minimalism ... Zany waltzes, ragtime riffs, chorales, toccatas, and much else romp and tear through these depictions of superheroes and villains from his ‘chamber novels’; other pieces spoof serial music ... to grand operas ... and Jewish guilt.” —JACK SULLIVAN, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, “...Paranoid Ravel...”—ALEX DUNN, KZSU FM90.3, Stanford, CA, “...It’s a romantic romp, rhythmically robust yet melodically flirting with the nostalgia of cabaret, minus the sleazy diminution of spilled drinks and smelly ashtrays. Its elegance recalls Elgar, and the serious sides, a synthesis of those strange bedfellows Schubert and Ives. Composers hate it when their music reminds you of someone else’s, but writing within a tradition, Noland has incorporated divergent styles that, woven together, work. Cosmopolitan without snobbery, it’s intelligent, pleasurable and convincing.” —ROCKY LEPLIN, THE BERKELEY VOICE

New tracks tagged #new complexity