Ferdinand Schwarz studied jazz trumpet in Cologne before his compositional interests took off during the pandemic, when he became “obsessed with the music of John Cage, Éliane Radigue and Morton Feldman, but also Jon Gibson and Arthur Russell.” He was drawn to “music that allowed me to dissolve in it, whether listening or playing… a sort of creative perceiving, as a tool to grow, transcend, to lose ego.” During his free master studies in Oslo, he became “more specifically fascinated with the act of listening and its creative potential,” engaging with sound art, instrument building, intonation systems, and listening-based music territories.
Listening Time is a 45-minute work developed collaboratively with AREPO – Madara Eleonora Mežale (clarinet), Marco Slaviero…
Tag Archive: Another Timbre
…Timothy McCormack, currently Assistant Professor of Composition at University of California San Diego, already had an impressive list of compositions and a significant discography before turning to the piano. Although that list included substantial solo pieces for other instruments, McCormack recounts that the piano had been avoided until the discovery of a ‘strange chord’ whose ‘intervention’ became more and more compelling and difficult to ignore. In the end it proved the eventual catalyst for mine but for its sublimation, a work which started as what the composer thought was going to be a ‘small side-project’ but which ended up being a year’s full on compositional effort. The pianist Jack Yarbrough was the intended performer from…
In 2017, in two batches of five, Another Timbre released ten albums of music by eight Canadian composers (two of the composers, Linda Catlin Smith and Cassandra Miller, each had a couple of albums among the ten) accompanied by a booklet about the composers. The intention was to improve Canadian composers’ reputations, one which was soon achieved. As well as Catlin Smith and Miller, with the help of Another Timbre, Canadian composers such as Mark Sabat and Martin Arnold gained in popularity.
Although Eldritch Priest is Associate Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and writes on sonic culture and experimental aesthetics, he is also a composer and improviser. He has a relatively…
…Jakob Ullmann was born in July 1958, in Freiberg, Saxony, East Germany, the son of theologian and politician Wolfgang Ullmann. After Jakob refused to serve military service in East Germany, he worked as a groundskeeper, boilerman and house painter in Dresden from 1978 to 1982. From 1979 to 1982, he studied church music in Saxony. He was denied official enrolment in Berlin’s Academy of Fine Arts and so he studied composition privately with Friedrich Goldmann until 1984. Since the early eighties, Ullmann has been working as a freelance composer and author of self-published writings, also teaching classes at different universities on New Music, mediaeval music, history of Byzantine music as well as music philosophy. His works have ben performed at festivals of…
Jürg Frey album Je laisse a la nuit son poids d’ombre (“I leave to the night its weight of shadow” in English) is his thirteenth for the label, some as composer, some as musician.
…Impressive as Frey’s tally of releases with Another Timbre is, it is worth remembering that in his earlier years from 1996 to 2010 most of his releases were on Edition Wandelweiser, which also catalogues his compositions (currently up to 188 of them) varying from many compositions for a single piano up to several compositions for a full orchestra. The composition which gives this album its name dates back to 2019-20 and was written for two soprano voices, cello, violin, trombone, clarinet, tuba, flute,…
Marja Ahti was born in Sweden in 1981 and is now a sound artist working in Turku, Finland. She works with field recordings and other acoustic sound material combined with synthesizers, feedback and tape treatments, organising sounds in a loosely associative way.
Besides her solo work, she is active in the duo Ahti and Ahti with her partner Niko-Matti Ahti, and they are members of the Himera, a collective of four Turku-based musicians and sound artists who organize a festival and concerts focused on different expressions of experimental music and sonic art. That group has been active since 2012. For Visiting Cloud (Two Translations) the two Ahti compositions “Chora (2019/2024)”…
Magnus Granberg was born in Umea in northern Sweden in 1974. He studied saxophone and improvisation at the University of Gothenberg and in New York in his late teens and early twenties. He was self-taught as a composer.
In 2005, he formed his ensemble Skogen which on November 12th 2010 recorded his composition “Ist gefellen in den Schnee” at Atlantis, Stockholm. The nine members of Skogen included Granberg himself on piano, an instrument he had taught himself. The album was released on Another Timbre in February 2012. As with many of Granberg’s compositions, he used other music as inspiration for his own, without copying other composers’ work. As sources of inspiration for “Ist gefellen in den Schnee” he said he had referred to two…
Songs introduces Santiago Diez Fischer – a composer/performer with roots in Buenos Ares and branches in contemporary European institutes – poetically expressing a form of abstract electro-acoustic composition with an almost punkish approach not normally heard on explorative contemporary minimalist label Another Timbre, yet clearly resonating its tenets. An instrumentalist at heart, who turns to electro-acoustic forms for their immediacy and the limitations of playing with an ensemble back in Argentina, Diez Fischer can coincidentally be grouped with a number of other Argentine composers – Lucio Capece, Gabriel Paiuk, and Tomàs Cabado – who grew up with Argentine rock, tango, folk music, and make music that challenges perceptions of…
Marc Sabat is a Canadian composer who was born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada in September 1965. He went to the University of Toronto, where he studied violin, composition and mathematics, completing a BA in 1986. He followed this with a Master’s at the Juilliard School in New York and then two years of string quartet playing in Banff and St. John’s Newfoundland. He has been based in Berlin, Germany, since 1999. Despite that, in 2017, as part of Another Timbres’ Canadian Composers Series, Sabat’s album Harmony was released on the label alongside Linda Catlin Smith, Cassandra Miller and the like.
Sabat is a pioneer of instrumental music written and performed in Just Intonation (JI) and one of a few composers who compose for…
Morton Feldman‘s composition “Intermission 6” dates from 1953, and is considered to be one of his most open, indeterminate piano works. Its score comprises a single page on which there are fifteen events — single notes or chords — which can be played in any order by one pianist or two. According to Feldman’s writing, “The pianist or pianists begin with any sound on the page, will hold until barely audible, then proceed to whichever other sound he/she/they may choose. Sounds may be repeated.” The music on this version of “Intermission 6” was all played by Finnish pianist Antti Tolvi and was recorded in Westers, Kiila, Finland, on 21st October 2024.
Feldman’s writing and music for “Intermission 6” are reminiscent of various other issues.
…The long-standing duo of percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys, hereafter GBSR and augmented here by flautist Taylor MacLennan, offers Morton Feldman’s homage to his erstwhile artistic comrade Guston, along with Why Patterns? (1978) and Crippled Symmetry (1983) in a wonderfully annotated six-disc set commensurate with the label’s other Feldman and Cage boxes, for which all involved have been justly lauded. The label has made a specialty of these two composers who are, clumsily and too often, still associated with the New York School, a designation that does the individuality of their work no justice. It is, however, music for which performance traditions are still in formation, making these sets doubly important for the deep dives…
Although James Opstad first recorded on double bass at Eastcote Studios, London, in September 2006, on an album entitled Interpretations (2006) credited to a drummer named Jon Opstad, James Opstad did not release an album under his own name until Drift (2025).
In the intervening years, the bassist had played or recorded with Apartment House — for instance, he played on the title track of O, Zomer (2018) by Cassandra Miller — with saxophonist Joe Wright in the duo called duck-rabbit, and in the quartet Jack Davies’ Flea Circus.
On Drift, which was recorded by Simon Reynell in London and Birmingham from 2020 to 2024, a selection of musicians played five Opstad compositions, ranging in…
Despite his relatively young age, Kory Reeder has already produced well over a hundred scores, the earliest dating from 2017 and the Covid years being particularly fertile for him. He has composed in a range of genres which include large ensemble, soloist with orchestra, choral, chamber (5+ players), quartets, trios, duos, solo, open ensemble pieces, art songs, stage music, electronic music, field recordings. In addition, Homestead is his second album release on Another Timbre, his first on that label having been entitled Codex Vivere recorded in December 2021 by Apartment House. Prior to those releases, Reeder’s first album Love Songs, Duets had been released on the prestigious Editions Wandelweiser Records. Two other Reeder albums have been released…
Seven beautiful, melancholic motets and a chanson by Renaissance composer Nicolas Gombert, arranged for instruments by James Weeks, who also composed the interludes.
Gombert’s music was renowned for the complexity of its polyphony, and these realisations, played by leading experimental ensemble Apartment House, emphasise the layered density of the music, while trying to take it as far away as possible from its origins as choral church music.
…the music here is rather more complicated than that as the album comprises eight Gombert compositions — seven motets and a chanson — as well as four interludes composed by James Weeks which were commissioned by…
John Cage might have a bit of a reputation problem. Ask a random person about him and if they remember anything, it’s probably “4’33,” his infamously silent piece of music. Perhaps if they’re a little more of a music nerd they’ll know he sometimes composed for prepared piano, a piano where the strings have objects stuffed between the strings. But between the poles of not playing anything and playing something unusually is Cage the composer. Contrasted with Cage the experimenter, this is a composer who worked with string quartets, duos and solo piano. It’s this Cage that’s the focus of the new Another Timbre release Chamber Works: 1943-1951, a set of his early music played by the ever reliable classical ensemble Apartment House.
Although she has been releasing albums since 2011, the Serbian-born New York resident, composer, pianist, performer and improviser Teodora Stepančič is here making her second appearance on Another Timbre — the first as a composer as her previous appearance on the label was as the pianist who performed Mark R. Taylor’s compositions on his album Aftermaths (Another Timbre, 2018).
In the years between that release and O A | F G, years which included the COVID disruption, Stepančič self-released an impressively varied 14 albums digitally. One of those featured “OA” performed by the ensemble Ordinary Affects and Douglas Farrand + people buying books at MIT bookstore Boston, released in December 2018.
If Pierre Boulez’s pieces involving the juxtaposition of object and commentary, like Pli Selon Pli, were filtered through late Mortan Feldman and combined with a post-Messiaenic take on musique concrete, something approaching the frame of Bryn Harrison’s Towards a Slowing of the Past might be approximated.
Pianists Mark Knoop and Roderick Chadwick perform this nearly 45-minute work for two pianos and electronics with staggering subtlety and precision, but nothing prepares for its unfolding beauty and shimmering decline.
To state that the work slows and descends, as Harrison does in another indispensable composer interview housed on Another Timbre’s site, is true but far from the truth. To point toward its…
Three recent and typically exquisite chamber works by Swiss composer Jürg Frey, all written for and performed by the Prague Quiet Music Collective – one in collaboration with the Norwegian new music group asamisimasa.
…Frey is a prolific composer, with many fine compositions dating back to 1984, the three compositions here date from 2023/2024, 2024 and 2022/2023, whereas four of the seven compositions on his previous Another Timbre release Outermost Melodies dated from 1994 to 2003. Just as the sound of Penumbra was influenced by Evans-Weiler and Falzones’ experience in Ordinary Affects, so was that of Longing Landscape by the fact that it was performed by Prague Quiet Music Collective,…