Newly listed in the ubu.com holdings is a 34-minute Marina Rosenfeld composition, recorded back in September 2005. According to the brief introduction, “participants performed Rosenfeld’s animated improvisational score using an array of bowable instruments, including violins, cello, electric guitars, percussion and harp.” It’s a group improvisation, in which some 40 musicians followed her graphically notation, the work moving from sinuous layers of amplified strings, through ecstatic waves of drones, out-classical cat-screech noise-making, and glossolalia (MP3).
Back in 2003, when the Orchestra was a work in progress, she told an interviewer at textura.org about the piece:
“I am trying to connect the ideas of emotion in music and improvisation itself — and making the claim that both the idea and the practice of improvisation are essentially feminine — a female art derived from female so-called vices: emotion, volatility, variability, fickleness. Being called fickle, for instance, is never a compliment, but I think it can actually form a kind of structure for a work of orchestral music.”
More on Rosenfeld at marinarosenfeld.com.
Things change on Glaciations, the five-track album from the duo Kalte. They just change, well, glacially. On the opening cut, “Obliquity,” thin wisps of sound give way to rumbling machinery and ghost echoes (