Catalog

The Ravello Records release ACE COMPOSERS features the music of three composers in the same family: Alan Schmitz and his two sons, Christopher and Eric. Though Alan describes the three composers as having different influences, their music is linked by connections to popular musical genres, which each references in some manner in a work featured on the album.

On his debut Ravello Records release ROSE, composer Michael Laurello offers a personal and refined style marked by rhythmic invention, visceral directness, and earnest emotional depth. His music reflects his diverse stylistic influences, which include Western classical music, jazz-fusion, progressive rock/metal, and EDM/IDM. Intricate polyrhythms, high-energy grooves, and a sophisticated harmonic palette are distinctive features of his music. Laurello composes for both traditional and non-traditional musical forces, including symphony orchestra, acoustic chamber ensembles, and works conceived specifically for the recording studio. He has recently collaborated with groups such as So Percussion, the Yale Philharmonia, Sandbox Percussion, and HOCKET.

On MARIMBA CONCERTI WITH PERCUSSION ORCHESTRA (2006), Robert McCormick conducts his McCormick Percussion Group – an ensemble comprised of 20 marimbists and accompanied by guest pianist Corey Holt Merenda throughout. Guest conductor Cayenna Rosa Ponchione appears on her composition The Creation, the album’s concluding track.

Ravello Records proudly presents the digital single PIECE BY PIECE, the PARMA debut of composer Beth Mehocic (ma•ho´•sick). Her work of the same name is scored for flute, bass clarinet, trumpet, bass trombone, violin, contrabass, and percussion and is performed by the Moravian Philharmonic Chamber Players. Piece by Piece was commissioned by the Erick Hawkins Dance Company of New York City in honor of their former director and composer-in-residence, Lucia Dlugoszewski. Dlugoszewski is known for her developments in avant-garde music technique and experimental music; thus, Mehocic includes a number of these techniques in the piece, including pitch bends, rapid glissandi, muting techniques, and extreme ranges.

On TWILIGHT REMEMBERED (2003), musical and marital partners Robert and Kim McCormick join forces as the McCormick Duo, performing percussion and flute, respectively. The album presents a collection of contemporary compositions for these two instruments, including works from Paul Bissell, Elliot Carter, Andre Jolivet, Ralph Shapey, David Heuser, Henri Lazarof, Hilton Jones, Wesley Fuller, Howard Buss, Kent Kennan, and Daniel Adams.

Juxtaposing the loud and abrasive with the soft and subtle, the McCormick Percussion Group balances tumult and tender in KID STUFF. Led by director Robert McCormick, Professor of Music at the University of South Florida in Tampa, the percussion orchestra re-imagines original compositions from five key contemporary classical composers.

Steven Kemper makes his debut on Ravello Records with his electroacoustic album MYTHICAL SPACES. Kemper combines acoustic instruments and electronics to create meditative compositions that explore the connections between real and imaginary worlds. Kemper writes that “myths represent traces of our collective imagination, and similarities between myths from different cultures point to a shared human experience.”

With THE BROKEN VESSEL, Andreas Barth, Geir Hjorthol and Magnar Åm take the concept of “industrial music” to a whole new level. The recording took place in an abandoned Norwegian factory, “The Propeller Hall,” utilizing everything from the acoustics in the building to the muffled sounds of traffic outside its walls. In this way the building became a partner in a concrete as well as a metaphorical way in creating the music of this ten-track album.

On 3: THE MUSIC OF GINA BIVER, her debut recording on Ravello Records, composer, guitarist, vocalist and producer Gina Biver presents five selections featuring the concept-based new music/new media performing collective Fuse Ensemble, a group in which she has played an integral part for the past decade. Not only did Biver compose the five tracks on the album, she either performed on, produced, mixed and/or engineered many of them.

INTERFACES explores the different ways a computer can fit in a modern jazz ensemble and still be true to itself. Technology performer Jeff Morris is joined by free jazz icon Karl Berger on vibes and piano as well as innovative New York percussionist Joe Hertenstein. Morris takes sounds from his partners live in the moment and transforms them into his own musical voice with the DNA of acoustic sounds and the fingerprints of digital processing. This live sampling improvisation results in expressively shifting quasi-loops and glitchy melodic gestures, drawn from music that just happened and influencing what the performers will do next.

While New Zealand guitarist and composer Campbell Ross cites influences as varied as Claude Bolling, Manuel Ponce and Benjamin Britten when discussing the works featured on CONCERTANTE, it is clear that his own distinctive style is manifested throughout the album. The first of CONCERTANTE’s Modern Works For Guitar opens with the three-movement Concertante for guitar, jazz trio and strings - a work that allows all of the album’s performers to be featured as soloists. Its kaleidoscopic first movement reveals elements of Latin, Blues, Jazz, and Classical genres that, when combined with the Spanish touches in the final movement, encompass the major musical styles that have influenced Ross over the past 30 years.

Matthew Burtner returns to Ravello Records with the haunting beauty of GLACIER MUSIC, an electroacoustic collection featuring the Alaskan natural landscape as the central instrument. Most of the natural sounds were recorded on Alaskan glaciers, featuring the sounds of snow, trickling streams, and the cracks, pops, and thundering as glaciers break apart and fall. Burtner, who was born in Alaska and grew up among the glaciers, also sculpts scientific measurements of glacial melt into the music through a technique known as sonification.

Composer Frederic D’Haene creates a remarkable musical world in MUSIC WITH SILENT AITAKE’S. When he was 25 years old, D’Haene began his life-long fascination with gagaku music, or traditional Japanese court music, that has informed his compositional style throughout his career. This study of a musical style different from that of his own culture resulted in what the composer calls “paradoxophony” or “paradoxical coexistence.”

DEVIANT RESONANCES carries the concept of “creative listening" into new dimensions. In addition to the unconventional ways in which the everyday listener is called on to interpret the music, composer David Rosenboom literally uses the action of “listening” as an instrument.

Follow composer Richard Carr as he guides you through his world-travel experiences in his Ravello Records release PLACES I’VE WALKED. The feeling of authenticity cannot be understated in these compositions, divided into four parts.

The 15 tracks on Thad Anderson’s LINES & SPACES are from his Lines series, based on his compositional technique called “duration lines” that create both structure and polyrhythmic interest. Anderson integrates traditional instruments with fixed media, live processing, and tuned metals to create pieces that are infinitely malleable.

SOLI FOR TUBA, ZHENG, HORN WITH PERCUSSION is percussionist Robert McCormick’s tenth album with PARMA Recordings. On their latest album, the McCormick Percussion Group performs five compositions from four distinct composers, each of whom contributes striking works that range from personal to global inspiration.

Composer Bill Whitley is no stranger to storytelling through the art of composition. Central themes in his works include that of embarking on a journey, the thrill and spontaneity of discovery, and the comfort and reflectiveness of the eventual returning home. These form a story arc as old as time, beautifully transcribed and made new through Whitley’s compositions.

New from Ravello Records comes composer James O’Callaghan’s ALONE AND UNALONE, a scintillating dance between reality and abstraction that is sure to spark the listener’s imagination and unearth their most primal misgivings. Montréal-based O’Callaghan has been laurelled with innumerable awards and prizes for his work–and rightfully so. Marrying traditional instruments, ambient sounds, and the incomparable power of the human voice, ALONE AND UNALONE dares the listener to grapple with solitude.

On WITHIN MY SOUL, New York-based composer Akemi Naito’s debut release on Ravello Records, the composer’s intent was to create a collection of musical works inspired by words. The poetry and prose that inspired the album’s three pieces were crafted by a trio of writers who transcend the boundaries of time and place: 19th-century British poet and novelist Emily Brontë; 20th-century Japanese novelist Kobo Abe; and Japanese monk-poet Saigyo (1118 – 1190).