Eschewing "documentary" interviews with residents for a night-and-day time-lapse tableau of the building's formidable architecture, it is a powerfully modulated and intensely rhythmic piece.
Commissioned by the High School of Music and Art in New York City, the rhythmic piece based on Walt Whitman's poetry was "the first choral piece I ever wrote and I had to play the piano piece at the premiere because it was so difficult," recalled Mr. Dello Joio, 88.
Wadada Leo Smith has evoked the 1960s civil rights campaigns, American drummer John Hollenbeck and his Claudia Quintet attached an ingeniously rhythmic piece to a 1936 Franklin D Roosevelt pro-welfare speech, and electronics innovator Matthew Herbert even built a petrifying collage from the sound of an incoming Libyan bomb.
The song developed from the band's interest in urban funk, and was described by The Edge as "a kind of Afro-rhythmic piece" and "a study in rhythm".
Troy Schumacher, a member of the City Ballet corps, is a fresh voice; his first work for the company is a sextet set to a rhythmic chamber piece by the young Brooklyn composer Judd Greenstein.
His MoMA "pop rally" was organized for the debut of "Sleepwalkers," a rhythmic video piece that tapped into the energy of a city waking, walking and sleeping and was screened on the museum building itself.
Focus on details of the black, glisteningly oiled Fang pieces: rhythmic elongation and compression of body parts, heads domed like cosmic eggs, sublimely abstracted hair plaits, and backs whose subtle planes flabbergast.
As a composer who's known in the Canadian press for his "showy orchestration" and "quirky, insistent, rhythmic drive," this piece showed a more personal, almost autobiographical side of the 23 year-old composer.
Mazur avoids some of the pitfalls by constructing Elixir from 21 short pieces, melodic, rhythmic and textural by turn, and by inviting her former boss, Jan Garbarek, to join her for half the album.
LAURIE SPIEGEL The New York composer Laurie Spiegel created her electronic music at Bell Labs in the 1970s; inspired by John Fahey, Bach and 14th-century motets (she played bluegrass and baroque guitar on the side), she composed rhythmic and agreeably spacey pieces using analog synthesizers and a computer that took up a whole room.
