Free Stuff!!, Again: Contemporary Music on YouTube and from the JACK Quartet

The JACK Quartet (photo by Justin Bernhaut.)

I haven't done a 'free stuff' post for a while, sorry about that, not been on the internets much recently (composing, listening, reading scores, international espionage, you know the deal.)

Here is one to be going along with anyway. I spotted on Tim Rutherford Johnson's blog The Rambler that he has updated his YouTube list of contemporary classical music, worth a look (he also has a list of classical mp3 blogs too.)

Also, I should mention the JACK Quartet again, not only have they recently recorded and released Xenakis's complete string quartets on Mode Records (CD/DVDs) but as I mentioned a while ago, they have a fair bit of music free to stream on their site (Lachenmann, Xenakis, Cassidy, Eötvös and more.)

EDIT: The JACK Quartet used to have full pieces to download/stream on their site but now there are only samples unfortunately, still, better than nothing eh.

If you are feeling in the mood to purchase the JACK Quartet's new releases you can get them at the Complement.Inversion.Etc shop/store.

UK shoppers go here for the CD, and here for the DVD, shoppers in the US go here for the for DVD and at the moment I can't find the CD listed in the US (?) (you can download the CD as an mp3 too BTW, nice, here for UK, here for US)

Quotation For Mid May

What I want...
- is always the same: a music which in order to be grasped, does not require a privileged intellectual training, but can rely uniquely upon its compositional clarity and logic; a music which is at the same time the expression and the aesthetic form of a curiosity able to reflect everything - including the illusion of progressive-ness. Art as a fore-taste of freedom in an age without freedom.

Helmut Lachenmann: from the liner notes of the Kairos CD pictured above. Available as usual from the small but ever-growing and select CD stock at the Complement.Inversion.Etc shop, or store if you are in the U.S.A.

Also, check out this audio interview with Lachenmann at/with the Slought Foundation way back in 2008.

Quotation For Early April

Helmut Lachenmann, resting the weight of his beard on his fingers.

Beauty-according to my own definition from twenty years ago-as 'the denial of habit' (not of all things habitual!)-has, insofar as the term 'habit' encompasses the idea of (...comfortably? thoughtlessly? safely? unemancipatedly?) 'dwelling', the following meaning: an offer to break free from all security, i.e. a naively intact bourgeois consciousness. The 'retrieval of art' would thus-to expand upon Kraus's pronouncement-mean: bringing art to a place of in-security, discarding false securities, and doing this with reference to an innovatively-orientated work-ideal that subjects our experience of music to constant dialectical renewal.

Helmut Lachenmann; Philosophy of Composition: from Identity and Difference: Essays on Music, Language and Time.

(first half of blue link above goes to the UK compinv Amazon shop, second part to the US store, UPDATE, that doesn't work for some reason, link to UK shop here.)