Raveling Unraveling

SKU: BT.AMP-448-130

9x12 inches. English-German-French-Dut ch.

WINNING PERFORMANCE EBBC LILLE 2016Raveling, Unraveling In Search of ‘La Valse’ was written for the Cory Band as their own-choice test piece for the 2016 European Brass Band Championships in Lille. The piece found its genesis in Sparke’s The Unknown Journey (2014) forconcert band, and the use of Ravel’s La Valse as a structural undercurrent to the original piece is an act of reverence. Sparke’s aim was to produce a work that is organic rather than episodic in nature. The composer’s view is that little inmusic does this better than La Valse and for this reason he uses various sections of this masterpiece, both manipulated and quoted verbatim (including much of its stunningclosing passages) to provide the overall geography of his new work. Asthe music progresses, more of the Ravel appears, surfacing completely as the piece reaches its climax - a gesture of homage to the French master.

WINNAAR EBBC LILLE 2016Raveling, Unraveling In Search of ‘La Valse’ is geschreven voor de Britse Cory Band als keuzewerk voor de Europese Brassband Kampioenschappen van 2016 in Lille. De oorsprong ligt in Sparkes The Unknown Journey (2014) voorharmonieorkest. Het is een diepe buiging naar Ravels La Valse, die wordt gebruikt als een soort structurele onderstroom van een origineel stuk muziek, met als doel een werk te maken dat organisch van karakter is. De componist heeftverschillende gedeelten uit het meesterwerk ingebracht, zowel bewerkt als letterlijk geciteerd met veel van de prachtige slotpassages om de algehele opbouw van zijn nieuwe werk te scheppen. Naarmate demuziek voortgaat, verschijnt er meer vanRavel, waarna de wals volledig opduikt in de apotheose: een fraai eerbetoon aan de Franse meester.

SIEGER EBBC LILLE 2016Raveling, Unraveling In Search of La Valse wurde für die Cory Band als selbst ausgewähltes Prüfungsstück bei den European Brass Band Championships 2016 in Lille komponiert. Die Komposition hat ihren Ursprung in Sparkes 2014 entstandenemStück The Unknown Journey für Blasorchester. Es handelt sich um eine Art Hommage, denn Ravels La Valse wird hier als formale Grundlage für ein eher in sich geschlossenes und nicht nur episodenhaftes Originalwerk verwendet. DemKomponisten zufolge gibt es kaum eine Musik, die dies besser vermag als La Valse. Er verwendet verschiedene Abschnitte aus diesem Meisterwerk, sowohl bearbeitet als auch direkt übernommen inklusive zahlreicher fantastischer Schlusspassagen ,um die Gesamtstruktur seines neuen Werkes darzustellen. Je mehr die Musik voranschreitet, umso mehr wird Ravels Einfluss erkennbar, vor allem beim Erreichen des musikalischen Höhepunktes des gesamten Stückes eine Hommage an den französischenMeister.

VAINQUEUR EBBC LILlE 2016Raveling, Unraveling In Search of La Valse a été composé pour le Cory Band comme pièce de choix pour le Championnat Européen de Brass Band 2016 Lille. L’œuvre tire son origine de la pièce de concert pour orchestre d’harmonie de Sparke,The Unknown Journey (2014). Une marque de respect La Valse, ce nouveau morceau utilise l’œuvre de Ravel comme sous-courant structurel et a comme objectif un genre organique plutôt qu’épisodique. D’après le compositeur, La Valseest l’un des seuls morceaux qui réussit accomplir ceci. Il se sert de plusieurs sections de ce chef d’œuvre, aussi bien modifiées que citées telles quelles y inclus laplupart de ses magnifiques passages finaux pour établir la structure généralede ce nouveau morceau. Plus la musique progresse, plus la musique de Ravel apparaît, et domine alors que l’apogée est atteinte un hommage au maestro français.

SKU: BT.AMP-448-030

English-German-French- Dutch.

WINNING PERFORMANCE EBBC LILLE 2016Raveling, Unraveling In Search of ‘La Valse’ was written for the Cory Band as their own-choice test piece for the 2016 European Brass Band Championships in Lille. The piece found its genesis in Sparke’s The Unknown Journey (2014) forconcert band, and the use of Ravel’s La Valse as a structural undercurrent to the original piece is an act of reverence. Sparke’s aim was to produce a work that is organic rather than episodic in nature. The composer’s view is that little inmusic does this better than La Valse and for this reason he uses various sections of this masterpiece, both manipulated and quoted verbatim (including much of its stunningclosing passages) to provide the overall geography of his new work. Asthe music progresses, more of the Ravel appears, surfacing completely as the piece reaches its climax - a gesture of homage to the French master.

WINNAAR EBBC LILLE 2016Raveling, Unraveling In Search of ‘La Valse’ is geschreven voor de Britse Cory Band als keuzewerk voor de Europese Brassband Kampioenschappen van 2016 in Lille. De oorsprong ligt in Sparkes The Unknown Journey (2014) voorharmonieorkest. Het is een diepe buiging naar Ravels La Valse, die wordt gebruikt als een soort structurele onderstroom van een origineel stuk muziek, met als doel een werk te maken dat organisch van karakter is. De componist heeftverschillende gedeelten uit het meesterwerk ingebracht, zowel bewerkt als letterlijk geciteerd met veel van de prachtige slotpassages om de algehele opbouw van zijn nieuwe werk te scheppen. Naarmate demuziek voortgaat, verschijnt er meer vanRavel, waarna de wals volledig opduikt in de apotheose: een fraai eerbetoon aan de Franse meester.

SIEGER EBBC LILLE 2016Raveling, Unraveling In Search of La Valse wurde für die Cory Band als selbst ausgewähltes Prüfungsstück bei den European Brass Band Championships 2016 in Lille komponiert. Die Komposition hat ihren Ursprung in Sparkes 2014 entstandenemStück The Unknown Journey für Blasorchester. Es handelt sich um eine Art Hommage, denn Ravels La Valse wird hier als formale Grundlage für ein eher in sich geschlossenes und nicht nur episodenhaftes Originalwerk verwendet. DemKomponisten zufolge gibt es kaum eine Musik, die dies besser vermag als La Valse. Er verwendet verschiedene Abschnitte aus diesem Meisterwerk, sowohl bearbeitet als auch direkt übernommen inklusive zahlreicher fantastischer Schlusspassagen ,um die Gesamtstruktur seines neuen Werkes darzustellen. Je mehr die Musik voranschreitet, umso mehr wird Ravels Einfluss erkennbar, vor allem beim Erreichen des musikalischen Höhepunktes des gesamten Stückes eine Hommage an den französischenMeister.

VAINQUEUR EBBC LILlE 2016Raveling, Unraveling In Search of La Valse a été composé pour le Cory Band comme pièce de choix pour le Championnat Européen de Brass Band 2016 Lille. L’œuvre tire son origine de la pièce de concert pour orchestre d’harmonie de Sparke,The Unknown Journey (2014). Une marque de respect La Valse, ce nouveau morceau utilise l’œuvre de Ravel comme sous-courant structurel et a comme objectif un genre organique plutôt qu’épisodique. D’après le compositeur, La Valseest l’un des seuls morceaux qui réussit accomplir ceci. Il se sert de plusieurs sections de ce chef d’œuvre, aussi bien modifiées que citées telles quelles y inclus laplupart de ses magnifiques passages finaux pour établir la structure généralede ce nouveau morceau. Plus la musique progresse, plus la musique de Ravel apparaît, et domine alors que l’apogée est atteinte un hommage au maestro français.

SKU: HL.44013337

WINNING PERFORMANCE EBBC LILLE 2016 Raveling, Unraveling - In Search of 'La Valse' was written for the Cory Band as their own-choicetest piece for the 2016 European Brass Band Championships in Lille. The piece found its genesis in Sparkes The Unknown Journey (2014) for concert band, and the use of Ravels La Valse as a structural undercurrent to the original piece is an act of reverence. Sparkes aim was to produce a work that is organic rather than episodic in nature. The composers view is that little in music does this better than La Valse and for this reason he uses various sections of this masterpiece, both manipulated and quoted verbatim (including much of its stunningclosing passages) to provide the overall geography of his new work. As the music progresses, more of the Ravel appears, surfacing completely as the piece reaches its climax - a gesture of homage to the French master.

SKU: PR.11441690S

UPC: 680160626021. 9 x 12 inches.

Ran's third string quartet was written for the Pacifica Quartet, who are featuring it in numerous performances from May 2014 through February 2016, across the country and abroad. Their blog page dedicated to the work also features the composer's notes, for more indepth insight. ...impassioned solos emerge from ominous quiet, and high arpeggios in the violins quiver alongside the earthy cello. Ms. Ran skillfully deploys these extremes of color, volume and pitch, yet the overall somewhat chilly impression is one of poise. -- Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times.
My third string quartet was composed at the invitation of the Pacifica Quartet, whose music-making I have come to know closely and admire hugely as resident artists at the University of Chicago.  Already in our early conversations Pacifica proposed that this quartet might, in some manner, refer to the visual arts as a point of germination.  Probing further, I found out that the quartet members had special interest in art created during the earlier part of the 20th century, perhaps between the two world wars.  It was my good fortune to have met, a short while later, while in residence at the American Academy in Rome in the fall of 2011, art conservationist Albert Albano who steered me to the work of Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944), a German-Jewish painter who, like so many others, perished in the Holocaust at a young age, and who left some powerful, deeply moving art that spoke to the life that was unraveling around him. The title of my string quartet takes its inspiration from a major exhibit devoted to art by German artists of the period of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) titled “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s”, first shown at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006-07.  Nussbaum would have been a bit too young to be included in this exhibit.  His most noteworthy art was created in the last very few years of his short life.  The exhibit’s evocative title, however, suggested to me the idea of “Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory” as a way of framing a possible musical composition that would be an homage to his life and art, and to that of so many others like him during that era.  Knowing that their days were numbered, yet intent on leaving a mark, a legacy, a memory, their art is triumph of the human spirit over annihilation. Parallel to my wish to compose a string quartet that, typically for this genre, would exist as “pure music”, independent of a narrative, was my desire to effect an awareness in my listener of matters which are, to me, of great human concern.  To my mind there is no contradiction between the two goals.  As in several other works composed since 1969, this is my way of saying ‘do not forget’, something that, I believe, can be done through music with special power and poignancy.    The individual titles of the quartet’s four movements give an indication of some of the emotional strands this work explores. 1) “That which happened” (das was geschah) – is how the poet Paul Celan referred to the Shoah – the Holocaust.  These simple words served for me, in the first movement, as a metaphor for the way in which an “ordinary” life, with its daily flow and its sense of sweet normalcy, was shockingly, inhumanely, inexplicably shattered. 2) “Menace” is a shorter movement, mimicking a Scherzo.  It is also machine-like, incessant, with an occasional, recurring, waltz-like little tune – perhaps the chilling grimace we recognize from the executioner’s guillotine mask.  Like the death machine it alludes to, it gathers momentum as it goes, and is unstoppable. 3) â� ��If I must perish - do not let my paintings die”; these words are by Felix Nussbaum who, knowing what was ahead, nonetheless continued painting till his death in Auschwitz in 1944.  If the heart of the first movement is the shuddering interruption of life as we know it, the third movement tries to capture something of what I can only imagine to be the conflicting states of mind that would have made it possible, and essential, to continue to live and practice one’s art – bearing witness to the events.  Creating must have been, for Nussbaum and for so many others, a way of maintaining sanity, both a struggle and a catharsis – an act of defiance and salvation all at the same time. 4) “Shards, Memory” is a direct reference to my quartet’s title.  Only shards are left.  And memory.  The memory is of things large and small, of unspeakable tragedy, but also of the song and the dance, the smile, the hopes.  All things human.  As we remember, in the face of death’s silence, we restore dignity to those who are gone.—Shulamit Ran .