Search - Herbert Brün, Herbert Brün :: Wayfaring Sounds

The second in a series of four CDs containing the complete works of Herbert Brun, one of the remarkable musical personalities of the 20th century. This CD contains Brun's compositions for instruments with tape. The compositions include 'Non Sequitur VI' (1966), a complex work with relatively independent instrumental and also tape parts, and an excellent example of 'algorithmic composition' as a musical technique; 'Wayfaring sounds' (1959), in Brun's words, is "scorning all categorization and mocking the conventional associative patterns"; 'on stilts among ducks' (1997), for viola and tape, is the most recent, and extended, work on this recording, a fascinating juxtaposition of the lyrical quality of the viola and the very different nature of pulsing and glissandi electronic tones; 'Sonoriferous Loops' (1964), an example of algorithmic composition; 'Infraudibles with percussion' (1968 - 1984), which weds recently through-composed (1984) instrumental parts to a tape composition from 1968; and 'Sentences Now Open Wide (SNOW)' (1984). 'Sentences Now Open Wide (SNOW) (1984) appropriately closes this recording with a work composed for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Experimental Music Studio of the University of Illinois to which Brun dedicated much of his life's work. Here we find joined a mid-1980s piece for chamber ensemble and a tape composed with the methods and equipment from the early 1960s studio. Three voices sing tones and recite a text by the composer, which addresses the paradoxical neccesity, and impossibility, of language. "A word looks no way or both ways or even more ways than a word can say. Certainly you are not just words but yes words are just you ..."