4. Now available for free listening on radiOM.org

A Concert of Japanese Koto Music (1966)
From a concert recorded on July 27, 1966, a selection of traditional and contemporary Koto music. The concert begins with Midare Rinzetsu, which is roughly translated as "disorder" or "unorthodox." It is for two kotos, and is in the dan-mono style of the Ikuta school, and is generally ascribed to the 17th-Century master koto player, Yatsuhashi Kengyo. This is followed by Matsukaze which means "wind in the pines." The work, which is believed to have been composed in the 19th-Century by Taiga Yamaki III (also known as Yamaki Kengyo), is scored for two vocalists, two kotos, and sangen. The third work in this concert is a modern composition for solo koto by the 20th-Century koto player and teacher, Kin'ichi Nakanoshima. The program then concludes with Okayasuginuta a work believed to have been composed by the 19th-Century master Kosaburo Okayasu. The main performers in this concert are Namino Torii and Minoyu Otaka, with assistance from Steven Otto and Hiromi Sakata.


The Music of Lou Harrison (1968)
Recorded in August of 1968 this is a wonderful four part program in which American composer Lou Harrison (OM 2 & 8; photo by John Fago) presents a selection of his varied works, in roughly chronological order. The program begins with Harrison providing a brief biographical sketch of his life in which he describes being born in Oregon and how he then moved with his family to Northern California, and his subsequent self-identification as a San Francisco Bay Area composer. The rest of the first half of the program is then dedicated to presenting many of his earlier, Mission Period compositions (a term meant to reflect his adopted home in California), including some of his groundbreaking percussion ensemble pieces such as Suite for Percussion and Labyrinth No. 3. In the third hour of this program the emphasis switches to his longer works written for large ensembles or orchestras, including excerpts from his Suite for Symphonic Strings and Symphony on G. In the last hour, Harrison focuses on works that emanate from his political conviction, as well as his technical studies of world music, and includes chamber works for the piri, psaltry, and other non-Western instrumentation. Radiating throughout this program is the sunny disposition and dulcet voice of one of America's most talented and warm hearted 20th-Century composers.

Computer Music by Justus Matthews (1973)
Four works of early electronic music by Dr. Justus Matthews, Professor of Music at California State University in Long Beach. These works were composed on the PDP 15/40 computer at the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm in the summer of 1973. According to the composer the titles of the works "refer to the MUSIC 15 music composition programming language devised by Prof. Gary Nelson (Bowling Green State University)...The middle number designates the number of the composition in a collection of 35...The floating point number is one called for by the MUSIC 15 input to start the random number generator." Despite working with one of the earliest computer music systems available to composers, and downright primitive by today’s standards, Professor Matthews has managed to create four simple yet elegant pieces featuring pure tone clusters, which standout as being more about the music than the machine.

Concerts by Composers: No. 12: Works by Philip Corner, Petr Kotík, & Tom Johnson (1981)
In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Experimental Intermedia Foundation held a series of exciting concerts of avant-garde and electro-acoustic music at Phill Niblock's (OM 11) loft in the SoHo district of New York City. These concerts were then packaged into a series of hour-long radio programs entitled "Concerts by Composers" and distributed to interested radio stations around the United States. This twelfth program in the series features music by Philip Corner and Petr Kotík, with additional commentary by music critic Tom Johnson (OM 15). The program begins with Philip Corner discussing his interest in gamelan music before we listen to his work Gamelan Vox, which while not scored for gamelan proper, does take its sense of time and pitch from the music of Indonesia. This performance of Corner's work was recorded in December 1980 during a concert at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. This is followed by an excerpt from another Foundation concert in which two aleatoric compositions by Czech composer Petr Kotík are performed simultaneously by the S.E.M. Ensemble. The program then concludes with composer and music critic for the Village Voice, Tom Johnson, discussing minimal music and its relationship to such things as Eastern Philosophy and the influence of John Cage on new music, while also performing Corner's dramatically minimalistic piece Elementals on the psaltery. The production and distribution of this program was originally funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Beards Fund.