| Irritable Hedgehog Music | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Founded | 2010 |
| Founder | David D. McIntire |
| Genre | Minimalism, postminimalism, electroacoustic |
| Country of origin | U.S. |
| Location | Kansas City, Missouri |
| Official website | www |
Irritable Hedgehog Music is a Kansas City-based record label, focused primarily on minimalist and electroacoustic music.
Irritable Hedgehog Music was original organized as the publishing imprint for David D. McIntire's compositions. The impetus for moving into the recording industry was a performance of Tom Johnson's An Hour for Piano by R. Andrew Lee in May 2009. [1] Recalls McIntire, “My wife and I were there and driving home I said, ‘You know, I think Andy plays that as well as anyone in the world. He owns that piece in a really amazing way.’ And she said, ‘Well I think he should record it, and you should produce it.’ I was startled by the idea, but as I let it sink in I thought, ‘You know, I should.’” [2]
Realization of that recording would take over a year, but on 30 October 2010, Irritable Hedgehog released their first commercial recording, "Tom Johnson: An Hour for Piano." [3] Since that time, their catalog has grown to include several CD releases as well as digital releases.
Manfred Werder: Stück 1998 - Released 19 October 2015. This realization by Chilean guitarist Cristián Alvear represents pages 676-683 of this 4000 page work by Manfred Werder.
Jay Batzner: as if to each other - Released 21 July 2015. The premiere recording of Jay Batzner's "as if to each other..." for piano and fixed electronics.
Memory and Weather - Released 13 February 2015. This is the debut album by the Ensemble of Irreproducible Outcomes (EIO), which features David D. McIntire (clarinet, tenor saxophone, ocarina, electronics), Ryan Oldham (trumpet, flugelhorn, objects, whistling) and Brian Padavic (double bass, whistling).
Jürg Frey: Pianist, Alone - Released 30 September 2014. This is the second album of Frey's music recorded by R. Andrew Lee, featuring two works: pianist, alone (1) and pianist, alone (2). The latter having been written specifically for Lee.
Dave Seidel: ~60 Hz - Released 25 February 2014. An album of electroacoustic music by composer Dave Seidel.
Electronic Music Midwest - Released 11 November 2013. This is an album of electroacoustic music by composers associated with Electronic Music Midwest.
Eva-Maria Houben: Piano Music - Released 15 October 2013. This CD features two previously unrecorded works of Wandelweiser composer Eva-Maria Houben: Abgemalt and go and stop. This album was selected by Alex Ross of The New Yorker as one of 10 Notable Classical Recordings of 2013. [4]
Landscape of Descent - Released 25 June 2013. 'Landscape' is an electroacoustic piece composed by David D. McIntire based on a short sampling of high-pitched bells.
Dennis Johnson: November - Released 18 March 2013. November, written in 1959, is perhaps the first minimalist composition every composed. [5] This is the first commercial recording of this nearly five-hour-long piece. This album was selected by Steve Smith as the top classical album of 2013 for Time Out NY. [6]
Jürg Frey: Piano Music - Released 13 November 2012. This CD features two previously unrecorded works of Wandelweiser composer Jürg Frey: Klavierstück 2 and les tréfonds inexplorés des signes pour piano (24-35).
Queen of Heaven - Released 31 January 2012. Another premier recording, this EP features music composed by Scott Blasco and is performed by pianist Kari Johnson, who commissioned the work. Based in Catholic and Orthodox theology, this piece for piano and electronics reflects on five different aspects of the Virgin Mary. [7]
William Duckworth: The Time Curve Preludes - Released 18 October 2011. This was the second complete recording of The Time Curve Preludes, following the premier recording for Lovely Music, [8] and also follows Bruce Brubaker's recording of Book I for Arabesque. [9] One notable aspect of the recording is that it allows the sustained tones (created by small weights place on certain keys) [10] to die away completely, more closely mirroring a live performance. [11]
Ann Southam: Soundings for a New Piano - Released 9 August 2011. This was the first commercial release of Southam's Soundings for a New Piano: 12 Meditations on a Twelve Tone Row, which was composed for Jane Blackstone in March 1986. The piece is another example of Southam's pervasive 12-tone row (featured in out pieces such as Simple Lines of Enquiry), and combines serial and minimalist composition techniques. [12]
Tom Johnson: An Hour for Piano - Released 30 October 2010. This marked the third recording of An Hour for Piano, with the first being Frederic Rzewski's original 1979 release, subsequently released on CD in 2000, [13] and Jeroen van Veen's recording as part of his Minimal Piano collection, released in 2007. [14] This was the first commercial release of the piece that was exactly one hour long, as is indicated by the score.
Along with CD releases, Irritable Hedgehog has put out a number of digital-only albums and tracks, many of which are free to download. The consist of almost exclusively of David McIntire's electroacoustic compositions and field recordings, with the exception of the Putney Project.
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The Putney Project came about as a result of two separated experiences. The first was McIntire's early exposure to the EMS VCS-3, an odd English synthesizer known as the "Putney," while the second was the 60x60 concerts. [15] The 60x60 concerts, curated by Robert Voisey, each featuring 60 works by 60 different composers that are one minute in length. [16]
As an undergraduate, McIntire recorded several improvisations with this synthesizer and invited others to compose their own pieces based on these raw materials. [17] All invited were encouraged to use the material as they saw fit. As the invitation states, "There are no restrictions as to length or how you use it. Re-mix, re-mash. Add beats. Subtract overtones, add undertones. Overdub guitar solos. Layer in twelve tubas. Put it in a blender and hit "frappé." Whether your approach is subtle and sophisticated or brute-force and grungy, it's all good."
The first volume was released on 3 January 2012, featuring works by Ken Frank, David Morneau, Alexander Hogan,Phillip Marshall, Jack Smith, and Scott Unrein
The second volume was released on 22 May 2012, featuring works by Steve Gisby, Christopher Biggs, Jonathan Robertson, Audrey Valentine, and John Chittum.
Juan María Solare is an Argentine composer and pianist.
William Duckworth was an American composer, author, educator, and Internet pioneer. He wrote more than 200 pieces of music and is credited with the composition of the first postminimal piece of music, The Time Curve Preludes (1977–78), for piano. Duckworth was a Professor of Music at Bucknell University. Together with Nora Farrell, his wife, he ran Monroe Street Music, the publisher of many Duckworth's pieces.
The 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87 by Dmitri Shostakovich are a set of 24 musical pieces for solo piano, one in each of the major and minor keys of the chromatic scale. The cycle was composed in 1950 and 1951 while Shostakovich was in Moscow, and premiered by pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva in Leningrad in December 1952; it was published the same year. The complete work takes about two and a half hours to play. It is one of several examples of music written in all major and/or minor keys.
Chris Brown is an American composer, pianist and electronic musician, who creates music for acoustic instruments with interactive electronics, for computer networks, and for improvising ensembles. He was active early in his career as an inventor and builder of electroacoustic instruments; he has also performed widely as an improviser and pianist with groups as "Room" and the "Glenn Spearman Double Trio." In 1986 he co-founded the pioneering computer network music ensemble "The Hub". He is also known for his recorded performances of music by Henry Cowell, Luc Ferrari, and John Zorn. He has received commissions from the Berkeley Symphony, the Rova Saxophone Quartet, the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, the Gerbode Foundation, the Phonos Foundation and the Creative Work Fund. His recent music includes the poly-rhythm installation "Talking Drum", the "Inventions" series for computers and interactive performers, and the radio performance "Transmissions" series, with composer Guillermo Galindo.
The Second Rhapsody is a concert piece for orchestra with piano by American composer George Gershwin, written in 1931. It is sometimes referred to by its original title, Rhapsody in Rivets.
The Wandelweiser Group is an international group of composers/performers. It was founded in 1992 by Dutch-born flautist Antoine Beuger and German violinist Burkhard Schlothauer. In 1993 Swiss clarinetist Jürg Frey was invited to join, followed by American guitarist Michael Pisaro, Swiss pianist Manfred Werder, then Austrian trombonist Radu Malfatti the following year, then American trombonist Craig Shepard, and others. The group runs its own publishing operation, Edition Wandelweiser, and its own record label Wandelweiser Records.
Electronic Music Midwest (EMM) is a festival of new electroacoustic music.
Maggi Payne is an American composer, flutist, video artist, recording engineer/editor, and historical remastering engineer who creates electroacoustic, instrumental, vocal works, and works involving visuals.
Ann Southam, was a Canadian electronic and classical music composer and music teacher. She is known for her minimalist, iterative, and lyrical style, for her long-term collaborations with dance choreographers and performers, for her large body of work, and, according to the Globe and Mail, for "blazing a trail for women composers in a notoriously sexist field".
Christina Petrowska Quilico is a Canadian pianist. She is a Full Professor of Piano Performance and Musicology at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2020 “For her celebrated career as a classical and contemporary pianist and for championing Canadian music.” In 2021, she was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Mark Gustavson is an American composer of contemporary classical music.
Tom Johnson's An Hour for Piano was written in 1971. The piece began as a series of short, improvisatory sketches in 1967 when Johnson was accompanying a modern dance class at New York University. Johnson gradually expanded these sketches and added transitions between them, writing a piece that is to be played in exactly one hour. Achieving this goal requires an absolutely steady tempo for the duration of the piece, which Johnson has set at quarter note = 59.225 beats per minute. The only recording that is exactly sixty minutes long was recently released by the Irritable Hedgehog label and performed by R. Andrew Lee.
Scott Unrein is an American composer and performer of electronic and acoustic music.
Phase music is a form of music that uses phasing as a primary compositional process. It is an approach to musical composition that is often associated with minimal music, as it shares similar characteristics, but some commentators prefer to treat phase music as a separate category. Phasing is a compositional technique in which the same part is played on two musical instruments, in steady but not identical tempi. Thus, the two instruments gradually shift out of unison, creating first a slight echo as one instrument plays a little behind the other, then a doubling effect with each note heard twice, then a complex ringing effect, and eventually coming back through doubling and echo into unison. Phasing is the rhythmic equivalent of cycling through the phase of two waveforms as in phasing. Note that the tempi of the two instruments are almost identical, so that both parts are perceived as being in the same tempo: the changes only separate the parts gradually. In some cases, especially live performance where gradual separation is extremely difficult, phasing is accomplished by periodically inserting an extra note into the phrase of one of the two players playing the same repeated phrase, thus shifting the phase by a single beat at a time, rather than gradually.
R. Andrew Lee is an American pianist of contemporary classical music, with a particular emphasis on Minimal music and music of the Wandelweiser collective. He has recorded ten albums for Irritable Hedgehog Music.
Dennis Lee Johnson was a mathematician and a composer. He is the namesake of the Johnson homomorphism in the study of mapping class groups of surfaces. He is credited as having composed the first truly "minimal" composition November, which was written for solo piano in 1959.
Taylan Susam is a Turkish-Dutch composer of experimental music. He is a member of the Wandelweiser group, which has been described by The New Yorker as "an informal network of twenty or so experimental-minded composers who share an interest in slow music, quiet music, spare music, fragile music."
Dante Boon is a Dutch composer and pianist. A member of the Wandelweiser composers collective, he is perhaps best known as an interpreter of experimental piano music. His own music has been performed internationally to wide acclaim.
Eva-Maria Houben is a German composer, organist, pianist, musicologist and university lecturer.
Jürg Hanselmann is a Swiss-Liechtenstenian pianist, composer and music educator. He teaches piano and composition at the Sargans Cantonal School.
