| Starkland | |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1991 |
| Founder | Thomas Steenland |
| Distributor(s) | Naxos of America |
| Genre | electro-acoustic, avant-garde, electronic, Experimental music, contemporary, classical |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Location | Boulder, Colorado |
| Official website | http://www.starkland.com |
Starkland is an independent record label based in Boulder, Colorado that specializes in alternative classical music. It was founded in 1991 by Thomas Steenland.
An independent record label is a record label that operates without the funding of major record labels. Many artists begin their careers on independent labels.
Boulder is the home rule municipality that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of Boulder County, Colorado, United States. It is the state's 11th most populous municipality; Boulder is located at the base of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of 5,430 feet (1,655 m) above sea level. The city is 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Denver.
Classical music is art music produced or rooted in the traditions of Western culture, including both liturgical (religious) and secular music. While a more precise term is also used to refer to the period from 1750 to 1820, this article is about the broad span of time from before the 6th century AD to the present day, which includes the Classical period and various other periods. The central norms of this tradition became codified between 1550 and 1900, which is known as the common-practice period. The major time divisions of Western art music are as follows:
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Starkland's first two CDs offered all the principal 1960s music from the "organized sound" pioneer Tod Dockstader. These releases led to major acclaim for the composer and increased recognition for his music, which stimulated Dockstader's return to composing and further releases of his music in recent years.
Tod Dockstader was an American composer of electronic music, and particularly musique concrète.
Most of Starkland's recordings are devoted to the music of single composers, including Charles Amirkhanian, Phillip Bimstein, Martin Bresnick, Jay Cloidt, Paul Dolden, Paul Dresher, Robert Een, Roger Kleier, Guy Klucevsek, Elliott Sharp, and Pamela Z.
Charles Benjamin Amirkhanian is an American composer. He is a percussionist, sound poet, and radio producer of Armenian extraction. He is mostly known for his electroacoustic and text-sound music. Performance artist Laurie Anderson praises his work: "The art of audio collage has been reinvented here... A brilliant sense of imaginary space."
Phillip Bimstein is an American alternative classical music composer and politician.
Martin Bresnick is a composer of contemporary classical music, film scores and experimental music.
Starkland's two most ambitious projects have focused on surround sound. For the label's Immersion DVD (released in 2000), Steenland commissioned 13 leading-edge composers to create pieces for high-resolution surround sound. The recording is playable at standard resolution on standard DVD players, and at high resolution on DVD-Audio players. Sources such as Pro Sound News and Billboard have recognized Immersion as the first such recording in history. The commissioned composers, all of whom created their first high-resolution surround-sound pieces, are: Paul Dolden, Paul Dresher, Ellen Fullman, Phil Kline, Lukas Ligeti, Ingram Marshall, Merzbow, Meredith Monk, Bruce Odland, Pauline Oliveros, Maggi Payne, Carl Stone, and Pamela Z. Immersion has been praised in such major publications as Stereophile and Sound & Vision , and at times has been the #1 bestselling DVD-Audio at Amazon.com.
Surround sound is a technique for enriching the fidelity of sound reproduction by using multiple audio channels from speakers that surround the listener. Its first application was in movie theaters. Prior to surround sound, theater sound systems commonly had three "screen channels" of sound, from loudspeakers located in front of the audience at the left, center, and right. Surround sound adds one or more channels from loudspeakers behind the listener, able to create the sensation of sound coming from any horizontal direction 360° around the listener. Surround sound formats vary in reproduction and recording methods along with the number and positioning of additional channels. The most common surround sound specification, the ITU's 5.1 standard, calls for 6 speakers: Center (C) in front of the listener, Left (L) and Right (R) at angles of 60° on either side of the center, and Left Surround (LS) and Right Surround (RS) at angles of 100–120°, plus a subwoofer whose position is not critical.
DVD-Audio is a digital format for delivering high-fidelity audio content on a DVD. DVD-Audio uses most of the storage on the disc for high-quality audio and is not intended to be a video delivery format. DVD-Audio has much higher audio quality than most video DVDs containing concert films or music videos.
Billboard is an American entertainment media brand owned by the Billboard-Hollywood Reporter Media Group, a division of Eldridge Industries. It publishes pieces involving news, video, opinion, reviews, events, and style, and is also known for its music charts, including the Hot 100 and Billboard 200, tracking the most popular songs and albums in different genres. It also hosts events, owns a publishing firm, and operates several TV shows.
For Starkland's other surround sound project, Steenland commissioned a major, 65-minute surround sound composition from Phil Kline. Released in 2009, Around the World in a Daze is a ten-movement work, presented in four audio formats along with 80 slides from the composer, found on the first disc of the double-DVD release. The second disc offers an extended 34-minute interview with Kline about this music (conducted by John Schaefer) and a music-video MEDITATION (run as fast as you can) with music and video by Kline. The New Yorker described the release as "A special-project disk in which Kline created, out of extravagant electronic means... an audio-visual feast that balances hipster zen with the seriousness of Bach and Wagner." [1] The release was also praised in The New York Times, [2] Stereophile, [3] and New York Magazine. [4]
Phil Kline is an American composer, sound artist, and performer most recognized for his Unsilent Night (1992) and Zippo Songs (2004). Beginning as a guitarist and singer in the New York City art punk scene, Kline has since gained notability through his song cycles and theatrical works, musical performance art pieces, work with Bang on a Can, and WQXR new-music radio show New Sounds. With five studio albums to date, a majority of his compositional work can be found on Cantaloupe Music.
Musicians on Starkland's recordings include: The Kronos Quartet, JACK Quartet, Ethel (string quartet), Turtle Island String Quartet, Either/Or, California EAR Unit, Paul Dresher Ensemble, Modern Mandolin Quartet, Todd Reynolds, Lisa Moore, Ashley Bathgate, Robert Black, Jenny Lin, and the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra. Starkland also distributes CDs from other labels, including Paul Dresher's Slow Fire, Steven Mackey's Ravenshead and Erling Wold's A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil.
The Kronos Quartet is an American string quartet based in San Francisco. They have been in existence with a rotating membership of musicians for over forty years. The quartet covers a very broad range of musical genres, including contemporary classical music. More than 900 works have been written for them.
The JACK Quartet is an American string quartet dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music. It was founded in 2005 and is based in New York City. The four founding members are violinists Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Kevin McFarland. In 2016, violinist Austin Wulliman and cellist Jay Campbell joined the quartet, replacing Streisfeld and McFarland. The quartet met while attending the Eastman School of Music, and have studied closely with the Kronos Quartet, Arditti Quartet, and Muir String Quartet.
Ethel is a New York based string quartet that was co-founded in 1998 by Ralph Farris, viola; Dorothy Lawson, cello; Todd Reynolds, violin; and Mary Rowell, violin. Unlike most string quartets, ETHEL plays with amplification and integrates improvisation into its performances. The group's current membership includes violinists Kip Jones and Corin Lee.
John Adams, Laurie Anderson, Kyle Gann, David Lang, Meredith Monk, Bill Morrison, Eric Salzman, John Schaefer, and Elliott Sharp have written introductions for Starkland's releases.
Publications praising Starkland's releases include The New York Times, Gramophone, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Stereophile, Wired, Boston Globe, Sound & Vision, New York Magazine, Billboard, and England's The Wire. Starkland's recordings have been featured on such major radio programs as National Public Radio's All Things Considered and Weekend Edition.
Starkland became a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization in 2011.
