your greedbagpress release - Four-Voice Canons
Over the past 25 years, Larry Polansky has been composing a series of fascinating mensuration canons (a formal concept dating back to the Renaissance) that run a sonic gamut from wildly boisterous (#6) to serenely introverted (#17, Guitar Canon). This disc brings together thirteen of these pieces (one of which is found here in three different realizations).
In these canons, each successively entering voice moves proportionally faster than the previous one (i.e., each successive voice is to some degree a temporal compression of the voice that precedes it, allowing all voices in any given canon to contain roughly the same amount of information yet all end simultaneously), causing each piece's density and rhythmic complexity to increase from beginning to end.
Usually, but not always, the individual voices in Polansky's canons are permutation lists of a small number of musical elements (e.g., four or five or six elements), which may include any and/or all of a voice's parameters (pitch, rhythm, instrumentation, etc.).
Each of the canons on this disc could be considered a different orchestration of two basic concepts—the mensuration canon and the permutational cycling of a small number of musical elements. The instrumentation varies widely: gamelan, electric guitars, children’s voices, computer-generated sounds, marimbas, non-pitched percussion, choir, and chamber ensemble. The pitch materials, rhythms, tempos, tunings, and textures also vary dramatically from piece to piece.
Three tracks on this CD involve the collaboration of noted composer/performers who have "realized" (created from a set of specific instructions) their own distinct versions of Polansky's canon #13 (the DIY Canon), filling the piece's malleable template with their own pitch and rhythm materials and instrumentation.
release:Four-Voice Canons
label: Cold Blue Music