Featuring:
Christian Kaya (clarinets); Claudio Puntin (clarinets); Heike Liss
(percussion); Bernd Settelmeyer (percussion); Bernd Weber
(voice); Fred Frith (voice & all other instruments and
manipulations)
Track listing:
Part 1 (Homage to John Cage)
Part 2 (Homage to Morton Feldman)
Part 3 (Homage to Earle Brown)
For his latest recorded adventure, former Henry Cow guitarist FRED FRITH pays homage to three giants of contemporary classical music, John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown.
THE PREVIOUS EVENING was originally commissioned by Amanda Miller, a work that was partly premiered by the London Contemporary Dance Theatre at London's Sadler's Wells in December 1993, and by the Pretty Ugly Dance Company in 1996, at the Tiroler Landestheater, Innsbruck and the Hebbel Theater, Berlin respectively.
In his own inimitable fashion, Frith has tried to incorporate the chosen composer's own working methods into each of the three pieces that make up The Previous Evening.
As he explains in the enclosed booklet regarding his John Cage homage: "Fragments of text heard in Part 1 were taken at random from John Cage's book Silence. Tape editing, the structure of events, and dynamic markings in this section were also determined using chance methods."
Elsewhere an Australian dawn chorus illustrates a section of "Part 3 (Homage to Earle Brown)", while other sound sources include works by Cage, Schumann, Mozart and "some bits and pieces of my own earlier work."
The result is a record which shines new light on the work of Cage,
Feldman and Brown, as well as illuminating another side of Fred
Frith's constantly evolving career as a musician and composer.
source: RéR promotional onesheet