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Music of Stephen Dembski

by The New York New Music Ensemble

supported by
Robert Bresnan
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jstamps
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Noel Fraser
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Robert Bielecki
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1.
Alta 07:37
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2.
Alba: I. Pressante 04:22
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3.
Alba: II. Calmissimo, sospeso 02:33
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4.
Alba: III. Allegro 06:43
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5.
Alba: IV. Fast and loose, ma non troppo 01:31
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6.
Alba: V. Moderato ben misurato 04:16
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7.
Digit 02:39
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8.
Trio 13:32
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9.
Stacked Deck 07:42
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10.
Altamira 01:25
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11.
Spectra 13:35
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about

|| Burn-on-demand CDs of this CRi reissue are available at our website: www.newworldrecords.org/products/music-of-stephen-dembski ||

Born in Boston in 1949, Stephen Dembski studied piano from an early age, and later (in elementary school) took up the flute. As a teenager, he played a lot of rock and roll and folk music, then became more involved with long-form improvised music, such as the jazz of Cecil Taylor. To support himself, he worked in mental hospitals and as a tree surgeon. While in his early twenties, the composition of strictly-notated music began to supercede his work as an instrumental performer.

In the early 70s, Dembski migrated to New York from Antioch College where he studied composition with John Ronsheim. After six months as a record salesman and two months as a tour guide, he began composition studies with Bülent Arel at SUNY-Stony Brook. From there he went to Princeton, where he received an M.F.A. and a Ph.D., and where his primary teacher was Milton Babbitt.

The works on this disc chronicle the development of Dembski’s mature musical language—a language that incorporates aspects of both tonal and twelve-tone methods. His approach to compositional structure takes the tonal system as a model for the relations between the various materials from which musical surfaces are constructed, and tonal polyphony as the model for the relations between the entities comprising those surfaces. But Dembski’s craft also involves some of the fundamental aspects of twelve-tone thought. A conception of pre-compositional structure provides the basis for generating arrays of pitch classes; these, in turn, are the basis for harmonic and contrapuntal sketches that are rhythmically animated and re-imagined as musical gestures, textures, articulated segments. In this synthesis of twelve-tone and tonal thinking, a musical world comes into being.

credits

released January 1, 1989

The New York New Music Ensemble: [Jayn Rosenfeld, flute; Laura Flax, clarinet; Daniel Druckman, percussion; Linda Quan, violin; Eric Bartlett, cello]; The Prism Orchestra; Robert Black, conductor; Rolf Schulte, violin; Fred Sherry, cello; Alan Feinberg, piano

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Composers Recordings, Inc. Brooklyn, New York

CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc.) was founded in 1954 by Otto Luening, Douglas Moore and Oliver Daniel. CRI was dedicated to the promotion of new music by American composers, releasing over 600 recordings on LP, cassette and CD over its 49 year history, New World Records assumed ownership of CRI in 2006, since which time its entire catalog has been digitized for streaming, download & CD-R purchase. ... more

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