Goldstein,malcolm - Seasons: Vermont - Music CD

Malcolm Goldstein's widely recognized composition The Seasons: Vermont is monumental in the same way that John Cage's "Atlas Eclipticalis" is. Goldstein's work, for multi-tracked tape collage and an unspecified number of vocalists and instrumentalists, captures the sounds and feelings of the state of Vermont through the four-movement seasonal cycle of one year beginning with the summer. There are sound textures cycled throughout each season, obviously indicative of that period - water, birds, earth moving, and so on. They are repeated in various ways after being grouped and regrouped and then accented with the musical voices of live performers. These voices have been scored specifically to moments in the tape collage, though there are passages written in for improvisation according to the work's frame guidelines. The Seasons: Vermont was ten years in the making. Goldstein listened, assimilated, and then collected sounds to record, manipulate, and then edit into an entire framework. This recorded performance is a re-creation of one given in 1983. That concert was released in edited form on Moe Asche's Folkways Records.