The duo Contour of Stephen Altoff (trumpet) & Lee Forrest Ferguson (percussion) perform Antoine Beuger's "dedekind duos" dedicated to mathematician Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind; and Jurg Frey's "22 Sachelchen" or "small things", 22 focused miniature compositions.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2009 Country: Germany Packaging: Cardstock 3 page foldover Recorded in Vereinshaus ,Wittnau, Germany, in July 2009.
Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind (1831 - 1916): Mathematician. He developed the idea of cutting into the continuum in order to define the irrational numbers and to comprehend the essence of continuity (Stetigkeit und Irrationale Zahlen, 1872). He was also the first to formulate a clear definition of infinite sets (Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?, 1887). By taking the infinite set as the fundamental concept, from which the concept of a finite set is to be derived, he very calmly, with clarity and precision, carried out a Copernican revolution in thinking about the world. He thus gave strong support to his friend Georg Cantor's project of a mathematical description of the world in termsof pure multiplicity (set theory). Dedekind had a lasting influence on both the substance and the style of modern mathematics.)
Duo Contour
Since their formation in 1998 at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, duo Contour have commissioned and performed over 40 new pieces by composers from Asia, Europe, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United States. Their collaborative work has combined the acoustic world of trumpet and percussion with dance, electronics, improvisation, origami, story-telling, theatre and video, as well as and with other musicians in their 'duo Contour plus....' programmes. The duo has been resident at the Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada), were featured in the Bangor New Music Festival (Wales), the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK), the Percussive Arts Society International Conference (Texas), the SINKRO Electroacoustic Music Festival, (Vittoria, Spain), the Slowind Festival (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and UK Microfest. They have been recorded and broadcasted by Südwest Rundfunk, Deutschland Radio Berlin, Slovenian National Radio and the BBC."-Editions Wandelweiser
"Two sets of pieces written for the duo Contour (Stephen Altoff-trumpet, Lee Forrest Ferguson-percussion), a potentially unwieldy combination. Frey's "22 sachelchen" (small things) is rather just that, 22 miniatures lasting 32 1/2 minutes that vary from quiet reductionism to outright fanfares. I guess some of the latter sort are a bit...shocking, at least in a Wandelweiser context. But there are also oblique references to jazz (the mute in no. 11), processional music (the tympani in no. 13) and much else. For me, however, that resulted in something of a grab bag effect, a series of disconnected bagatelles, some attractive (no. 17, a lovely quasi-scale, and the closing section), some bland (all finely played, I should say), some annoyingly blaring, that added up to a cabinet drawer of odds and ends. Beuger takes his time and the results bear him out. Five sections in his "dedicated duos" (the dedicatee being the mathematician Julius Dedekind, an associate of Cantor), and they don't stray all that far from one another--quiet, considered, the instruments often creating parallel lines of sound, not so different from what label-mate Michael Pisaro does with sine tone and acoustic instruments. Indeed, I was often reminded of some of the quieter moments from Greg Kelley over the past years. Very pure, very calm, each tone or duo of tones shimmering in its own space, receding, allowing the next to surface. Lovely work, worth it on its own."-Brian Olewnick, Just Outside