The 17th volume of Master Musicians Collective’s “New Century” series is a collection of works, none lasting over 15 minutes, by composers who are not widely known to the public. As you would expect, styles vary considerably, but this is an asset when putting together a program of this type. Variety is the spice of listening! These recordings were made in several Eastern European cities between 1996 and 2001. The sound quality is consistently fine and the performance level high: these orchestras, most of which would be familiar to Fanfare readers, have recorded a lot of music over the years and are used to getting their act together quickly. Critical listening suggests the Czech orchestra under Válek may be a cut above the others in range and timbre, but I would imagine none of the above composers feels his or her music badly done by.

The notes provide synopses of the works but virtually no information about who wrote them. Most of these composers hold teaching posts in American universities, the exception being Henrik Frisk, who lives in southern Sweden where he evidently works as a computer programmer, academic, and sax-player. (He plays the important saxophone solo in his Tetrachordal Variations .) His Web site includes part of a dissertation entitled “Improvisation and composition: dichotomy or unity?” I must admit I found the extract abstruse to the point of incomprehensibility—but my academic days are long behind me and no doubt the jargon has changed. The point I am making is simply that Frisk’s Variations turn that dichotomy into unity by deftly straddling the two worlds of progressive jazz (saxophone and piano) and contemporary classical music (symphony orchestra). These elements cohere without Third Stream quotation marks around the disparate styles to draw attention to them.

I must be brief about the other items. Paula Diehl was born in China to Danish parents but educated in the US. She has developed a system of structuring her music called Separation; its goal is to create “intervallic independence.” Insiders consists mainly of long held single notes on strings punctuated by percussion, primarily the woodblock. Piano and oboe have a presence in the second movement, which is otherwise barely distinguishable from the first. There is a machine-like character to her music, (the result of this systematic working out, perhaps?) giving it a cryptic quality. Ira-Paul Schwarz (b. 1922)—certainly the eldest here—numbered Nadia Boulanger among his teachers. His Celtic Concerto is a light-hearted piece, making playful use of an Irish jig tune after a more sentimental introduction. The solo instrument is the pennywhistle, a tiny tin flute that featured prominently in James Galway’s encores. This divertimento is written in a more traditional language than its discmates. Stephen Barber studied with Corigliano; in his XYZ we enter the world of the post-Mahlerian adagio . The composer describes the inspiration behind this work as an out-of-body experience he had following the death of his grandmother. This subject matter is caught in eerie orchestral textures that have been treated to selective electro-acoustic tampering. XYZ is a fascinating, sophisticated piece of expressionism.

The final three works here share a common mid-20th-century symphonic language and all make skillful use of the orchestral forces. Daniel McCarthy’s Towers depicts an episode from Lord of the Rings where the travelling hobbits climb a mountain. The moment of final ascent demonstrates an aptly Straussian breadth, but the whole is rigorously argued—it could easily be the first movement of a symphony. Lewis Neilson’s Procession grabs our attention from the outset with distinctive trombone and violin glissandos; this scherzo is a vivid orchestral showpiece portraying the shenanigans in Dante’s Inferno. Charles Hoag’s work is more abstract and full of interesting textures. Thematic material could be more distinctive, a minor caveat which applies to the bulk of these works. A disc for the curious, then, from a praiseworthy series that is helping to keep contemporary music alive. Too bad for Messrs. Hoag, McCarthy, Schwarz, and Frisk that they have had to wait almost a decade to see these performances in print.

FANFARE: Phillip Scott