Nonken - Sample Scholarly Work #3
"The Silence of A Falling Star Lights Up a Purple Sky."
Christopher Trapani: Waterlines [Track 9]. New Focus, FCR 200, 2018. 

"The Silence of a Falling Star Lights Up a Purple Sky," for solo piano, is a piece about drawing borderlines along a continuum. It was conceived from the start as dealing with the idea of endings and thresholds; in particular, it invokes the death of Hank Williams, who was found outstretched on the back seat of a Cadillac on New Year's Day, 1953. 
     That lonesome, drifting sound is embodied in aimless interludes in the middle register, playing on prepared strings, deadened with putty to evoke the sound of a palm-muted country guitar. Their two-voice motion pays homage to old-time soloists' quirky  habit of never playing fewer than two strings at once, ostensibly as a safeguard from showing off. The piece scans the spectrum from the bottom up, rising in register and snowballing in momentum until it hits the top end of the piano, shooting past the final point of perceptibility.
trapani_fallingstar.mp3
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Waterlines at New Focus Recordings
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded in 2004 by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber. Since 2012, New Focus Recordings has been distributed by Naxos of America.
Christopher Trapani: Notes on Waterlines
Christopher Trapani: Composer Website

Nonken - Sample Scholarly Work #4
"Three Pieces for Two Pianos"
Larry Polansky: Three Pieces for Two Pianos [Tracks 1-4]. New World,  NW80777, 2016.

 "Three Pieces for Two Pianos," three unnamed movements with an interlude connecting the second and third, was premiered by Marilyn Nonken and Joseph Kubera in 2011. Polansky's unique compositional style is characterized by a constant reexamining, questioning, reformulating, and mixing of ideas. Here, the polymath composer explores different musical ideals, using mathematical models and algorithmic processes to set folk songs; the second piece and following interlude set Stephen Foster's "Comrades, Fill No Glass for Me." The third piece is a canon of epic scale, strongly influenced by Polansky's teacher James Tenney, often referred to as the first American spectralist.
"Three Pieces for Two Pianos:" Sound Files on YouTube
"Three Pieces for Two Pianos" at New World Records
Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc., which records under the label New World Records, was founded in 1975.
It is dedicated to the documentation of American music largely ignored by the commercial recording companies; in its catalogue of over 400 recordings, some 700 American composers are represented. The company was founded with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation with a mandate to document American music encompassing a broad spectrum of musical genres. New World currently releases 12-16 new titles per year, chosen from a wide repertory including concert and choral music, opera, sacred music, band music, jazz, traditional, folk, Native American music, popular songs and dances, and musical theater.

polansky_linernotes.pdf
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Reviews
Larry Polansky: Composer Website

Nonken - Sample Scholarly Work #5
Vortex Temporum Revisited [Live]. Projected Release: Metier, 2022.  

"Vortex Temporum" (1996), a concerto for piano and five instruments written by Gérard Grisey (1946-1998), is a seminal work in the spectral repertoire. Written for a detuned piano (with four specific notes lowered by a quarter-tone), it uses an arpeggio from Maurice Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe" as a point of departure, with three contrasting movements exploring a rich evolution of sound and color. Grisey asks that the listener attend to how sound behaves in space and time, as if experiencing it from the contrasting perspectives of humans, insects, and whales. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of Grisey's birth, Marilyn Nonken commissioned six American composers to write solo works inspired by this piece, using the composer's unique scordatura: Edmund Campion, Richard Carrick, Victoria Cheah, Brian Erickson, Christopher Trapani, and Nina C. Young. Divine Art's contemporary music division, Metier Sound and Vision, is committed to releasing and distributing this recording, which will include "Vortex Temporum"  (Marilyn Nonken with Ensemble Sound Icon, under conductor Jeffrey Means) and the commissioned works. Studio recordings are projected to take place in Spring and Summer 2021, with commercial release the following year.
Vortex Temporum Revisited at Roulette Intermedium
Marilyn Nonken with Sound Icon: Live Recording
Track 1 (00:00-36:09): Works Commissioned by and Written for Marilyn Nonken, 2016

* Richard Carrick: Les ciels de Kigali  00:00-3:26
* Nina C. Young: A bout de souffle  3:52-8:01
* Marilyn Nonken acknowledges the composers 8:14-9:05
* Brian Erickson: Epistrata  9:09-13:31
* Edmund Campion: Before and After  14:17-21:20
* Victoria Cheah: n961,963 21:52-27:44
* Christopher Trapani: Lost Time Triptych  28:23-35:54

Track 2 (00:00-38:45): Gérard Grisey, "Vortex Temporum" (1996)
Marilyn Nonken, piano
Jeffrey Means, conductor
Sound Icon

Movement I  00:00
Movement II   12:29
Movement III 20:50

Boston Classical Review
Recording committment letter from Divine Art.pdf
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Composer Websites