CD safari
The Tower Records in Harvard Square has been singing its siren song to me all week long. It lures me in seductively, flaunting its assets–a good sized section devoted entirely to new music–while simultaneously draining mine. Ever since the Borders in Ann Arbor scaled down its classical music section I haven’t had many opportunities recently to thumb through the bins and discover an interesting and exciting CD. My safaris through Tower these past few days have yielded four trophies: a box set of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano (Wergo); Still Lives (Lovely), a CD featuring three works by Alvin Lucier, including Marilyn Nonken performing Music for Piano with slow sweet pure wave oscillators; Salvatore Sciarrino’s La bocca, i piedi, il suono (Col Legno) for a quartet of alto saxophones with a back-up band of one hundred saxophones; and Vespertine by Bjork.
