Contemporary

Conlon Nancarrow (b. October 27, 1912, Texarkana - d. August 10, 1997, Mexico City) was an American-born composer who lived most of his life in Mexico. Nancarrow is remembered almost exclusively for the pieces he wrote for the player piano. He was one of the first composers to use musical instruments as mechanical machines, utilising their capacity to play complex polyrhythms at tempos far beyond human performance ability.

Read more about Conlon Nancarrow on Last.fm.

The British Methodist Youth Choir was formed in 1982 and, with rolling membership, has continued to sing a variety of the best of the choral repertoire ever since, both in concert on CD (a first album, [album]A New Dawn[/album], has enjoyed considerable success, and a second was shortly to be released at the time of writing in spring 2012). Working under the strapline 'A Mission in Song', a feature of the choir's repertoire in recent years has been specially composed music, to traditional or new texts, particularly by former and current Musical Directors Anthony Thompson and Heidi Cottrell respectively.

Composer Pauline Oliveros is a maverick in the field of electronic music. Oliveros' first instrument was the accordion; as a teenager in Texas she played in a 100-piece accordion group that appeared at the rodeo. In 1949 she entered the University of Houston, but in 1952 transferred to San Francisco State College. Oliveros studied music privately with Robert Erickson and began to associate with a loose confederation of like-minded composers; Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Morton Subotnick among them.

music
pianocircus formed in 1989 to play Steve Reich's Six Pianos, and has since created a repertoire of over eighty works; the majority are written specially for the ensemble and include pieces by Kevin Volans, Graham Fitkin, Brian Eno, Louis Andriessen, Erkki-Sven Tuur, Terry Riley, Nikki Yeoh and Heiner Goebbels. pianocircus has released seven CDs with Decca and now has three CDs available on its own label. members