KBCS

Historical voices inform contemporary ones on this week’s Flotation Device. We pay our respects to the late Karl Berger who bridged Ornette Coleman’s milieu with today’s Downtown improv scene. We celebrate the 90th birthday of Morton Subotnick, whose synthesizer works helped define a language straddling the montage style of musique concrète and the gestural world of acoustic music—and whose traces can be observed in two new works from today’s Polish avant-garde. We also connect Sun Ra’s contemporaneous synth experiments with the extemporaneous electroacoustic world of London’s Scatter quartet. And the Grdina/Maneri/Lillinger trio gives some consideration to the oud and viola as worthy instruments for avant-improvisation.

PatKop as a composer? That too is on the docket, showing her affinity for Webern, something true for Feldman too, as revealed by a concerto that he refused to call a concerto and which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week. We also connect Elsa Bergman and Stefano Gervasoni to Ligeti, and Philippe Manoury to Boulez. And we espy similarities between Scott Fields’ new text settings and Charles Dodge’s primordial experiments in musicalized computer speech, which are likewise turning 50, as is an obsessively plasmatic work by Rădulescu that anticipates much of today’s dark ambient and noise music.