Contemporary Music Ensemble

It's incredibly exciting for students to tackle these Aphex Twin tracks. Aphex is a brilliant creator of incredibly complex electronic music, and it's music that wasn't ever meant for humans to play. The demands upon musicians to realize these sounds live—both in terms of the sounds they have to make and the virtuosity of executing them at these high speeds and with the required level of exactitude—are extreme. It's incredibly exciting to watch.

The Glass and Scelsi pieces are two very different visions from two very different composers, from around 1970, of a kind of stripped-down music. Glass's work is a major early statement in American minimalism, and the Italian composer Scelsi was developing this very organic, fluid, breath-oriented approach to music built out of single notes.