Harvey Sollberger conducting the Group for Contemporary Music at Columbia University. Harvey Sollberger, flute; Charles Wuorinen, piano; Yi-an Chang, piano. Thor Johnson conducting the Peninsula Festival Orchestra. CRI 691 [ADD]; 46:01. Produced by Carter Harmon. (Distributed by Koch International.)

When in his eye-opening article “Asian Concepts and Twentieth-Century Western Composers” (The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 57:2, 1971) the Chinese-born, American-adopted composer Chou Wen-chung cites the similarities between Webern’s acute concern for the transformational properties of timbre, texture, register, and duration in an otherwise intervalically-generated musical structure and those in the traditional Chinese music for ch’in (a kind of zither), he is in fact giving us insight into his own compositional thought and processes. But Yü Ko, written for violin, wind instruments, piano, and two percussionists, and The Willows are New, for solo piano, are adapted from ancient ch’in songs, and seek to replace the original instrument’s subtle nuances of pitch, attack, timbre, and inflection with expanded notions of color and texture. In The Willows are New, clusters and unorthodox harmonies alter our response to the piano’s usual romantic inclinations, and unconventional rhythmic gestures are meant to suggest the contemplative yet spontaneous brush strokes of the Asian calligraphic arts. The distortion of the piano is carried even further in Cursive, where the instrument is partially “prepared” to create unexpected buzzing, metallic, and percussive timbres; the flutist, too, alternates between techniques derived from shakuhachi playing and post-Boulez atonal phrasing. Pien translates these ideas into a larger setting, beginning with the slow, gradual presentation of material common to Japanese and Korean ensemble musics, isolating individual sounds from the various instruments and reuniting them in implicit hocket (or Webern’s klangfarbenmelodie) phrases. The attention to color and dynamics here is fascinating, and as the textures continually vary from sparse to energetic groupings it’s obvious that moment to moment transformation is Chou’s goal. Finally, Landscapes, the earliest (1949–the other works date from 1957 to ’66) work, paints a simpler, yet equally evocative scene derived from three traditional melodies associated with three pastoral poems.

Chou (the family and given names are reversed, as in Bartók Bela), like Toru Takemitsu and Isang Yun in their own fashion, has created marvelously crafted, imaginatively expressive music from contrasting Asian and Western sources. The performances are excellent, and the sound, refurbished from the original 1957 and ’72 recordings, is fine. (By the way, for the record, the timing is incorrectly given on the CD box as 61, not 46, minutes.)