Posted on DRAM News Wednesday, January 20, 2010 [off-campus access]

DRAM is delighted to announce the availability of twenty newly digitized LPs from the CRI label, the initial batch of approximately 400 CRI LPs that we will be making available over the coming months. Never before issued in any digital format, these titles have been functionally unavailable for more than two decades. Each album includes the original liner notes, and all are also available as premium-quality on-demand CD-Rs from New World Records. The first group of twenty albums includes music by Charles Amirkhanian, Jack Beeson, Easley Blackwood, Julian Carrillo, Theodore Chanler, Mario Davidovsky, Robert Erickson, Ben Johnston, Kenneth Gaburo, John Melby, Quincy Porter, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Robert Ward. We will add approximately 15-20 LPs each month, and intend to have all titles available by the middle of next year. (After the first two groups of releases, the remainder of the titles will be issued in numerical sequence.)

CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc.) was founded in 1954 by Otto Luening, Douglas Moore and Oliver Daniel. Moore was a well-established American composer, Luening was just beginning his work with Vladimir Ussachevsky, with whom he would help found the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1958, and Daniel was a promoter for such American musical luminaries as Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison. Dedicated to the promotion of new music by American composers, CRI released over 600 recordings on LP, cassette and CD over its 49 year history, including works by Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Harry Partch, Ned Rorem, Roger Sessions and Charles Wuorinen, to name just a few. Ownership of the CRI catalogue was assumed by New World Records in 2006, since which time New World has worked to maintain the availability of many CRI titles that had gone out of print or, with the current project, had never before been digitized.