Release Date: September 14, 2018
Catalog #: NV6179
Format: Digital & Physical
21st Century
Chamber
Solo Instrumental
Piano
String Quartet

Several Times

The Music Of Dennis Kam For String Quartet & Piano

Dennis Kam composer

SEVERAL TIMES is an impressive collection spanning over four decades of the composer’s career. Though artistic development is present throughout the larger timeline of the album, each composition demonstrates innovative approaches to time and repetition. These innovations reflect a desire to not only learn and understand time, but master it.

String Quartet No. 1 and String Quartet No. 2 may have been composed 20 years apart from each other, but Dr. Kam’s approach to each composition shares a nucleus: repetition. The differences are subtle at first. The former employs a non-tonal, modernist arrangement reminiscent of 1960s post-Webern music, while the latter focuses more on pitch centricities and implied tonal relations. Dr. Kam’s cyclical patterns generate a sound distinctly his own.

Similarly, Sonata No. 1 and Sonata No. 2 share a unique approach to time while retaining their identities in pitch orientation. At only eight years apart, the two sonatas sound closely related, yet each carries a unique motion that draws one into the breathtaking piano performance. The arresting compositions compel listeners to work out the intricacies of time and repetition — if they can.

As timeless as Dr. Kam’s compositions are to himself, so too are they to listeners. Whether you consider String Quartet No. 1 from the mid-60s to D-Bop: Sonata No. 2, the compositions characterize the unique style of Dr. Kam from his past to present, and hint at what is to come in the future.

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Artist Information

Dennis Kam

Composer

Dennis Kam (1942-2018), Professor Emeritus – University of Miami, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1942. Retired from the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida since 2013, Kam was Chair of the Music Theory and Composition Department from 1976 until 2012 and also directed/conducted the Other Music Ensemble (group for the performance of new music) at the University of Miami. He was the Music/Worship Director at Granada Presbyterian Church in Coral Gables, Florida and also Composer-in- Residence/ Associate Conductor for the South Florida Youth Symphony.