Targeting New Music in Postwar Europe: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Crafting of Art Music Avant-Garde Scenes

2018 ◽  
pp. 65-90
Author(s):  
Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Art Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Postwar Europe

London, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Brighton Dome: Big Noise Tour

Tempo ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 58 (228) ◽  
pp. 61-62
Author(s):  
John Godfrey
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Art Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Brass Bands ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Music Ensembles ◽  
Music Ensemble ◽  
New Type ◽  
Minimal Music ◽  
Louis Andriessen

Big Noise – heard in London on 21 November and repeated at the Dome (Corn Exchange) in Brighton on the 22nd – was a collaboration between the highly idiosyncratic New Music ensembles Orkest de Volharding (Holland) and Icebreaker (UK). The former was established by the amazingly influential Dutch composer Louis Andriessen: reacting against the elitist music of his youth, he saw the need for a new type of Art-music ensemble which could travel into the streets and play music with a broad appeal. Borrowing from the model of Dutch street bands (the equivalent, perhaps, of the UK's brass bands), jazz of the 1920s, Minimal music coming out of America and the European avant-garde, Andriessen created an ensemble and a language with an overt non-elitist agenda.

Fighting with Words: American Composers' Commentary on Their Work

1985 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine M. Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Art ◽  
Art Music ◽  
American Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
American Composers ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

In the past few decades, there has been an explosion of literature concerning the changes taking place in American art music. In many cases, this literature is the work of the very people who are making those changes, the composers of new music. Much of their commentary is written in a manifesto style reminiscent of avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. The dominant topic concerns the changes composers feel are needed to revolutionize American music.

Ausentes presentes: Art Music from the Chilean Exile in the Anacrusa Festivals at the Goethe-Institute Santiago (1985–89)

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-380
Author(s):  
DANIELA FUGELLIE
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Transfer Process ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
Military Dictatorship ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractCreated in 1984, the Anacrusa Music Association organized concerts, workshops, and festivals of contemporary music in Chile during the last years of Pinochet's military dictatorship. Crucial for these events was the collaboration with the Goethe-Institute Santiago, which enabled a space for free expression within the repressive context of the dictatorship. This article explores the circulation and reception of musical works by Chilean composers living in exile performed in the 1985, 1987, and 1989 Anacrusa festivals. The trajectories of the pieces by three main figures of the politically engaged avant-garde of the 1960s – Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt, Sergio Ortega, and Fernando García – can be seen as a transfer process that involved the goals of West German cultural diplomacy in Chile, as well as the interaction between Anacrusa organizers, Latin American colleagues, and performers who returned from exile.

scholarly journals Composing Individuals: Ethnographic Reflections on Success and Prestige in the British New Music Network

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
HETTIE MALCOMSON
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
New Music ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Art Worlds ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scant Attention

AbstractIn contrast to established musicians, lesser-known composers have received scant attention in art music scholarship. This article, based on an ethnographic study, considers how a group of British composers construed ideas of success and prestige, which I analyse in terms of anthropological writings on exchange, Bourdieusian symbolic economies, and Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power. Prestige was ascribed to composers who created ‘interesting’ music, a category that eclipsed novelty as an aim. Individuality, enacted within a context of individualism, was key to assessing whether music was interesting. This individuality had to be tempered, structured, and embedded in the social norms of this and related ‘art worlds’. The article examines the social processes involved in creating this individuality, musical personality, and music considered interesting.

scholarly journals Art as a Critique of Language: On the Continuity of the Tradition of the Avant-Garde Aesthetic in the Modern and the Postmodern

2007 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-303
Author(s):  
Susanne Kogler
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Conceptual Knowledge ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
New Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Traditional Language ◽  
Art Philosophy ◽  
Language Of Music ◽  
The One

That art functions as a corrective to rational-scientific insights is one of the formative thoughts of art philosophy. The fact that artistic expression represents a corrective to linguistically-rationally affected insight also ranks among the constants of art philosophy in the 20th century. “Expression is the opponent of articulating something” can be read, for instance, in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory with regards to the character of language in art and Jean François Lyotard wrote on aesthetic experience: “What happens to us is by no means something which we would have controlled, programmed or conceptually apprehended beforehand”. The uneducible, conceptually unattainable is also at the centre of current art production of the 21st century. On the basis of Lyotard’s and Adorno’s positions, the article shows that one should acknowledge a constancy of the topos of art as non-conceptual knowledge on the one hand as the continuing function of a tradition defined from the philosophical aesthetics of modernity to post-modernity and orientated on the artistic avant-garde. On the other hand and beyond this a continuous line of tradition of New Music becomes clear, leading to the expressionistic avant-garde of the 20th century which represented the starting point for Adorno’s music philosophy, through Lyotard’s focus on John Cage, up to the avant-garde of New Music in the era of post modernity. Specific features of contemporary art, such as rebellion against linguistic standards, an understanding of expressivity that opposes the traditional language of music and operates on the verge of silence, as well as the utopian vision of a modified reality which aims at transcendency enable a conception of art as non-conceptual knowledge, corresponding with the positions of art philosophy in modernity and post-modernity in important points. The relevance of focusing on this line of tradition for musicology lies in the fact that it sheds new light on the musical avant-garde and its further function and, last but not least, that it opens new perspectives in understanding contemporary artistic productions.

scholarly journals Contemporary art music and its audiences: Age, gender, and social class profile

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Grebosz-Haring ◽  
Martin Weichbold
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Music Festivals ◽  
Social Patterns ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Movements ◽  
Motivational Structure

Contemporary art music (CAM) has experienced significant aesthetic changes in recent decades and has acted as a seismograph for socio-cultural movements. New music festivals have had a significant influence on the development and perception of this music by promoting aesthetic pluralism, introducing new concert formats, and expanding to unusual venues. These movements induce changes in the social patterns of CAM consumers and have an impact on the traditional high culture audience profile. This article relies on audience surveys at three European CAM festivals and draws on Bourdieu’s (1984) and Schulze’s (1992) class and lifestyle concepts in order to explore demographic characteristics and social class in CAM audiences. As the results show, consumption of CAM is still a distinctive practice sustained by an exclusive community having considerable education and “musical capital”. Nevertheless, the festivals show heterogeneity in the age structure and motivational structure of attendees as well as in specific patterns regarding knowledge, experience and active involvement with CAM. The analysis shows that aesthetic pluralism can lead to greater social openness regarding social class affiliation.

I Love You with an Asterisk: African-American Experimental Composers and the French Jazz Press, 1970-1980

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen H. Lehman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Improvised Music ◽  
The Impact

Beginning in the 1970s, the French jazz press became the first community of critics seriously to consider the new African-American experimental music being put forth by musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). More than any other aspect of their music, the incorporation of instrumentations, concepts, and musical forms normally associated with Western art music challenged assumptions within both the European and the American jazz communities. The response to these musicians in publications like Jazz Magazine and Jazz Hot was complex and multi-dimensional. A genuine fascination with this new music was nevertheless tempered by received notions about race and musical idiom. The political climate in France after the student demonstrations of 1968 provided a context which also may have been important for at least some French jazz critics. The impact of the French jazz press on the field of improvised music in France in the 1970s was only one component of a transactional process of resistance by critics and conscious counter-resistance by key musicians/composers who wanted to expand notions of what jazz could encompass. Based on archival research and interviews with both musicians and French critics and scholars I intend to examine this dialogue between the French jazz press and the musicians themselves, in an effort to better understand how each community affected the other in France from 1970 to 1980.

Paz, Juan Carlos (1897–1972)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Violeta Nigro-Giunta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Chamber Music ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Film Scores ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Press ◽  
Traditional Institutions

Juan Carlos Paz (1897–1972) was an Argentine composer, critic, writer, and self-described "compositional guide" who played a key role in twentieth-century Argentine contemporary music. Known for his rebellious attitude towards traditional institutions and academia, and as an advocate of avant-garde music throughout his life, Paz was a pioneer in the use of the twelve-tone technique in Latin America. Paz founded such groups as Grupo Renovación [Renovation Group] and Asociación Nueva Música [New Music Association], both devoted to promoting and performing new music. Paz wrote music for solo instruments, chamber music, orchestra, and theatre, as well as film scores. He published three important books dedicated to new music and three volumes containing his memoirs, and collaborated intensively with the press and magazines (Crítica, Reconquista, Acción de Arte, La Protesta, La Campana de Palo, Argentina Libre, among others).

Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1928–2007)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Toop
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Graphic Notation ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Public ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
German Composer

For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was an absolutely seminal figure within the European avant-garde. By the mid-1950s, every new work of his seemed to open up new perspectives for radical composing: key notions and genres such as serialism, electronic music, variable forms, and graphic notation were all crucially affected by his work. Of all post-war composers, Stockhausen best exemplifies Chateaubriand’s dictum that ‘‘the original writer is not the one who imitates no one, but he whom no one can imitate’’; whereas other major figures had hosts of epigones, Stockhausen’s huge influence largely involved his way of thinking about composition, which was constantly evolving and re-forming, rather than attempted emulations. At the same time, by the late 1960s he was also something of a cult figure in the pop/rock world, as witness his appearance on the cover of the Beatles’ ‘‘Sergeant Pepper’’ album. Yet from the mid-1970s, Stockhausen increasingly (though never totally) withdrew from the public eye, working for just over twenty-five years on a massive cycle of seven operas collectively entitled Licht [Light], involving about thirty hours of music––probably the most ambitious (completed) project in the whole of Western art music.

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