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.

Cracking the Dutch Early Music Movement: the Repercussions of the 1969 Notenkrakersactie

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAILAN R. RUBINOFF
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Music Schools ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Music Ensembles ◽  
Historical Performance ◽  
Early Music Movement ◽  
Music Programming

AbstractThe Notenkrakersactie of 17 November 1969 was a landmark event for Dutch musical life: a group of composers disrupted a concert of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, protesting against the orchestra's lack of contemporary music programming. Scholars have tended to interpret this protest as a watershed for the avant-garde, but historical performance – not just contemporary music – proved to be a significant beneficiary. Early Musicians, like New Musicians, had common political goals and appealed to the youth counterculture. Ensuing reforms to the federal arts subsidy system, state-funded music schools, and conservatories in the 1970s were also advantageous for the Dutch Early Music movement. During the welfare retrenchment of the 1980s and the subsidy restructuring of the 1990s, Early Music ensembles economized and had greater success with mainstream recording companies and audiences than new music groups. Nearly forty years after the Notenkrakersactie, traditional symphony orchestras have less influence on Dutch musical life, but recent cutbacks to arts subsidies threaten contemporary music and historical performance alike.

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.

Studio Production in Contemporary Vietnam

2021 ◽  
pp. 133-155
Author(s):  
Lonán Ó Briain
Keyword(s):  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
Cultural Sustainability ◽  
Music Production ◽  
First Case ◽  
Music Ensembles ◽  
Music Ensemble ◽  
Culture Brokers

Chapter 5 examines how and why the VOV music ensembles are keeping their red music relevant in contemporary Vietnam. In the reform era, the ensembles were separated into two groups: the national or ethnic music ensemble (nhóm nhạc dân tộc), comprised of traditional instrumentalists and folk singers, and the new music ensemble (nhóm nhạc mới), which performs Vietnamese songs and instrumental music composed for choir and chamber orchestra. Drawing on fieldwork at the radio studios in Hanoi, this research provides an ethnographic account of contemporary music production processes at the station. The first case study examines how recordings by the traditional music ensemble, a versatile group of instrumentalists and folk singers, represent and reify the three major cultural regions of Vietnam. The second explores how productions by the new music ensemble, which reference the musical styles of DRV revolutionary opera, memorialize government achievements, valorize heroes of the past, and are made relevant to the contemporary political context through references to current issues such as territorial claims in the South China Sea. Rather than dismiss these musicians as political puppets, the chapter investigates their creative, pragmatic approaches to the constraints and contradictions of life in a (post)socialist state. Meanwhile, culture brokers working at these national broadcasters are leading the politicization of this intangible cultural heritage, a process they justify with the language of cultural sustainability.

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 Grażyna Bacewicz – The Polish Sappho

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-102
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Gąsiorowska
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Women Composers ◽  
The Political ◽  
String Orchestra ◽  
Limited Extent ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
New Type ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
Artistic Career

Abstract The paper is an attempt at a synthetic presentation of the Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz’s (1909–1969) musical output and artistic career, presented against the background of events in her personal life, and of major events in Polish and European history in the first seven decades of the 20th century. Bacewicz was called ‘the Polish Sappho’ already in the years between World Wars I and II, when there were very few women-composers capable of creating works comparable to the most eminent achievements of male composers. Her path to success in composition and as a concert soloist leads from lessons with her father, the Lithuanian Vincas Bacevičius, to studies at the Łódź and Warsaw Conservatories (violin with Józef Jarzębski, composition with Kazimierz Sikorski), and later with Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de la Musique, as well as violin lessons with André Tourret. Her oeuvre has for many years been linked with neoclassicism, and folkloric inspirations are evident in many of her works. Her crowning achievement in the neoclassical style is the Concerto for String Orchestra of 1948, while influences from folklore can distinctly be heard in many concert pieces and small forms. The breakthrough came around 1958, under the influence of avant-garde trends present in West European music, which came to be adapted in Poland thanks to the political transformations and the rejection of socialist realism. In such pieces as Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion of 1958, Bacewicz transforms her previously fundamental musical components (melody, rhythm, harmony) into a qualitatively new type of sound structures, mainly focused on the coloristic aspects. Grażyna Bacewicz also applied the twelve-note technique, albeit to a limited extent, as in String Quartet No. 6 (1960). Her last work was the unfinished ballet Desire to a libretto by Mieczysław Bibrowski after Pablo Picasso’s play Le désir attrapé par la queue.

scholarly journals Avant-Garde Children’s Magazines and Newspapers of the 1920s – 1930s in Siberia

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-105
Author(s):  
Ksenia V. Abramova
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Children And Youth ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Children's Magazines ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Times ◽  
Design Techniques

The purpose of this article is to analyze the magazines and newspapers for children and youth issued on the territory of Siberia in 1920s – 1930s. A great many children’s books were issued that years, moreover, the approach to design of that books and to the contents of writings for children changed significantly: the topics had to be actual, associated with the construction of the new society. At the same time, exactly in children’s press in 1920s, the new principles of book graphics were formed. There are a large number of magazines and newspapers aimed at youth audiences were published in Siberia in the 1920s and 1930s, but they did not have a long history. Some of them appeared only once or twice, after that they closed. But all the more interesting is the study of these rare publications as experiments that influenced how the Soviet children’s and youth magazine was formed. Viewing magazines and newspapers allows you to observe how the rubrication and the genre system of Soviet publications for children evolved, as well as identify trends that have become a definite “sign of the times”. The article explores archive materials and examines the contents of printed issues, peculiarities of the approaches to the inner composition of the material and design techniques, discovers the features of the “Soviet avant-garde” development in children’s and youth periodicals. It indicates that the majority of the Siberian Children’s and youth magazines issued within that period has demonstrated a strongly demonstrated ideological overtone, claiming its purpose raising the new type of human and orientation on the “iterature of fact”. The article covers the peculiarities of the illustration techniques in Siberian post-revolutionary magazines. The article marks that up to the mid – late 1920s, the children’s and youth periodicals design became composed of such elements as insets, plane drawings based on a contrast combination of black and white, photography and photographic compilation. Furthermore, it describes a number of self-presentation techniques, developed exactly by the avant-garde art. As can be seen from the above, it can be stated that Siberian children’s and youth journalism acquired the avant-garde trends of the first third of the 20th century, however, they haven’t been gradually and fully realized.

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.

Malay Women Singers of Colonial Malaya

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tan Sooi Beng
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Women Performers ◽  
New Music ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
New Type ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Experiences Of Women

Popular Malay music developed in Malaya in tandem with socio-political transformations which took place as a result of British colonialism. It was at this time that a new type of local commodified urban popular music known as lagu Melayu (Malay song) emerged to entertain the multiethnic urban audiences from different social and class backgrounds. This new music was shaped by the convergence of the new social conditions, technology such as print, gramophone, radio, film, microphones, cultural forms, and performance sites that emerged. By examining the song styles and texts of 78 rpm recordings of Lagu Melayu, oral interviews with performers, and published texts of the colonial period, this chapter illustrates how the new popular music accorded women performing artists voice and agency to negotiate dominant discourses regarding modern colonial subjectivity and gender. Women singers promoted a type of vernacular modernity that was not defined solely in European terms butwas characterized by continuity, difference, and hybridity. The musical recordings and stories of their lives reveal the complex polyvocal and sometimes contradictory experiences of women performers in colonial Malaya.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document