SOUND, MEANING AND MUSIC-DRAMA IN LACHENMANN'S DAS MÄDCHEN MIT DEN SCHWEFELHÖLZERN

Tempo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (268) ◽  
pp. 20-33
Author(s):  
Laurence Osborn
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Musique Concrete ◽  
Cultural Baggage

AbstractThis article argues that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern demonstrates a unique approach to music-drama that stems from the perceptual capacities of listeners, and their desire to search for meaning in what they hear. Beginning with the claim that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern can be viewed as the culmination of an aesthetic project begun at the point of Lachenmann's emergence as a distinctive voice of the European avant-garde during the 1960s, the article first examines two major aspects of Lachenmann's aesthetics – musique concrète instrumentale and aura – outlining a composing philosophy that has been at the heart of Lachenmann's practice throughout his career. The article claims that Lachenmann sought to establish a rejuvenated semiotics, freed from cultural baggage and tied to the perceptual and cognitive capacities of listeners. Drawing upon the studies of Naomi Cumming and Luke Windsor, it outlines a theoretical framework that takes into account this composing philosophy and its implications, applying it in analyses of various excerpts from Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern. My analysis illuminates a music-drama that forms around the interplay of internally represented images and sensations, the emergence of which is facilitated by a musical language that prepares sounds to take on certain types of meaning. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the possible implications this has for audience members.

Composition trends in polish vocal lyric. Musical language features in polish songs after the mid-20th century based on selected examples

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (12) ◽  
pp. 175-198
Author(s):  
Anna Mikolon
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Witold Lutoslawski ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
Krzysztof Penderecki ◽  
Voice And Piano ◽  
Stochastic Music ◽  
Musique Concrete

The subject for analysis were works for voice and piano by selected Polish composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, e.g. Grażyna Bacewicz, Tadeusz Baird, Henryk Czyż, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Henryk Hubertus Jabłoński, Wojciech Kilar, Zygmunt Krauze, Szymon Laks, Witold Lutosławski, Juliusz Mieczysław Łuciuk, Wojciech Łukaszewski, Paweł Łukaszewski, Maciej Małecki, Paweł Mykietyn, Edward Pałłasz, Konrad Pałubicki, Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Rudziński, Marian Sawa, Kazimierz Serocki, Tadeusz Szeligowski and Romuald Twardowski. An important matter for the author was to determine whether there are common features for this creative genre. She also attempted to find an answer to the question if the trends from the second half of the 20th century were reflected in songs. The scope of analysis covered the repertoire the author knew from her performance practice from the standpoint of a pianist. To the general characteristics of selected songs she added a review of famous trends, techniques and styles of composition, such as impressionism, neoromanticism, expressionism, dodecaphony, serialism, punctualism, minimalism, sonorism, spectralism, neoclassicism, vitalism, postmodernism, aleatoricism, bruitism, microtonality, electronic music, musique concrète, stochastic music, references to previous periods, to folklore and to popular music. She compared musical notation of the analysed works. She also confronted forms of songs with contemporary composition techniques. Interesting was the approach of composers to chamber relations in a duo and the way they made texts musical. Most composers distanced themselves from the avant-garde in works for voice and piano which had a specific poetic text because of the clarity of narration. Matching composers unequivocally to just one trend turned out impossible. Various techniques and phenomena may co-exist in one piece and in the same way one creator may search for different means of expression.

scholarly journals Innovative trends in the symphonic works of Soviet composers of the 1960s and Symphony No.3 by B. Tishchenko. Part 2

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Iurii Eduardovich Serov
Keyword(s):  
New Music ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Russian Music ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Symphonic Music ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Generation

The subject of this research is the period of Russian symphonic music of the 1960s. A new generation of composers – the “Sixtiers” – introduced a fresh modern musical language and remarkable artistic achievements. In first part of the article, the author dwell on several fundamental symphonic works by R. Shchedrin, S. Slonimsky, E. Denisov, Y. Falik, N. Karetnikov, as well gives general characteristics to this period. The second part of the article examines the compositions by A. Schnittke and L. Prigozhin. Special attention is turned to the Symphony No.3 by Boris Tishchenko, who opens new stylistic horizons and encompasses the key trends of modern music, including the avant-garde, into his stylistic orbit. This article is first to consider B. Tishchenko's outstanding Symphony No.3 in the context of stylistic and linguistic innovations of the 1960s, which defines the scientific novelty. Analysis is conducted on the role and place of the youngest composer of the “Sixtiers” B. Tishchenko in the struggle for the “new music”. The conclusion is made that Tishchenko was one of the leaders in revival of the Russian music of the late XX century, and his Symphony No.3 reflects the pursuits of the postwar generation of Soviet composers to the fullest.

scholarly journals ‘There Must Be a Poetry of Sound That None of Us Knows…’: Early British documentary film and the prefiguring of musique concrète

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-186
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Cox
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Coal Face ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Musique Concrete

Standard histories of electronic music tend to trace the lineage of musique concrète as lying mainly in the Futurists’ declarations of the 1910s, through Cage’s ‘emancipation’ of noise in the 1930s, to Schaeffer’s work and codifications of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This article challenges this narrative by drawing attention to the work of filmmakers in the 1930s that foreshadowed the sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and thus offers an alternative history of their background. The main focus of the article is on the innovations within documentary film and specifically the sonic explorations in early British documentary that prefigured musique concrète, an area ignored by electronic music studies. The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the documentary movement’s members, particularly their leader John Grierson, will be compared with those of Pierre Schaeffer, and the important influence of Russian avant-garde filmmaking on the British (and musique concrète) will be addressed. Case studies will focus on the groundbreaking soundtracks of two films made by the General Post Office Film Unit that feature both practical and theoretical correspondences to Schaeffer: 6.30 Collection (1934) and Coal Face (1935). Parallels between the nature and use of technologies and how this affected creative outputs will also be discussed, as will the relationship of the British documentary movement’s practice and ideas to post-Schaefferian ‘anecdotal music’ and the work of Luc Ferrari.

The Cultural Context of Reception:

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-55
Author(s):  
Riikka Korppi-Tommola
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
High Expectations ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
Encounter Time

Abstract The reception of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and John Cage’s visit to Helsinki in 1964 revealed local, Finnish aesthetic priorities. In the dance critics’ texts, Cunningham’s style seemed to create confusion, for example, with its mixture of styles visà-vis avant-garde music. Music critics, mainly avant-garde and jazz musicians, had high expectations for this theatrical event. In their reviews, comparisons were made between Cunningham’s style and the productions of Anna Halprin. In this paper, I analyse the cultural perspectives of this encounter and utilize the theoretical framework of Thomas Postlewait’s pattern of cultural contexts. Additionally, I follow David M. Levin’s argumentation about changes in aesthetics. Local and foreign conventions become emphasized in this kind of a transnational, intercultural encounter. Time and place are involved in the interpretations of the past as well as later in the processes of forming periods.

Zwischen Heroismus und Antiheroismus Ligetis Mikropolyphonie in 2001 revisited

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Beate Kutschke
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The 1960S

This article re-investigates the use of Ligeti’s second movement of his Requiem “Kyrie” (1963/1965) in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 — A Space Odyssey (1968). It does so in light of allusions to heroic models and the – obviously – heroic Zarathustra fanfare, both of which are pervasive in Kubrick’s film. The article aims at determining compositional means that refer to heroic ideas in avant-garde music of the 1960s, a time period in which radically new and skeptical views of heroism came to the fore that also affected the articulation of the heroic in music.

scholarly journals Whose Voices? The Fate of Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Adlington
Keyword(s):  
Compositional Style ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Text Setting ◽  
Factory Workers ◽  
Female Prisoners ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Music ◽  
Small Orchestra ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Current Reality

Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros for female voices and small orchestra was performed for the first and only time at the Holland Festival in 1970. A setting of texts by female prisoners and factory workers, it marks a sharp stylistic departure from Nono's political music of the 1960s by virtue of its audible quotations of revolutionary songs, its readily intelligible text setting, and especially its retention of the diatonic structure of the song on which the piece is based, the communist “Internationale.” Nono's decision, following the premiere, to withdraw the work from his catalogue suggests that he came to regard it as transgressing an important boundary in his engagement with “current reality.” I examine the work and its withdrawal in the context of discourses within the Italian left in the 1960s that accused the intellectuals of the Partito Comunista Italiano of unhelpfully mediating the class struggle. Nono's contentious reading of Antonio Gramsci, offered as justification for his avant-garde compositional style, certainly provided fuel for this critique. But Voci destroying muros suggests receptivity on the part of the composer—albeit only momentary—to achieving a more direct representation of the voices of the dispossessed.

scholarly journals Montager svøbt i matricepap. En materialearkæologisk undersøgelse af Asger Jorn og Guy Debords Fin de Copenhague

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 587
Author(s):  
Thomas Hvid Kromann
Keyword(s):  
Waste Product ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Situationist International ◽  
International Network ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Photographic Documentation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Depth Analysis

Thomas Hvid Kromann: Montages wrapped in flong. A material-archeological examination of Asger Jorn and Guy Debord’s Fin de Copenhague The article presents and analyses Fin de Copenhague, which was published in 1957 by the Danish painter Asger Jorn and the French theorist and activist Guy Debord. According to legend, this famous avant-garde masterpiece was created in a 24-hour fit of vandalistic creativity and bound in a waste product from the production of newspapers, “flong,” making every copy in this edition of 200 unique. Until recently, Fin de Copenhague has been analyzed within the theoretical framework of the Situationist International (1957–1972), focusing rather on the concept than the materiality of the book. In alignment with a heightened theoretical awareness of the importance of Jorn’s printed matter, the article closely examines Fin de Copenhague, drawing on a combination of art historical and book historical disciplines.The first part of the article is focused on the production, the distribution and the reception of the work. Hereby, the article presents the first thorough analysis of the intertextuality of the work as well as the international network the book circulated within. In the second part of the article, one finds an in-depth analysis of the flong. Until now, no research has focused on the variations of Fin de Copenhague. The author has collected photographic documentation of numerous covers from European and American libraries, copies owned by collectors, and copies sold at auction. In this way, the multiple covers can be studied, including the various aesthetic effects of each individual book cover. Furthermore, a material-archeology of the flong makes it possible to date the single pieces of flong, proving that Fin de Copenhague couldn’t possibly be created within these 24-hours. It is necessary to differentiate between finalizing the idea for the book, the printed work and the published work. In addition to this, the notion of the “social authorship” is underlined, stressing the importance of the printers Verner Permild and Bjørn Rosengreen.

scholarly journals Beethoven Returns to Bonn: Origins, Belonging and Misuse in Mauricio Kagel’s Ludwig van (1969)

2021 ◽  
Vol 107 ◽  
pp. 29-61
Author(s):  
Elaine Fitz Gibbon
Keyword(s):  
West Germany ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Adobe Acrobat ◽  
German Government ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
East German ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
One Year

In 1969 West Germany, the country was abuzz with anticipation of the approaching Beethoven bicentennial. That year the composer and experimental filmmaker Mauricio Raúl Kagel, born in Argentina to Russian- and German-Jewish parents in 1931 and living in Cologne since 1957, was commissioned by the State to commemorate the momentous occasion. What resulted was a film that surely no West German official had anticipated. Entitled Ludwig van: A Report and strongly inflected by Kagel’s absurdist aesthetic, Kagel’s film critiques the fetish object that Beethoven’s music and person had become in twentieth-century West Germany, touching upon, amongst many topics, East German claims of Beethoven’s “misuse” by the West German government, as well as the rise in the 1960s of the theory that Beethoven was Black. While Ludwig van has been recognized for its sendup of bourgeois music culture, it has yet to be analyzed from the perspective of diasporic experience. Simultaneously a love letter to and deconstruction of Beethoven’s cultural legacy, Ludwig van asks its audience to consider the complex diasporic experiences of avant-garde artists in the wake of WWII. Drawing on work by Brigid Cohen, I argue for the centrality of the theme of migration and displacement in Ludwig van. And in reading two central scenes from the film, I consider, in dialogue with Scott Burnham, what light the fifty-one-year-old film’s critique of the fetishization of origins and genealogy might shed on the celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday in 2020, and such acts of memorization more generally. [Please note: This article contains embedded video files. These files cannot be played on all PDF readers. Current Musicology recommends Foxit PDF Reader, Adobe Acrobat, or any other PDF reader capable of reading "enriched" media.]

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