Tectonics Glasgow, 1–3 May 2015

Tempo ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (274) ◽  
pp. 62-64
Author(s):  
Matthew Hammond
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Free Improvisation ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Orchestral Works ◽  
The Common ◽  
Music Programming

Ilan Volkov's Tectonics series continues to break new ground in contemporary music programming and curating. Tectonics has now seen its third edition in Glasgow, where Volkov conducts the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and has also sprung up in other locations to which he has connections – beginning in his home city of Tel Aviv, the series has spread also to Reykjavik, Adelaide and New York. The common theme is a blend of new commissions (usually orchestral works), important recent works, and performances from figures from other areas of avant-garde music making – free improvisation, electronic music and the outer fringes of noise and metal.

Conversations in Leningrad, 1988

Tempo ◽  
1989 ◽  
pp. 15-20
Author(s):  
Claire Polin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Choral Music ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Children's Theatre ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
New York Philharmonic ◽  
The Third ◽  
Violin Music ◽  
The Many

Certainly it was the year to visit the USSR, as one rubbed shoulders with pre-Summit reporters awaiting Reagan/Gorbachev, and pilgrims celebrating the millennium of Christianity in Russia. Wandering up the Nevsky Prospekt, you saw musicians hurrying with instrument cases in hand; and whichever way you crossed the Neva or the canals, the babel of language sounded like a session at the United Nations. As Tikhon Khrennikov (still Chairman of the Composers Union 40 years after its notorious 1948 Congress) pointed out in his welcoming address at the opening concert, the Festival's purpose was ‘for building spiritual bridges between nations using music as the unique and indispensable means of communication’. Stylistic restrictions were withdrawn so that listeners would get an unusually broad idea of the ‘many-sided panorama of modern musical art’. Thus, not only ‘serious’ music but also pop, jazz, folk, and traditional musics were performed. Having attended the previous two Festivals, it was very interesting to observe the progressive attitude of the Third. Not only was there more of everything, but more variety: not only symphonic, chamber, and choral music events, but also organ recitals, modern violin music, opera, children's theatre, a song evening, and even one for light music. Not only did the best Soviet conductors and performers participate, but also the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra, jazz groups of the USSR and elsewhere, and the British avant-garde vocal group ‘Electric Phoenix’. Although the concerts were heavily weighted with Soviet works, still almost 40 countries were represented (from Cuba to Mongolia) with works by more than 150 living composers.

Genre and Capital in Avant-garde Electronica

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-71
Author(s):  
Eliot Britton
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Tools And Techniques ◽  
Flexible Boundaries ◽  
Structured Approach

This article applies a genre level approach to the tangled discourse surrounding the points of convergence between avant-garde electronica and electroacoustic music. More specifically the article addresses related experimental practices in these distinct yet related fields of electronic music-making. The democratisation of music technology continues to expand into an increasingly diverse set of musical fields, destabilising established power dynamics. A flexible, structured approach to the analysis of these relationships facilitates the navigation of crumbling boundaries and shifting relationships. Contemporary electronic music’s overlapping networks encompass varying forms of capital, aesthetics, technology, ideology, tools and techniques. These areas offer interesting points of convergence. As the discourse surrounding electronic music expands, so must the vocabulary and conceptual models used to describe and discuss new areas of converging artistic practice. Genre level diagrams selectively collapse, expand and arrange artistic fields, facilitating concrete, coherent arguments and the examination of patterns and relationships. Through the genre level diagram’s establishment of distinct yet flexible boundaries, electronic music’s sprawling discourse can be cordoned off, expanded or contracted to suit structured analyses. In this way, this approach clarifies scope and facilitates simultaneous examination from a variety of perspectives.

‘LA NOTATION NE PEUT RENDRE COMPTE DU FAIT’: PERFORMING MURAIL'S ‘TERRITOIRES DE L'OUBLI’

Tempo ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 62 (244) ◽  
pp. 2-10
Author(s):  
Marilyn Nonken
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
State University ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Morton Feldman ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Old Order ◽  
Brian Ferneyhough

For contemporary music in America and Europe, the 1970s were a time in which the old order was changing, giving place to a new avant-garde. In Germany, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik was stagnating under the inept leadership of Ernst Thomas, savaged by the press and ridden with inner squabbling and politics. For 25 years a bastion of musical innovation and experimentation, Darmstadt now seemed little more than ‘the crumbling edifice of the avant-garde's chief fortress’. The focus was shifting to Paris, where, in 1977, IRCAM opened beneath the Centre Georges Pompidou. Led by Pierre Boulez and staffed by Luciano Berio, Vinko Globokar, Max Mathews, and Jean-Claude Risset, its stated mission was to reunite science and music and create new modes of performance. Across the Channel, the composers of the New Complexity (Brian Ferneyhough, James Dillon, Richard Barrett, and Chris Dench) were also redefining performance practice, focusing not on technology but on notation and its implications for virtuosity. And in America, different schools of musical thought were colliding in the streets and the academy. Leonard Bernstein delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, then presented his ‘unanswered question’ to the American public, on television, in 1976. And uptown and downtown were ensconced, with Milton Babbitt and Morton Feldman appointed to the faculties at the Juilliard School and the State University of New York at Buffalo, respectively. On both sides of the Atlantic, seminal artistic statements were being made, heralding the unruly adolescence of a new and disparate avant-garde no longer directly connected to the Second World War.

Christopher Rouse: An Overview

Tempo ◽  
1997 ◽  
pp. 2-8
Author(s):  
Laurie Shulman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
School Of Music ◽  
Eastman School Of Music ◽  
Orchestral Works ◽  
The Uk

One of the brightest stars in contemporary music, the American Christopher Rouse remains comparatively little known in the UK. A Baltimore native who teaches at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, he had already served as composer-in-residence for two orchestras and his music was widely performed when his Trombone Concerto earned America's Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1993. Rouse has been particularly successful with orchestral works. He promises to be one of the next century's great composers in traditional forms, specifically symphony and concerto.

Key Questions of Antagonist Music-Making

Red Strains ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianmario Borio
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Free Improvisation ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
Key Questions

From the early 1960s through to the mid-1970s, a widespread desire on the Italian left to resist the ‘schematization of everyday life’, triggered by the pressures of politics and mass media, led to a politicization across different musical genres. The discourse of intellectuals and artists was significantly influenced by the writings of the founder of the Italian Communist Party Antonio Gramsci, and in turn led the PCI of the early 1970s to an unambiguous commitment to resist ‘any impulse to identify with any specific “poetics” or “tendency”,...to ignore the great variety of creative experiences’ (Giorgio Napolitano), whilst affirming a faith in innovation and renewal as the vehicle for oppositional sentiment. This chapter examines this complex cultural network as it manifested itself in the distinct musical terrains of folk music, rock, jazz, and free improvisation, and avant-garde music theatre.

scholarly journals Lecture about Electronic Microtonal Music at the Theremin Center Electronic Studio of the Moscow Conservatory in March 2004

ICONI ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 149-158
Author(s):  
Joseph Pehrson ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
School Of Music ◽  
Microtonal Music ◽  
Eastman School Of Music ◽  
Written Compositions ◽  
The University

Joseph Pehrson is a well-known New York-based composer. He studied at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Michigan. He has been active in promoting contemporary music in New York, having been a co-director of the “Composers’ Concordance” concert organization from 1984 to 2011. Pehrson has written music in various styles, including neoclassical and avant-garde, microtonal music. The latter includes electronic compositions with and without solo instruments, which he wrote in the decade of the 2000s. He has delved very deeply into microtonal theory and has written compositions for various unusual and non-standard microtonal scales, such as the 21-note to the octave scale. The following is a transcript of Joseph Pehrson’s presentation at the Theremin Center, which was the Moscow Conservatory’s electronic studio in the 1990s and 2000s.

scholarly journals “Zero point” The Beginnings of György Ligeti’s Western Career

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 103-114
Author(s):  
Márton Kerékfy
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Zero Point ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Professional Relationships ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Future Aspirations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gyorgy Ligeti ◽  
Musical Concepts

György Ligeti and his wife fled Hungary in December 1956, travelling through the night of the 11 and 12, and finally reaching Vienna the following day. The existing materials dating from Ligeti’s early emigration demonstrate particularly dynamic correspondence with three Hungarian expatriates: composers Sándor Veress and Mátyás Seiber, as well as the critic John S. Weissmann. 33 letters and postcards and a further 11 replies, held in the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, comprise a body of Ligeti’s correspondence with these colleagues dating between the final month of 1956 and the end of 1958. Although evidently incomplete, this unique collection offers novel perspectives surrounding the beginnings of Ligeti’s Western career. Reflecting expectations and future aspirations, these documents trace the excitements as well as challenges of “wiping the slate clean.” Encapsulating Ligeti’s evolving compositional interests and recounting the processes through which he forged new professional relationships, this correspondence reveals insights relating to the composer’s newly- emerging public image. Emigration brought many trials, yet upheaval simultaneously presented an opportunity to radically break with the past. Ligeti could redefine his professional identity as a composer. Although Ligeti felt uneasy in Cologne, it quickly became apparent that engaging in an official capacity with the Electronic Music Studio of the West German Radio (WDR) provided an extraordinary opportunity to establish himself in avant-garde musical circles. Initially shocked by these musical experiments, it was clear to Ligeti that his own creative path lay separate from the avant-garde scene with which he became acquainted in Cologne. Ligeti’s correspondence dating from these encounters indicates that he left Hungary with preconceived musical concepts and aspirations. His experiences with contemporary music rather provided the technical tools through which he could construct and articulate his own concepts, in a manner appearing current in the context of the Cologne-Darmstadt avant-garde.

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.

Common Goods: American Folk Crafts as Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1932—33

Prospects ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 447-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Marshall
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
New England ◽  
Arts And Crafts ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Everyday Object ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Common ◽  
Intellectual Leader

During New York City's newly opened Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA's) fourth exhibition season of 1932–33, while director and intellectual leader Alfred H. Barr, Jr. was on sabbatical leave in Europe, interim director Holger Cahill mounted a show of 18th- and 19th-century American arts and crafts. Offered for sale in New England as antiques at the time of the show, the items on display in Cahill's American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America 1750–1900 obscured the divisions between the avant-garde and the traditional, between high art and the everyday object. In an exhibit of items not easily categorized as modern nor properly considered art, MoMA admitted such local antiques and curiosities as weather vanes and amateur paintings into spaces otherwise reserved for the likes of Cézanne and Picasso.

Fostering a Post-Digital Avant-Garde: Research-led teaching of music technology

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Ferguson ◽  
Andrew R. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Education Sector ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Technology Programme

In this article we discuss how contemporary computational and electronic music-making practices might be characterised as a post-digital avant-garde. We also discuss how practitioners within the higher education sector can play a role in leading the development of these practices through their research and teaching. A brief overview of twentieth-century avant-garde practices is provided to set the scene before a case for defining a post-digital avant-garde is made. By way of illustration, the authors describe their own post-digital creative practices and then discuss how these integrate into their academic duties. We reflect on themes that run through avant-garde practices and continue into the post-digital. Finally, we describe how these themes inform an undergraduate music technology programme such that it might be shaped to reflect these developments and prepare students for a post-digital future.

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