Decontamination Double-Bill: #12 – fragmentation and distortion / #13 – Lecture about sad music and happy dance

Tempo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (286) ◽  
pp. 74-77
Author(s):  
Michael Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
North West ◽  
Music Community ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
Sad Music

Over the last decade, Larry Goves, composer and lecturer of music at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM), has been steadily enriching the experimental music community in Manchester, UK. As an artistic director and curator, Goves regularly presents his and other's work through the ensemble The House of Bedlam, the annual New Music North West festival, and the Decontamination series. This review covers the twelfth and thirteenth instalments of the Decontamination series, presented as a double-bill at RNCM's Carol Nash Recital Room on 28 February 2018.

‘First-Class Evening Entertainments’: Spectacle and Social Control in a Mid-Victorian Music Hall

2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Till
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
National Opera ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
Urban Working

First-Class Evening Entertainments was the title given to a variety programme presented at Hoxton Hall in East London when it first opened in 1863. In 2000 Nicholas Till and Kandis Cook were commissioned by Hoxton Hall and the English National Opera Studio to make a new music theatre piece for the Hall, which led to an investigation of the content and context of the original programme. In the following article Nicholas Till offers a reading of the 1863 programme as an example of the mid-Victorian project to exercise social control over the urban working classes. Nicholas Till is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Wimbledon School of Art, and co-artistic director of the experimental music theatre company Post-Operative Productions. He is the author of Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart's Operas (Faber, 1992), and is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Opera.

I COULDN'T MAKE A PIECE AS BEAUTIFUL AS THAT: A CONVERSATION WITH ALLISON CAMERON

Tempo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (286) ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Anna Höstman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Diego ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Bang On A Can ◽  
Artistic Director

AbstractThe composer Allison Cameron (b. 1963) lives in Toronto. Her music has been widely performed at festivals such as Emerging Voices in San Diego, Evenings of New Music in Bratislava, Festival SuperMicMac in Montréal, Newfoundland Sound Symposium, New Music across America, Bang on a Can Marathon in New York, New York, and Rumori Dagen in Amsterdam. A dedicated performer of experimental music in Toronto, Allison co-founded the Drystone Orchestra (1989) and the Arcana Ensemble (1992). She has been improvising since 2000 on banjo, ukulele, cassette tapes, radios, miscellaneous objects, mini amplifiers, crackle boxes, toys and keyboards, in collaboration with Éric Chenaux, the Draperies, Ryan Driver, Dan Friedman, Mike Gennaro, Kurt Newman, John Oswald, Stephen Parkinson and Mauro Savo, among other musicians. In that same year she became Artistic Director of Toronto's experimental ensemble Arraymusic, a position she held for five years. In 2007, she founded the Allison Cameron Band with Eric Chenaux and Stephen Parkinson, and in 2009, the trio c_RL with Nicole Rampersaud (trumpet) and Germaine Liu (drums). Allison has experimented with graphic and notational scores that will soon be gathered and published as a collection. Additionally, she is the winner of the 2018 KM Hunter Award for music in Ontario.

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.

Ultima 2018, Oslo

Tempo ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (288) ◽  
pp. 88-90
Author(s):  
Alec Hall
Keyword(s):  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Outdoor Setting ◽  
Multiple Pressures ◽  
Experimental Theatre ◽  
New Applications ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
Symphonic Work ◽  
Selection Of

Unfolding over ten days in September 2018, this year's edition of Ultima was centred on the theme of migration, with a focus on both music and people. In his preface to the festival programme, Thørbjorn Tønder Hansen, the new artistic director, writes, ‘The borders of contemporary music are happily eroding, and the scene is in constant flux’. Responding to the multiple pressures of asylum seekers in Europe, demographic inequities in the representation of artists and composers, and the growing collective sense that ‘New Music’ is on the cusp of some kind of significant re-orientation, Hansen and his curatorial team produced a significant accomplishment by bringing together such a varied selection of programming. The range of installations included symphonic work; multi-channel acousmatic pieces with live diffusion to performance pieces with new applications of technology; and experimental theatre pieces set inside the black box or at a rugged outdoor setting far beyond Oslo's city limits. Ultima tipped its cap to just about anything that could set foot within the expanded terrain of ‘music composition’ today.

Darmstadt 2016: the ‘Universal Mouth’

Tempo ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 71 (279) ◽  
pp. 86-87
Author(s):  
Stephanie Jones
Keyword(s):  
New Music ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Artistic Director

In the preface to the 2016 International Summer Course for New Music programme booklet, the festival's artistic director, Thomas Schäfer, repeated a question that Irvine Arditti had put to him when they were discussing the Arditti Quartet's concerts: ‘shall we attack the future or dig up the past?’. This question, posed in order to establish some form of discursive framework for the course, became a subliminal trace throughout the festival. The participants' bags, for instance, were imprinted with the slogan, ‘attack the future’ and Schäfer ended his preface by stating, ‘let me call out to everyone involved, and to our audience: let's attack the future!’. The air of the festival itself, however, seemed slightly more reserved throughout its lengthy 17-day span. There were, of course, moments of theatrical flamboyance, such as Fantasises of Downfall (2015) by Johannes Kreidler, metalized void (2015/16) by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, The Lichtenberg Figures (2014/15) by Eva Reiter, Sideshow (2009/15) by Steven Kazuo Takasugi, EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT (2015/16) by Jennifer Walshe, and Living Instruments (2015) by Serge Vuille. Yet, overall the atmosphere of the festival seemed to be one of quiet vigilance as events unfolded.

Presteigne Festival 2014

Tempo ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 69 (271) ◽  
pp. 81-83
Author(s):  
Stephanie Power
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Small Market ◽  
Market Town ◽  
Artistic Director

Based in a small market town just inside the Welsh border, the Presteigne Festival annually punches well above its weight in contemporary music terms. The conductor George Vass has been Artistic Director at Presteigne for 22 of its 32 years, and his tireless advocacy of living and lesser-known composers has garnered not only increasing international respect, but a loyal and substantial audience, including many locals for whom encountering ‘new music’ has clearly become something to relish rather than suffer.

The Rockefeller Foundation, the University New Music Center, and “Foundation Music”

2020 ◽  
pp. 101-128
Author(s):  
Michael Sy Uy
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Rockefeller Foundation ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
Chamber Ensembles ◽  
Milton Babbitt ◽  
Music Ensembles ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
The University

This chapter focuses on the Rockefeller Foundation’s support of university new music centers and contemporary chamber ensembles, offering new insights into a commonly understood historiography of U.S. twentieth-century music: the dominance and prestige of experimental music and serialism at universities. Most notably, composers at Columbia, Princeton, the University of Chicago, and Mills College served dually as outside experts and commissioned artists and performers. Milton Babbitt, Otto Luening, and Vladimir Ussachevsky benefited greatly from their involvement at Rockefeller and the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center. The composers and performers justified their work initially through the Soviet threat and rivalries with European studios, and later with innovation and creativity. The new music ensembles solidified a musical circuit that crisscrossed the country, making stops at many Rockefeller-funded centers. The foundation revealed ways it was both an advertent and inadvertent patron of what New Yorker critic Winthrop Sargeant pejoratively referred to as “foundation music.”

> rainy days 2017

Tempo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (284) ◽  
pp. 81-83
Author(s):  
Athena Corcoran-Tadd
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
Rainy Days ◽  
Fine Print

Questioning whether new music is ‘losing touch’, Lydia Rilling, in her first edition as artistic director of Luxembourg's rainy days festival, curated a programme which sought, via an exploration of ‘the emotional landscapes of contemporary music’, to ‘reveal’ that this is not the case. The festival's scope extended beyond concerts to sound installations, pre- and post-concert talks, an (all female-presented) conference dedicated to the festival topic, a newly affiliated composition academy, and a closing ‘bal contemporain’ which paired Frank Zappa and Alexander Schubert with onion soup, while composers, musicologists and curators let loose after such extensive reflection upon the question that had been posed at every turn, emblazoned on the yellow telephone book-sized festival programmes (from which all quotations in this review are taken), echoed on individual concert programmes, interrogating the listener from the tickets’ fine print: how does it feel?

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document