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.

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.

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.

A Personal Reminiscence on the Roots of Computer Network Music

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 71-77
Author(s):  
Scot Gresham-Lancaster
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Computer Network ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Personal Reminiscence ◽  
Early Computer ◽  
Network Music ◽  
Heterogeneous Quality ◽  
Transition Points ◽  
Fundamental Shift

This historical reminiscence details the evolution of a type of electronic music called “computer network music.” Early computer network music had a heterogeneous quality, with independent composers forming a collective; over time, it has transitioned into the more autonomous form of university-centered “laptop orchestra.” This transition points to a fundamental shift in the cultural contexts in which this artistic practice was and is embedded: The early work derived from the post-hippie, neo-punk anarchism of cooperatives whose members dreamed that machines would enable a kind of utopia. The latter is a direct outgrowth of the potential inherent in what networks actually are and of a sense of social cohesion based on uniformity and standardization. The discovery that this style of computer music-making can be effectively used as a curricular tool has also deeply affected the evolution and approaches of many in the field.

Women and ‘Kraakgeluiden’: the participation of women improvisers in the Dutch electronic music scene

2004 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
HELEN METZELAAR
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Women Performers ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Complex Issue ◽  
Music Improvisation ◽  
Participation Of Women

The field of electroacoustic improvisation in the Netherlands is largely male dominated. Flutist, improviser and composer Anne La Berge signalled this and other problems related to gender in ‘Kraakgeluiden’, a Dutch venue for improvisation in electroacoustic music. Four possible factors contributing to gender discrimination are proposed: the stereotypical gendered concept of an improviser, differences in communicative styles, the dominance of male networks, and music technology itself. This is followed by a consideration of gendered differences in music improvisation. It is posited that male improvisers often seek to establish a hierarchy among themselves, while women performers tend to project themselves less to the forefront. Women improvisers may traditionally have a different sense of autonomy, in adherence to gender norms. While music education might offer a means to change behaviour patterns, it appears that these gender norms are internalised at a surprisingly young age. While concentrating on electroacoustic improvisation, this essay also includes relevant experiences of other improvisers. Gender discrimination in electroacoustic music improvisation is a complex issue deserving more research.

scholarly journals Improvising Inside a House of Cards: New performance and music-making through a collective networked instrument

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-389
Author(s):  
Trond Engum ◽  
Thomas Henriksen ◽  
Carl Haakon Waadeland
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Music Performance ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
House Of Cards ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Somatic Transformation ◽  
Musical Interaction ◽  
Networked Music ◽  
Musical Communication

This article presents experiences and reflections related to performing improvised, live processed electroacoustic music within a context of networked music performance. The musical interaction is performed through a new collective networked instrument, and we report how the ensemble ‘Magnify the Sound’, consisting of two of the authors of this article, meets the instrument in different networked performance situations, and how this is related to the affordance of the instrument. In our performances the network is inherent to our artistic practice, and we experience a phenomenological and somatic transformation in our roles as musicians, from individual instrumentality to shared instrumentality. The instrument invites new forms of music-making and contributes in fundamental ways to the ensemble’s musical communication and artistic expression. In the present article we outline our methods of working artistically with the networked instrument, and we point at some artistic results. We then discuss how the collective instrument has facilitated new performance and musical practice within the network.

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.

Distributed Participatory Design: The challenges of designing with physically disabled musicians during a global pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-229
Author(s):  
Franziska Schroeder ◽  
Alex Lucas
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Participatory Design ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Digital Medium ◽  
Banking Services ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
The Impact

The global COVID-19 pandemic has been an extraordinary situation. Social distancing has impacted the vast majority of people, reorganising society, physically separating us from friends, family and colleagues. Collectively we found ourselves in a distributed state, reliant upon digital technologies to maintain social and professional connections. Some activities can translate unabated to a digital medium, with benefits, such as the convenience inherent in many online shopping and banking services. Other activities, particularly those which are socially engaged, including inclusive music-making or design, may need to be re-framed and re-thought due to the absence of in-person contact.In Northern Ireland, the Performance Without Barriers (PwB) research group works with disabled artists from the Drake Music Project Northern Ireland (DMNI) to identify ways in which technology can remove access barriers to music-making. Since disabled people are experts in their unique lived experience of disability, they must be involved in the design process, an approach known as participatory design. At the end of 2020, many of us are still adjusting to the new normal, only beginning to understand the impact of distributed digital living. In this article, we examine how the socially engaged work of PwB has been affected, changed and adapted during the pandemic throughout 2019 to 2020, expanding ideas of distributed creativity to the notion of distributed design. The authors formalise the concept of socially engaged distributed participatory design, an approach that classifies PwB’s current research activities in the area of accessible music technology design and improvised musicking. Consideration is given to the impact the notion of ‘distribution’ has on degrees of participation.

Presenting the Unpresentable: Jean-François Lyotard’s Kantian Art-Sublime

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rachel Zuckert
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Absolute

Abstract This article reconstructs Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of the sublime in contemporary art, focusing on his claim that such art ‘presents’ the unpresentable, and tracing its origins in Kant’s account of the sublime. I propose that Lyotard identifies a difficulty concerning Kant’s account: to understand why the disparate elements in the experience of the sublime (idea of reason, sensible representation) should be synthesized to form that experience. Lyotard recasts this difficulty as a pragmatic problem for artistic practice – how to ‘testify’ to the absolute in a non-absolute, sensibly perceivable object (the artwork) – that can be understood to drive avant-garde artistic experimentation.

Supporting Everyday Creativity in Ubiquitous Music Making

2016 ◽  
pp. 78-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damián Keller ◽  
Maria Helena de Lima
Keyword(s):  
Information Value ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Technological Support ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Creative Experience ◽  
Musical Creativity ◽  
Musical Resources ◽  
Music Information ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Musical Activities

The concept of everyday musical creativity is related to non-professional musical activities carried out in venues not intended for artistic practice. Everyday musical creativity demands technological support to provide access to musical resources by non-musicians and by musicians engaging in musical activities in domestic and public spaces. This chapter covers key aspects of the conceptual ubiquitous music framework and its methodological implications for the support of everyday creative activities. We discuss strategies to enhance music information value within the context of two sets of studies, the first set focusing on the development of an interaction metaphor and the second set dealing with the assessment of technological requirements to support creative musical activities in educational contexts. One of the implications of the methodological framework proposed by ubiquitous music studies is the expanded notion of musical information as a product of creative experience rather than as an abstract symbolic system.

Re-Imagining Westphalia

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-198
Author(s):  
M.I. Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Miles Davis ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Sound Transformation ◽  
The Cold War

Chapter 5 focuses on a work from Karlheinz Stockhausen entitled Hymnen (Anthems). Stockhausen’s influence on the electronic music avant-garde, in classical and popular music domains, on those from his native Germany to the UK, the US, and elsewhere, is legendary. The techniques Stockhausen was refining were also being put to work by the Beatles, Miles Davis, and Frank Zappa, to name a few. Working with national anthems that are sampled and transformed, Hymnen is a landmark work that I argue is as much about “remembering” as it is a research-based experiment in the early years of electronic and acoustic sound transformation. This work, completed during 1960s, evokes the cold war years where space exploration, civil rights, and nuclear (dis)armament standoffs between the communist East and the capitalist West predominated. It is also the decade of Woodstock, political assassinations, civil rights, and antiwar movements in the US and around the world. Hymnen still has a lot to offer for contemporary explorations into the geopolitics of any music-politics nexus.

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