Compositional Procedures in Electronic Music and the Emergence of Time Continuum

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-167
Author(s):  
Danilo Rossetti ◽  
Micael Antunes ◽  
Jônatas Manzolli
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Texture Evolution ◽  
Form Perception ◽  
Luciano Berio ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Analytical Methodology ◽  
Complex Dynamic Systems ◽  
Time Concepts ◽  
Perception Of Time ◽  
The Voice

We introduce an analytical methodology to approach the perception of time in the electronic works Thema: Omaggio a Joyce (1958), by Luciano Berio, and Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–6), by Karlheinz Stockhausen. Such works have already been widely analysed and discussed. Moreover, similarities between them have been pointed out, such as the use of the voice as their main compositional material and the search for a continuum between the voice and electronic sounds. Despite their similarities, we argue that the perception of time in those works is significantly different. For that purpose, we bring theoretical references such as time concepts related to complex dynamic systems, and the perception of time according to the Gestalt theory. We discuss segmentation and texture evolution in time of both works employing graphical representations based on perceptual audio descriptors such as the mel scale and the volume. In addition, aiming to find recurrences, repetitions and variations of the spectral material in time, we apply phase space graphs addressing the values of the descriptors employed in the analysis. The features found will lead to conclusions on the emergence of time perception in which the continuity depends on the presence of similar events, periodicities and pregnancies, while discontinuity is given by the presence of more variation, instability and saliences. We emphasise the differences of form perception in those pieces, arguing that they are the result of the manipulation of sound materials and organisation in time by the composers.

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.

Electronic Music

Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 107-117
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
World War ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Edgard Varese ◽  
American Composer ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Musique Concrete

With the end of World War II came the rebirth of European radio. Government stations in both France and Germany established experimental studios for research, from which arose a new kind of music, “electronic music.” The station in France, Office de Radiodiffusion Télevision Française (ORTF), was directed by the engineer/composer Pierre Schaeffer and his partner, Pierre Henry, who called their musical creations musique concrète. In Germany the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) studio produced music through the process of “synthesis.” This chapter will explain the difference between the two approaches used to create electronic music with examples from the percussion solo and ensemble repertoire. Early experiments using wire recorders, test records, and tape recorders by composers Halim El-Dabh, John Cage, and Edgard Varèse precede the major electronic works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mario Davidovsky, and the American composer Stephen Everett, whose use of computers in “real time” brings the reader into the next century.

Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1928–2007)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Toop
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Graphic Notation ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Public ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
German Composer

For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was an absolutely seminal figure within the European avant-garde. By the mid-1950s, every new work of his seemed to open up new perspectives for radical composing: key notions and genres such as serialism, electronic music, variable forms, and graphic notation were all crucially affected by his work. Of all post-war composers, Stockhausen best exemplifies Chateaubriand’s dictum that ‘‘the original writer is not the one who imitates no one, but he whom no one can imitate’’; whereas other major figures had hosts of epigones, Stockhausen’s huge influence largely involved his way of thinking about composition, which was constantly evolving and re-forming, rather than attempted emulations. At the same time, by the late 1960s he was also something of a cult figure in the pop/rock world, as witness his appearance on the cover of the Beatles’ ‘‘Sergeant Pepper’’ album. Yet from the mid-1970s, Stockhausen increasingly (though never totally) withdrew from the public eye, working for just over twenty-five years on a massive cycle of seven operas collectively entitled Licht [Light], involving about thirty hours of music––probably the most ambitious (completed) project in the whole of Western art music.

The Emergence of Timbre: Ligeti's Synthesis of Electronic and Acoustic Music in Atmosphères

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER IVERSON
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Gyorgy Ligeti ◽  
Stylistic Development ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Additive Synthesis ◽  
Compositional Control

AbstractIn 1957, soon after his emigration from Hungary, György Ligeti began an internship at the electronic music studio of Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne. The three electronic works Ligeti produced there constitute a small portion of his oeuvre, but it is commonly acknowledged that his experiences in the studio were crucial for his stylistic development. This article makes specific analytical connections between the techniques of elektronische Musik that Ligeti encountered at the WDR and his sound-mass techniques in acoustic composition. The discourses in circulation in the electronic studio of the 1950s – especially as articulated by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, and Gottfried Michael Koenig – reveal a collective obsession with gaining compositional control over timbre. By internalizing and reusing mainstream elektronische Musik techniques such as additive synthesis, filtering, and Bewegungsfarbe in an acoustic form, Ligeti brought timbre forward as the central compositional problem in the acoustic work Atmosphères.

Milan's Studio di Fonologia: Voice Politics in the City, 1955–8

2016 ◽  
Vol 141 (2) ◽  
pp. 403-443
Author(s):  
Delia Casadei
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Luciano Berio ◽  
Human Voice ◽  
Political Modernity ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTThe Studio di Fonologia Musicale of Milan, Italy's first electronic music studio, opened in 1955. Housed in the national broadcasting (RAI) studios in Milan, the studio was founded by two celebrated Italian composers: Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna. The institution is often remembered nowadays for being the first electronic music studio to focus its activity on the human voice. As I argue, this focus was not only of an aesthetic nature, but rather reflected long-standing political and intellectual conceptions of voice, speech and public space that were rooted in Italy's early days as a republic, and in mid-twentieth-century Milan as the flagship city for this newly achieved political modernity.

ARTWORK: CEVDET EREK

Tempo ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (278) ◽  
pp. 84-85
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Electronic Dance Music ◽  
Acoustic Characteristics ◽  
Simple Idea ◽  
The Voice

The solo exhibition ‘Week’ was conceived for the sky-lit gallery on the upper floor of the Kunsthalle Basel in 2012. At the very centre of the gallery space a mono-block of loudspeakers was playing 7, a visual representation of which was notated for the brochure of the exhibition. 7 is constructed from two versions of an acoustic bass drum sample, which acts as a minimal ‘audio-diagram’ representing the ever-repeating cycle of the seven days of the week. The piece was constructed using a scale of 1:86400 (24 hours × 60 minutes × 60 seconds); in other words, a second refers to a day in ‘real time’. The bass drum sample sounds on each second, creating a steady beat with a tempo of 60 bpm which, for some visitors, is a direct reminder of certain types of electronic dance music. On top of the beat, a computer-generated voice recites the days of the week in English, one day per second. Occasionally, the voice switches to counting the days without specific names: ‘day, day, day … ’. The audio piece used the vocabulary and acoustic characteristics of minimal electronic music in order to represent a temporal unit, by using the means of time itself, whilst the visual representation (notation) was used as an aid to describe the simple idea behind the sonic counterpart.

Spazio, voce, gesto tra nuova musica e nuovo teatro musicale

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniele Vergni
Keyword(s):  
Body Language ◽  
The Body ◽  
Luciano Berio ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Musical Compositions ◽  
Complex Cross ◽  
Similar Solutions ◽  
Composition Process ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Cross Reference

In the ‘60s, there was a liminal space where Nuova Musica’s compositions and Nuovo Teatro’s actions had put in place similar solutions, creating a complex cross-reference between theatrical action and musical compositions. Sometimes those compositions – not thought for the theatre – have deepened crucial aspect for Nuovo Teatro and sometimes anticipated what was happening in the theatrical-musical scene. The problematics raised from those compositions and the resulting reflections concern mainly the use of the acustic space, the voice and the body language. The first two (space and voice) are elements that Nuova Musica was thinking back since the ‘50s, before the actions of the Nuovo Teatro Musicale began to undermine the foundation of the traditional opera. After a short excursus in the practice of voice and space in the ‘50s, and after analyzing how the body language step inside the music’s composition process during the ‘60s, we analyze some compositions by Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio and Domenico Guaccero, searching for changes and afterthougts that can be grasped in compositions not directly designed for the theatre stage.

London, South Bank and RAM: ‘Omaggio: a Celebration of Luciano Berio’

Tempo ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 59 (231) ◽  
pp. 41-44
Author(s):  
Malcolm Miller
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
New Music ◽  
Luciano Berio ◽  
The South ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The 1960S

The fortnight-long celebration Omaggio to the late Luciano Berio, held 15–30 April 2004, explored the post-modern passion and exuberance of the composer's musical personality, from the experimental daring and fun of the era of new music of the 1960s to the more searching multi-cultural tapestries of the final decades and his last works. Large audiences drawn from all ages enjoyed a wide range of Berio's works at the South Bank Centre and the Royal Academy of Music, including several UK premières including Stanze, his last work, as well as seminal pieces such as Sinfonia, Laborintus II, the fourteen Sequenzas, and electronic music, performed by leading virtuosi and ensembles. Overall, the festival represented a significant and memorable tribute to one of the leading figures of new music in the second half of the 20th century.

The Shiraz Arts Festival: Western Avant-Garde Arts in 1970s Iran

Leonardo ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Gluck
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Islamic Revolution ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Iannis Xenakis ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Peter Brook ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
Arts Festival ◽  
Theater Directors

Iran in the 1970s was host to an array of electronic music and avant-garde arts. In the decade prior to the Islamic revolution, the Shiraz Arts Festival provided a showcase for composers, performers, dancers and theater directors from Iran and abroad, among them Iannis Xenakis, Peter Brook, John Cage, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Merce Cunningham. A significant arts center, which was to include electronic music and recording studios, was planned as an outgrowth of the festival. While the complex politics of the Shah's regime and the approaching revolution brought these developments to an end, a younger generation of artists continued the festival's legacy.

Nono, Luigi (1924–90)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carola Nielinger-Vakil
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Music Theater ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Second Viennese School ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Music ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Law Degree

Luigi Nono stands out as one of the most uncompromising modernist composers of the Italian avant-garde. Together with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Nono was one of the leading representatives of integral serialism in Europe after 1945. Nono is further known for his political music theater, his innovative spatial use of electronic music and live-electronics, avant-garde and microtonal instrumental writing, and an exceptionally lyric and communicative application of complex compositional procedures. Luigi Nono was born into a wealthy Venetian family just after Mussolini came to power. Toward the end of World War II, Nono began to study composition with G Fr Malipiero at the Venice conservatoire (1943–5) while completing a law degree at Padova University (1942–7). At the conservatoire, Bruno Maderna’s influential composition tutorials sparked a life-long interest in Renaissance polyphony and the works of the Second Viennese School. Equally fundamental was Hermann Scherchen’s conducting course (Venice, 1948). Luigi Dallapiccola’s lyric serialism was another formative influence at this time. Nono’s first major work, the Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell’op.41 di Arnold Schönberg, was premiered under Scherchen at the Darmstadt New Music Courses in 1950. Together with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Nono subsequently established himself as one of the leading composers of integral serialism.

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