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.

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.

Toward a Total Work of Art

Art Scents ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 158-177
Author(s):  
Larry Shiner
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Total Work ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Music Score ◽  
Theater Production ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Successful Integration

Chapter 9 begins with the idea of the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) and considers examples of odors in theater from the Renaissance to the present, arguing that the inclusion of odors in some types of theater production is appropriate. In the case of film, the chapter discusses the difficulties faced by the first serious attempts in the 1950s and the handful of recent efforts, arguing that the combination of images with sound is able to suggests odors, whereas actual odors are likely to create more puzzles than they are worth, except in the case of highly experimental “art house” films. In the case of music, the chapter focuses on Green Aria: A Scent Opera, presented at the Guggenheim in 2009, a work that combined narrative, odors, and an electronic music score and marked a decisive step toward the successful integration of actual smells with music and narrative.

A Musical Suite Composed by an Electronic Brain: Reexamining the Illiac Suite and the Legacy of Lejaren A. Hiller Jr.

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 19-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiffany Funk
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Computational Experimentation ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Conceptual Performance ◽  
The 1950S

In 1956, Lejaren A. Hiller, Jr., and Leonard Isaacson debuted the Illiac Suite, the first score composed with a computer. Its reception anticipated Hiller’s embattled career as an experimental composer. Though the Suite is an influential work of modern electronic music, Hiller’s accomplishment in computational experimentation is above all an impressive feat of postwar conceptual performance art. A reexamination of theoretical and methodological processes resulting in the Illiac Suite reveals a conceptual and performative emphasis reflecting larger trends in the experimental visual arts of the 1950s and 1960s, illuminating his eventual collaborations with John Cage and establishing his legacy in digital art practices.

scholarly journals Interpretation and Performance Practice in Realizing Stockhausen's Studie II

2016 ◽  
Vol 141 (2) ◽  
pp. 445-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Williams
Keyword(s):  
Performance Practice ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Electronic Devices ◽  
Great Care ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Musical Skills ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
And Performance

ABSTRACTIn the 1950s, using electronic devices to make music seemed a new paradigm for composers eager to remove the effects of interpretation on their relationship with their audience. The promise was that compositional ideas could be directly made into sound with the help of a technician whose task it was to carry out instructions. By making a new realization of Stockhausen's Studie II, composed in 1954, I interrogate many of the original techniques and practices, and show that there are many sites which require interpretation and raise issues of performance practice. The implication of these discoveries is that there may be advantages to an analysis of early electronic music of the 1950s and 1960s from the perspective of the practice of instrumental music, and that where there are references to ‘technicians’, great care should be taken to understand and appreciate the range of musical skills often required by such individuals. This approach to realization also raises serious questions about the ontology of electronic music.

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.

scholarly journals Finger Exercises for Oscillators: István Anhalt on Electronic Music1

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 77-84
Author(s):  
Matt Rogalsky
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Research Council ◽  
National Research Council ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Synthesis Techniques ◽  
Early Experiences ◽  
Digital Synthesis ◽  
The 1950S

Abstract In conversation with Matt Rogalsky, composer István Anhalt discusses his association with Hugh Le Caine and the National Research Council laboratories in the 1950s, the founding of the electronic music studio at McGill, and his early experiences learning tape music and analog and digital synthesis techniques. The composer describes his early electronic works, the use of electroacoustic elements in his later music, and the importance of electroacoustic music in music education.

‘There is Music in It, But It is Not Music’: A Reception History ofMusique Concrètein Britain

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-230
Author(s):  
LOUIS NIEBUR
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Reception History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Cultures ◽  
The World ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The One ◽  
Musique Concrete ◽  
Hostile Attitude

AbstractThe traditional narrative of the development ofmusique concrèteandelektronische Musiktells a story of esoteric, academic branches of musical modernism emerging out of Paris and Cologne in the 1950s. But this narrative clouds our understanding of the unique ways this music developed in Britain, largely filtered through the BBC, as a relatively populist, accessible iteration of Continental techniques. This article explores how British reactions to contemporary music and, in particular,musique concrèteandelektronische Musik, reflected on the one hand continued suspicion towards Continental music and on the other a deep insecurity about Britain's musical position in the world. The predominantly hostile attitude towards electronic music from within establishment musical cultures betray profound concerns about trends that were seen to exert a harmful influence on British musical society.

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