Reich on Tape: The Performance ofViolin Phase

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSEPH AUNER

ABSTRACTThe score of Steve Reich'sViolin Phasespecifies that the performer is to recapitulate aspects of the composer's creative process in the studio. Working with a four-channel tape recorder, the violinist and a sound engineer are given detailed directions for creating the basic tape loop that generates the performance tape used in live performance. And yet – no doubt due to the scarcity of appropriate tape recorders – most present-day performers ofViolin Phaseuse looping hardware or software that make it possible to dispense with many of the instructions in the score, including the necessity of having the engineer on stage. That this significant change in performance practice seemingly passes for the most part without notice demonstrates how the decades-long ubiquity of tape has been replaced by a kind of invisibility, through which the particularities of the medium have been subsumed into more generalized notions of fixed media. I argue that the specific materialities of tape and tape machines are not incidental toViolin Phase, but are central to its composition, performance, and reception. A focus on the role of tape, and indeed on the roll of tape itself, can illuminate this and other pieces as well as Reich's deep involvement with music technologies throughout his career.

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelsey E. Medeiros ◽  
Logan M. Steele ◽  
Logan L. Watts ◽  
Michael D. Mumford
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-336
Author(s):  
Zosia Kuczyńska

The Brian Friel Papers at the NLI reveal a long and relatively unexplored history of major and minor influences on Friel's plays. As the archive attests, these influences manifest themselves in ways that range from the superficial to the deeply structural. In this article, I draw on original archival research into the composition process of Friel's genre-defining play Faith Healer (1979) to bring to light a model of influence that operates at the level of artistic practice. Specifically, I examine the extent to which Friel's officially unacknowledged encounter with a book of interviews with painter Francis Bacon influenced the play in terms of character, language, and form. I suggest that Bacon's creative process – incorporating his ideas on the role of the artist, the workings of chance, and the extent to which art does violence to fact – may have had a major influence on both the play's development and on Friel's development as an artist.


Leonardo ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Thanos Polymeneas-Liontiris ◽  
M. Eugenia Demeglio

Abstract This article presents a series of experimental music theatre performances that took place between 2015 and 2017. This art-based research investigates how qualities of the posthuman condition could manifest in experimental music theatre, by applying cybernetic and system theory principles at different levels (i.e. compositionally, aesthetically, dramaturgically) in the creative process. The aim of this article is to present these creative processes and to introduce this type of performance practice, namely cybernetic performance ecosystem.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-27
Author(s):  
Wouter Egelmeers ◽  
Joris Vandendriessche

IMPORTING TEXTS FROM ABROAD Editors’ reuse of foreign historical texts in Dutch periodicals, 1780-1860 This article explores the ways in which the editors of five Dutch history journals and three magazines for general circulation copied historical texts from abroad, between 1780 and 1860. By comparing original texts with reprinted versions, we show that the editors’ work involved not only ‘passive’ duplication (reprinting in full), but also more active forms of intervention, from the selection of text fragments to their translation, modification or critical review. These varied editorial practices point to a broader creative process through which historical knowledge was tailored to an emerging and nationally-oriented academic audience. Editors here assumed the role of mediators, gatekeepers even in the sense that their judgment determined the very choice of texts. At a time when the study of history was evolving at both the national and international level, and when the relationship between actors making up the disciplinary field was also in flux, editors thus became influential figures.


2018 ◽  
pp. 20-29
Author(s):  
David N. Fixler

Louis I. Kahn’s Richards Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania are a paradoxical building. At the same time that they perhaps represent the epitome of Kahn's literal expression of structure and material hierarchy, servant and served spaces and the role of mechanical systems in determining architectural form, these powerful ideas never came together programmatically to enable a fully functional, complete work of architecture. This paper describes the quest to solve the functional conundrum and technical shortcomings of Richards, to bring the architecture and program closer together. Through a synthesis combining transformation — a significant change in use that allowed the opening of the laboratory floors to the unique light and views that were always latent in the promise of Kahn’s essential architectural idea — and rehabilitation, where the best aspects of Richards — the glazed, vitrine-like facades and the beautiful logic of the building services distribution, were renovated for enhanced performance, Kahn’s original architectural vision and present function were able to be successfully reconciled.


2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-183
Author(s):  
Branka Rotar Pance ◽  
Ema Igličar

Creativity is the focus of research in various areas. The present paper focuses on creativity in music and the role of the teacher in stimulating and developing it in an individual’s musical development. It highlights the importance of evaluating musical ideas, the creative process and final products. The Music Olympiad involves a presentation of competitor’s own compositions. In the research, we analysed the characteristics of the compositions written for and performed at the first three Slovene Music Olympiads.


Author(s):  
Alina Predescu

Serban Oliver Tataru and Alfred Guzzetti are filmmakers that investigate on camera the role of memory in the construction of family history. They interview family members, gather old home movies and family photographs, and dig for public archival footage, in an effort to assume their position within a personal historical continuum, and to affirm their agency within their familial community. In their creative affirmation of generational subjectivity, they push against accepted familial narratives, and use the camera as a surgical tool that troubles lingering wounds beyond the surface of old images. In Anatomy of a Departure (2012), Romanian-German filmmaker Serban Oliver Tataru interviews his parents about their decision to emigrate from Ceausescu’s Romania while he was a teenager, scrutinizing on camera the conditions and consequence of a life-changing decision. While the dynamic of filming one’s own family is reminiscent of home movie tropes, and the tension built around sharing delicate memories reveals an intimacy usually intended to remain private, the film proposes a multilayered performance of the authorial self. As the film reveals a self-portrait set against the familial portrait (Marianne Hirsch), an inherent performative element acts as the necessary mediator between private and public, between ethic, aesthetic and politic. Negotiating between a restorative and a reflective nostalgia (Svetlana Boym), Tataru proposes a live performance of homecoming.


Author(s):  
Anna Sokołowska

AbstractThis paper is an attempt to analyze the necessity of defining and extending the protection of the child’s creative process. The starting point for consideration is the key role of artistic instruction in the child’s education and development which justifies providing appropriate framework for that process. The present text defines artistic output as a personal good covered by legal protection and specifies relevant legal regulations underlying the subject. It also reveals the position of the child as a creator with his/her specific characteristics and possible dangers arising from those characteristics. Another issue discussed here is the creative process and its components. In a further part, legal aspects of the child’s situation in the context of creative activity are analyzed with references to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), the (Polish) Family and Guardianship Code (1964), the UN Declaration on Rights of the Child (1959) and other legal acts. Finally, the paper addresses objectives of arts education in the light of the discussed issues. Conclusions include an indication of certain similarity between some areas of interest in pedagogy and in law. The main conclusion comes down to a statement that in the education process we should take into consideration so-called creative integrity which constitutes a personal good of both the adult and the child, and which is covered by legal protection.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 495-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Gomes da Costa ◽  
Qin Zhou ◽  
Aristides I. Ferreira

2005 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Dardanelli

This article deals with the variation in the demand for self-government in Scotland – as measured by the vote in the two referendums – between 1979, when devolution was rejected, and 1997, when devolution was endorsed. The existing literature mainly deals with each of the two referendums in isolation and does not offer an explicitly comparative analysis of them. However, implicit comparisons contained in analyses of the 1997 referendum tend to identify as the main cause of the variation the ‘democratic deficit’ created by Conservative rule between 1979 and 1997, which was consistently rejected in Scotland. I take issue with this explanation on theoretical and empirical grounds and advances an alternative account grounded in an explicit comparison of the two referendums. Based on a rationalist approach, the analysis presented here identifies three key elements in the voting dynamics at the two points in time – a gap between support for self-government and the actual vote in the referendum; an interaction effect between attitudes to devolution and to independence; and the role of the European context in shaping perceptions of independence. I argue that significant change in these three variables (rather than a ‘democratic deficit’) appear to have been the most important determinants of the different results of the two referendums.


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