Lessons of noise and silence: avant-garde cinema and experimental music in Australia

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Martin
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Music ◽  
Avant Garde

scholarly journals Fragments Over Experimental Film: Liminal Zones of Cinema, Art and Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miško Šuvaković
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Music ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Experimental Theater ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Institutional Power ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Singular Event ◽  
Unknown Control ◽  
Second World

In what follows, I will point to theorization of concept of the experimental film. My main thesis is that experimental art is based on the project, research practice, innovation and open transgressive or subversive artworks. Art focused on subversion of institutional power features as a singular event performed within a particular social relationship, as a critical actionist, engaged, or activist practice. Transgression – literally – refers to: infraction, violation of a law or an order, while in geological terms it implies penetration and expansion of the sea over the mainland. The notion of transgression relates to excess, overrunning or, more precisely, departing the familiar for the unknown, control for freedom. Experimental art was created in different disciplines such as experimental music, experimental film, experimental theater, etc. John Cage’s concept of ‘experimental music’ has been the starting point for new experimental art and artistic practices since 1950. Experimental film (experimental, new, avant-garde or neo-avant-garde cinema) has featured since the Second World War. The concept and term describe a range of filmmaking styles which are generally quite different from, and often opposed to, the practices of mainstream commercial and documentary filmmaking and entertainment-oriented cinematography. In the second and third part of the essay, I will present an analysis of the experimental films of the artists the OHO group and Neša Paripović. Article received: December 2, 2017; Article accepted: December 18, 2017; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Šuvaković, Miško. "Fragments Over Experimental Film: Liminal Zones of Cinema, Art and Theory." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies no 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.225

scholarly journals THE AVANT GARDE AS EXFORM

Tempo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (286) ◽  
pp. 7-16
Author(s):  
Lauren Redhead
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Music ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
Work Concept ◽  
Capitalist Ideology ◽  
Critique Of Ideology

AbstractPeter Bürger's critique of the historical avant garde (in Theory of the Avant Garde) accounts for its ineffectual nature as a political movement because of its relationship with institutions. He argues for hermeneutics to be employed as a critique of ideology, and as a facet of the understanding of the ‘historicity of aesthetic categories’. The influence of institutions on music since 1968 has served as a central part of its critique: the work concept itself seems to enshrine political ineffectiveness and the bourgeois nature of art practice that ought to be critiqued by an avant garde. In contrast, Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of the ‘exform’ re-conceives the avant garde as outside of institutions and an idea of ‘progress’ that is aligned with a dominant capitalist ideology. He frames the task of the avant-garde artist as giving energy to ‘waste’, outside of political and ideological institutions. This type of avant-garde practice functions to ‘bring precarity to mind: to keep the notion alive that intervention in the world is possible’. This article explores the exform with respect to the work of the British composer Chris Newman and the Swiss composer Annette Schmucki, and considers how Bourriaud's approach to re-thinking the avant garde might apply specifically to contemporary and experimental music in the present.

scholarly journals From Microphone to the Wire: Cultural change in 1970s and 1980s music writing

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-555
Author(s):  
STEPHEN GRAHAM
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
White Male ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Music Scenes ◽  
Independent Music ◽  
Attitude And Practice ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk

AbstractIn this article I examine localized cultural change that nevertheless serves as an applied instance of broader change. Focusing mostly on British, white male musicians and music writers active in the improvised and experimental music scenes of the UK (and, to a lesser extent, United States and Europe) across the 1970s and early 1980s, I identify clear shifts in taste, attitude, and practice. These shifts arc across what Ben Piekut calls the ‘mixed avant-garde’ of the 1960s to what I describe as the ‘unpop avant-garde’ of the late 1970s and 1980s, in which influences from popular and non-Western music play more significant roles than before and liminal, quasi-popular practices such as noise are in the emergence. I trace the appearance of the unpop avant-garde through independent music publications from the period, most prominently Microphone, Musics, Collusion, Impetus, and Re/Search, using these published scene discourses as barometers of the musical atmosphere of the time.

Counter-voicing in the avant-garde and experimental music: Selected cases

Maska ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (203-204) ◽  
pp. 106-116
Author(s):  
Luka T. Zagoričnik
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sound Poetry ◽  
The Voice

The present article is a reworking of a lecture that was performed live and with visual and sound examples at the CoFestival. In selected examples, the author tries to articulate various vocal practices through contemporary and experimental music, performative practices and sound poetry, in which the voice escapes gender, meaning, turns into noise, and emerges through the utterances of silence.

Cardew, Cornelius (1936–1981)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Venn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Musical Education ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
Hit And Run ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

Cornelius Cardew was a leading figure in British experimental music in the 1960s and a committed political activist in the 1970s. His earlier music, particularly that inspired by Cage, demonstrates on going concerns with the relationship between composer and performer, not least in the emphasis placed on improvisation. His later politically motivated music abandoned avant-garde and experimental principles in favor of a direct, tonal idiom. He died after a hit-and-run incident in East London. Cardew’s musical education was conventional; first as a boy chorister at Canterbury Cathedral (1943–50) and then at the Royal Academy of Music (1953–57). He had a philosophical nature too, apparent in his enduring fascination with Wittgenstein’s Tractutus. Cardew familiarized himself early on with early-twentieth-century serialism and increasingly with the continental avant-garde: at nineteen, he gave (together with fellow student Richard Rodney Bennet) the London premiere of Pierre Boulez’s Structures I and taught himself guitar in order to participate in the 1957 London premiere of LeMarteau Sans Maître. Many of Cardew’s compositions of this era reflected such interests, as in his Piano Sonata No. 2 (1956).

Afterword

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Piekut
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
World War ◽  
Latin Americans ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
The Social

This chapter discusses how a US-focused mainstream concept of American experimental music within the art music tradition was cemented in the 1950s through the work of John Cage at a moment when he established professional connections with the European avant-garde. The chapter recognizes that before this moment, composers such as Henry Cowell had thought of American experimentalism in a more hemispheric way and included the activities of composers like Carlos Chávez, Alejandro García Caturla, and Amadeo Roldán in their genealogies. Rather than arguing for a revisionist type of history to include Latin Americans in these narratives about American experimental music, the chapter’s goal is to show that taking into account historical and contemporary Latin@ and Latin American understandings of experimentalisms not only may help us in redefining the social and political meaning of what has been constructed as mainstream musical experimentalism but also may play a central role in critically rethinking post–World War II narratives about music.

Performance, Resistance, and the Sounding of Public Space

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Raffo Dewar
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Military Coup ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Aesthetic Responses ◽  
Activist Art ◽  
Concert Halls ◽  
Governmental Control

Two years after the 1966 military coup in Argentina, three musicians, Norberto Chavarri, Roque de Pedro and Guillermo Gregorio, formed the intermedia performance collective Movimiento Música Más. The collective combined experimental music, visual art, poetic performance, and political action, carrying out activities in concert halls, plazas, and city buses. This chapter examines the activist art of this little-known “Other” avant-garde that existed at the periphery of 1960s internationalism, focusing on two of its performance pieces: Plaza para una siesta de domingo (1970) and Música para colectivo línea 7 (1971), composed by Norberto Chavarri. These two performances embody the group’s approach to experimentalism: a commitment to bringing art and people into public spaces during a time of rigid governmental control of those spaces and bodies, creating domestically inspired aesthetic responses to the complex problems of late 1960s and early 1970s Buenos Aires.

Experimentation and Improvisation in Bogotá at the End of the Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodolfo Acosta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Music Ensembles ◽  
Colombian Music ◽  
Governmental Institutions ◽  
Academic Tradition

This chapter explores how experimentation and improvisation became meaningful within the Colombian Western academic tradition. Acosta provides a musicological report of the evolution of experimental composition, interpretation, and improvisation in Bogotá toward the end of the twentieth century. The rise of atonality, electroacoustic and mixed music, indeterminacy, and other avant-garde movements from the late 1950s onward, are sketched as direct precedents for the rise of experimental improvisational practices since the 1980s. These tendencies grew into a rich field within Colombian music throughout the last decades of the century, with the appearance of improvisation/experimental music ensembles in which composers, performers, and improvisers found creative outlets. This process is traced, along with the significant proliferation of performance situations, as well as the reactions of artistic, educational, and governmental institutions to the developing field.

Noise Music

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Hegarty
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Free Jazz ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Aesthetics ◽  
Erik Satie

Noise/Music looks at the phenomenon of noise in music, from experimental music of the early 20th century to the Japanese noise music and glitch electronica of today. It situates different musics in their cultural and historical context, and analyses them in terms of cultural aesthetics. Paul Hegarty argues that noise is a judgement about sound, that what was noise can become acceptable as music, and that in many ways the idea of noise is similar to the idea of the avant-garde. While it provides an excellent historical overview, the book's main concern is in the noise music that has emerged since the mid 1970s, whether through industrial music, punk, free jazz, or the purer noise of someone like Merzbow. The book progresses seamlessly from discussions of John Cage, Erik Satie, and Pauline Oliveros through to bands like Throbbing Gristle and the Boredoms. Sharp and erudite, and underpinned throughout by the ideas of thinkers like Adorno and Deleuze, Noise/Music is the perfect primer for anyone interested in the louder side of experimental music.

Boring Formless Nonsense

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eldritch Priest
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Magical Thinking ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Negative Capability

Boring Formless Nonsense intervenes in an aesthetics of failure that has largely been delimited by the visual arts and its avant-garde legacies. It focuses on contemporary experimental composition in which failure rubs elbows with the categories of chance, noise, and obscurity. In these works we hear failure anew. We hear boredom, formlessness, and nonsense in a way that gives new purchase to aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions that falter in their negative capability. Reshaping current debates on failure as an aesthetic category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a duplicitous concept that traffics in paradox and sustains the conditions for magical thinking and hyperstition. Framing recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art, Priest explores how the affective and formal elements of post-Cagean music couples with contemporary culture's themes of depression, distraction, and disinformation to create an esoteric reality composed of counterfactuals and pseudonymous beings. Ambitious in content and experimental in its approach, Boring Formless Nonsense will challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music.

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