Boulez's Künstlerroman: Using blocs sonores to Overcome Anxieties and Influence in Le marteau sans maître

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Salem
Keyword(s):  
John Cage ◽  
Artistic Development ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Analytical Basis ◽  
Anxiety Of Influence ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
Personal Reflections ◽  
Previous Scholarship

Previous scholarship on Pierre Boulez's Le marteau sans maître celebrates the analytical basis of the piece, with particular emphasis on Boulez's concept of the bloc sonore and its role in Le marteau's design. This article synthesizes aspects of this scholarship with Boulez's personal reflections from the years 1953–55, many of which remain unpublished to this day. Utilizing Boulez's correspondence with Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, as well as his own published writings and the sketches for Le marteau, I present the story of an artist on the path to self-discovery. I also shift the discussion of blocs sonores away from viewing them as musical objects necessary for the analysis of Le marteau to recognizing their significance as a cultural and aesthetic concept at the heart of Boulez's artistic development at this time. Finally, I use the literary trope of “anxiety of influence” to relate Boulez's own maturation to his struggle to escape the shadow and influence of Schoenberg. By humanizing a work that is often cited for its analytical virtuosity and poetic audacity rather than the network of biographical circumstances behind its creation, I attempt to reorient our ears from the rigidness of integral serialism to the broader significance of Boulez's score.

scholarly journals Composer dans l’ombre de Darmstadt (1987)

2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 53-66
Author(s):  
Helmut Lachenmann
Keyword(s):  
John Cage ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen

Dans cet article rédigé en 1987 et publié en 1996 dans le recueil de texte intitulé Musik als existentielle Erfahrung, le compositeur Helmut Lachenmann porte un regard critique et autocritique sur l’expérience des cours d’été de Darmstadt, depuis le début des années 1950 jusqu’au début des années 1980. Décennie par décennie, il dégage les divers courants et tendances qui ont marqué l’histoire de Darmstadt en explicitant les paradoxes parfois insolubles engendrés par l’attitude avant-gardiste dont les cours d’été avaient fourni le modèle autour de 1950. À chaque fois, il se réfère à des expériences vécues, faisant intervenir Luigi Nono (son professeur autour de 1960), Dieter Schnebel, John Cage ou Karlheinz Stockhausen. Partisan d’un « structuralisme dialectique », l’auteur spécifie enfin sa position — en référence au festival de Donaueschingen de 1980 et à un texte de 1982, « Affect et aspect » — par rapport à celles de Wolfgang Rihm et de Walter Zimmermann, ainsi que d’autres compositeurs ayant (ou non) tenté de théoriser leur relation à la tradition et à la subjectivité.

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.

John Cage and George Herbert Mead: The Unknown Influence of Van Meter Ames

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 354-369
Author(s):  
SERENA YANG
Keyword(s):  
John Cage ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
The World ◽  
University Of Cincinnati ◽  
Creative Abilities ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
The University ◽  
Compositional Control ◽  
American Thought

AbstractAs John Cage wrote in his bookA Year from Monday, the “current use for art [is] giving instances of society suitable for social imitation—suitable because they show ways . . . people can do things without being told or telling others what to do.” Cage's ideal anarchic music emphasizes not only renouncing compositional control, but also the process of self-discovery happening to everyone, a process that leads participants to discover their creative abilities. This paper argues that Cage's penchant for self-discovery came from his understanding of George Herbert Mead's theories of the process of individuation (the “me” and the “I”). Cage discovered Mead through readingZen and American Thought(1962) by his friend Van Meter Ames, a professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, who saw the compatibility between Zen and Mead's concept of self in the capacity of the “I,” a phase of self whose unpredictable steps contribute to human innovation. Cage found the possibility of overthrowing the thought of the world through triggering a self-discovery of the “I” in everyone. He realized this idea in his happenings, such as0’00”, by requiring performers to respond to the simple descriptions without specifying sound or duration.

scholarly journals Aborder la modernité : Triptyque et Lignes et points de Pierre Mercure

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
Brian Cherney
Keyword(s):  
John Cage ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen

Les deux oeuvres pour orchestre Triptyque (1959) et Lignes et points (1964) illustrent les diverses façons qu’avait Pierre Mercure d’aborder l’héritage du modernisme musical. Un des traits fondamentaux de la musique d’allégeance moderniste – et une préoccupation qui relie les compositeurs des premières décennies du xxe siècle (Bartók, Stravinsky, Berg, Hindemith, Honnegger, etc.) avec ceux qui relèvent de l’avant-garde musicale de l’après-guerre – se trouve dans un souci de symétrie. Pour sa part, Mercure emploie des formes symétriques pour structurer les deux oeuvres étudiées dans cet article à divers niveaux. Dans Triptyque, la surface de la musique reste tout à fait traditionnelle, alors que plusieurs aspects de sa structure (un peu cachés) relèvent d’une sensibilité résolument moderniste. Dans Lignes et points, au contraire, la surface de la musique, les sons, les couleurs et les textures sont empreints d’un caractère moderne, voire avant-gardiste, alors que sa structure pour ainsi dire « souterraine » se résume à un thème et variations de confection tout à fait classique (bien que cette forme ne s’entende pas nécessairement comme telle). D’autres aspects de ces deux oeuvres révèlent l’influence sur Mercure de ses contemporains, tels que Karlheinz Stockhausen, Earle Brown et John Cage, dont Mercure a entendu les oeuvres lors de la Semaine internationale de musique actuelle (SIMA) qu’il a organisée en 1961.

Vivier, Claude (1948–1983)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Bazin
Keyword(s):  
Art Songs ◽  
Instituut Voor ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Balinese Gamelan ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
Religious Establishment

Claude Vivier is perhaps the best known of all Quebec composers, both in Canada and abroad. In 1967, after being removed from the religious establishment where he was preparing to become a priest, Vivier registered at the Montreal Conservatory of Music where he studied until 1970. He first attended composer Gilles Tremblay’s classes at the conservatory, and studied piano with Irving Heller there before traveling to Europe. A number of scholarships that Vivier received from the Canadian Arts Council (CAC) brought him to Utrect (1971–72) where he studied electroacoustic composition at the Instituut voor sonologie with composer Gottfried Michael Kœnig, and also to Cologne where he became a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Claude Vivier is the author of a catalogue bearing many traces of an intense journey of self-discovery. An opera, Kopernikus (1979) and three orchestral art songs (Lonely Child, 1980; Wo bist du Licht, 1981; Bouchara, 1981) are among his most affecting works. His major work for strings, Zipangu (1980), leaves an impression as lasting as his Pulau Dewata (1977) succeeds in invoking atmospheres typical of the Balinese gamelan sound world. Vivier was murdered in Paris in 1983, leaving behind a supposedly symbolic, unfinished work titled Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele? [Do you believe in the immortality of soul?].

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.

John Cage und Karlheinz Stockhausen

2003 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-422
Author(s):  
Hellmut Federhofer
Keyword(s):  
John Cage ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen

scholarly journals “Na ombreira da porta”: Intersecções para a construção poética de música visual.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludmila Constantino da Silva Queirós ◽  
Paulo Bernardino Bastos
Keyword(s):  
Artistic Expression ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Visual Music

This article first addresses the threshold (place of frontier) between arts in a generic way. Later approaches particularly the poetic intersection between Image and Sound, considering some authors that move conceptually amongst these two arts, such as: John Cage and Nan June Paik and others that establish collaborations among themselves to elaborate artistic constructions between Image and Sound, such as the Quay Brothers (Stephen and Timothy Quay) and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass.This article, as an antechamber to the investigation of the intersection between Sound and Image, intends to illuminate how the analysis of this articulation of movement between the threshold of Sound and Image (door jamb) and how one (image) can be analyzed as another (sound), or how the two approaches (image-sound) may be, metaphorically, very similar (intersections for the poetic construction of visual music). In what way Time and Space can also determine this common “poetic place” of building “music / sound - visual” or the inverse “visual - sound / music”, consequently, and in this way, alert to the experiencing of an artistic expression that, in my opinion, intersects with all others (inherent condition of contemporaneity).

scholarly journals Loudspeakers Optional: A history of non-loudspeaker-based electroacoustic music

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Long ◽  
Jim Murphy ◽  
Dale Carnegie ◽  
Ajay Kapur
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Alternative Technologies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Electronic Performance ◽  
Sound Objects ◽  
Musical Robotics

The discipline of electroacoustic music is most commonly associated with acousmatic musical forms such as tape-music and musique concrète, and the electroacoustic historical canon primarily centres around the mid-twentieth-century works of Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage and related artists. As the march of technology progressed in the latter half of the twentieth century, alternative technologies opened up new areas within the electroacoustic discipline such as computer music, hyper-instrument performance and live electronic performance. In addition, the areas of electromagnetic actuation and musical robotics also allowed electroacoustic artists to actualise their works with real-world acoustic sound-objects instead of or along side loudspeakers. While these works owe much to the oft-cited pioneers mentioned above, there exists another equally significant alternative history of artists who utilised electric, electronic, pneumatic, hydraulic and other sources of power to create what is essentially electroacoustic music without loudspeakers. This article uncovers this ‘missing history’ and traces it to its earliest roots over a thousand years ago to shed light on often-neglected technological and artistic developments that have shaped and continue to shape electronic music today.

Reminded by the Instruments

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
You Nakai
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Electronic Circuits ◽  
Graphic Notation ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Live Electronic Music

David Tudor (1926–1996) is remembered today in two guises: as an extraordinary pianist of postwar avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, influencing the development of graphic notation and indeterminacy; and as a spirited pioneer of live-electronic music who realized idiosyncratic performances based on the interaction of homemade modular instruments, inspiring an entire generation of musicians. However, the fact that Tudor himself did not talk or write much about what he was doing, combined with the esoteric nature of electronic circuits and schematics (for musicologists), has prevented any comprehensive approach to the entirety of his output which actually began with the organ and ended in visual art. As a result, Tudor has remained a puzzle of sorts in spite of his profound influence—perhaps a pertinent status for a figure who was known for his deep love of puzzles. This book sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor as a puzzle that David Tudor made, applying Tudor’s own methods for approaching other people’s materials to the unusually large number of materials that he himself left behind. Patching together instruments, circuits, sketches, notes, diagrams, recordings, receipts, letters, custom declaration forms, testimonies, and recollections like modular pieces of a giant puzzle, the narrative skips over the misleading binary of performer/composer to present a lively portrait of Tudor as a multi-instrumentalist who always realized his music from the nature of specific instruments.

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