Mapping Sound

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 35-67
Author(s):  
William O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
Mobile Form ◽  
Environmental Sounds ◽  
Free Exploration ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Graphic Scores ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
Complementary Actions

Each playthrough of Ed Key and David Kanaga's Proteus (2013) presents players with a new, randomly generated island to explore. This unstructured exploration is accompanied by a procedurally generated ambient soundtrack that incorporates both harmonic textures and melodic motives, and abstract musical representations of environmental sounds. In the absence of clearly defined goals—except to progress through four distinct “seasons” of the game—the player's relationship to the soundtrack becomes a core gameplay element, and a playthrough of Proteus becomes, among other things, a kind of improvised performance art. Viewed from this perspective, Proteus's combination of free exploration and chance strongly evokes ideas from mid-twentieth-century musical modernism, including the graphic scores of Cardew and Cage and the “mobile form” works of Stockhausen and Ligeti. Proteus further complicates analysis by concealing the mechanisms that produce particular musical fragments and by eliding the roles of listener and player/performer. This article examines the tensions inherent in the complementary actions of playing/performing Proteus and listening to/analyzing it, and argues that the game challenges the distinctions between creator, performer, and observer by vividly embodying the most deeply ingrained metaphors of music analysis.

scholarly journals The Spaces of Dream: Lutosławski's Modernist Heterotopias

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS REYLAND
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
Sociohistorical Context

AbstractThis article offers a revisionist perspective on the contested notion of Witold Lutosławski's authenticity as a modernist composer. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to musicology's increasingly nuanced narration of the story of musical modernism. The case is argued partly by relating Lutosławski's output to broader traditions in twentieth-century modernism, including musical representations of alienation, loss, violence, and nostalgia. Crucially, however, it is also argued by interpreting the more conventionally gratifying aspects of his pieces as something other than a hedonistic cop out. Adapting ideas from Michel Foucault, such passages are deemedheterotopianin function and interpreted in a wider-ranging sociohistorical context including Poland's responses to modernism and to Soviet Cold War oppression. The article's other main objective, therefore, is to interpret as heterotopian (and thus alternatively authentic) the expressive, structural and symbolic functions of passages in Lutosławski's works, thereby introducing Foucault's little-known idea to a wider audience of music scholars – given the concept's potential to contribute to critical explorations of a much wider diversity of musical texts and phenomena. Analysis of Lutosławski'sLes espaces du sommeilfor baritone and orchestra (1975) interconnects these strands.

Broken Beauty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Straus
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
Valuable Resource ◽  
Mobility Impairment ◽  
Attitudes Toward Disability ◽  
The Core ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Dialectical Relationship ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
Cultural Constructions

Modernist music is centrally concerned with the representation and narration of disability. The most characteristic features of musical modernism—fractured forms, immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical simplification of means in some cases, and radical complexity and hermeticism in others—can be understood as musical representations of disability conditions, including deformity/disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism. Modernist musical representation and narration of disability both reflect and shape (construct) disability in a eugenic age, a period when disability was viewed simultaneously with pity (and a corresponding urge toward cure or rehabilitation) and fear (and a corresponding urge to incarcerate or eliminate). Disability is right at the core of musical modernism; it is one of the things that musical modernism is fundamentally about. This book draws on two decades of work in disability studies and a growing body of recent work that brings the discussion of disability into musicology and music theory. This interdisciplinary enterprise offers a sociopolitical analysis of disability, focusing on social and cultural constructions of the meaning of disability, and shifting attention from biology and medicine to culture. Within modernist music, disability representations often embody pernicious stereotypes and encourage sentimentalizing, exoticizing, or more directly negative responses. Modernist music claims disability as a valuable resource, but does so in a tense, dialectical relationship with medicalized, eugenic-era attitudes toward disability.

Idiocy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph N. Straus
Keyword(s):  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Holy Fool ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Natural Man ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
The Village ◽  
Music Representations ◽  
Deep Interest

Idiocy, once understood as a mark of divine disfavor, is later medicalized under a variety of seemingly scientific classifications, culminating in a eugenic-era fear of the “menace of the feebleminded” and the widespread institutionalization to which it gave rise. In literature and in music, representations of idiocy have generally fallen into a small number of types: the Holy Fool and the Sentimental Idiot; the Wild Child and the Natural Man; the Village Idiot (often played for laughs); and the Eugenic Idiot (simultaneously pitiable and a feared source of violence, possibly sexual in nature). Modernist music represents idiocy in its tendency toward simplification in all domains; its static, nondevelopmental character; its deliberate cultivation of disfluency and inarticulateness; its interest in generic incongruity; its pleasure in low humor; and above all its deep interest in the childlike, the folk, and the primitive (including the racial primitive). As in modernist literature, musical representations of idiocy enable the sorts of compositional innovations that are widely understood as defining musical modernism.

scholarly journals Voices of earthmen (1995) by Vladan Radovanovic: A review

Muzikologija ◽  
2007 ◽  
pp. 295-302
Author(s):  
Marija Masnikosa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rigid System ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
Musical Modernism

This paper discusses the compositional technique and the poetic level of the composition Glasovi Zemljana (Voices of Earthmen) composed by Vladan Radovanovic in 1995. The work is based on the composer?s own musical principle, which he called hyperpoliphony, established in his early work Polyphony No. 9, and applied in his entire musical opus to date. The composition contains three movements, although the disposition of each section implies integration at a higher level of its structure, enabling us to interpret this work as an organic, textually unified three-part whole. Even though so-called hyperpolyphony creates and pervades the whole composition, this music is not the outcome of some rigid system. It breathes and it has its own ?warm? and even ?confessing? sections, especially in the unexpected instrumental and vocal ?solo-episodes?. Although this work was composed in an age of musical postmodernism, and shows a very strong imprint of musical expressionism, its atonality and very specific modernist musical technique define it as a modernist work, which places it in the huge trajectory of musical modernism of the second half of the twentieth century.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Stephen Rodgers
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Guiding Principles ◽  
State Of Affairs

This chapter provides an overview of the book as a whole. It opens with a brief history of Hensel studies—starting with the rediscovery of Hensel in the 1980s, leading through the growth of Hensel scholarship toward the end of the twentieth century, and ending with the current state of affairs—and argues that we need to understand Hensel’s music better. It then outlines some of the book’s guiding principles—including a belief in power of music analysis to access and communicate the wonders of Hensel’s songs and a commitment to exploring Hensel’s songs within its many diverse contexts—and explains the book’s overall organization around these contexts.

Dallapiccola, Luigi (1904–1975)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Roderick
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Society ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Luigi Dallapiccola ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
The City ◽  
Performed Music

Luigi Dallapiccola was the leading Italian composer of the middle half of the twentieth century, contributing much to the development of musical modernism in Italy as well as writing some of the most famous and widely performed music of his era. He was born in Pisino in modern-day Croatia; his Istrian background and the changing political ownership of his hometown are often cited as the root of many of his later musical and esthetic directions. However, it could be claimed that his more crucial relationship with place occurred in Florence, where he re-located in 1922 as a burgeoning compositional talent to study with Ernesto Consolo and later the modernist Vito Frazzi. He never left, finding the city of Dante, Botticelli, and Boccaccio to be a perpetual artistic muse. By the end of the 1930s, Dallapiccola had been firmly established as Italian music’s principal pioneer and was known overseas as a vocal supporter of musical internationalism through the International Society for Contemporary Music.

‘Britten Minor’: Constructing the Modernist Canon

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-290
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER CHOWRIMOOTOO
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Benjamin Britten ◽  
Canon Formation ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Musical Modernism

AbstractIn the last few decades, established narratives of twentieth-century music – with Schoenberg and his disciples at the centre and others on the periphery – have come under considerable fire: some have denounced the modernist canon itself as narrow and esoteric, while others have sought to restore marginalized ‘minor’ composers to a supposedly rightful centrality. In this article, I revisit the mid-century process of canon formation in order to excavate a deeper, less divisive understanding of its history. Using Benjamin Britten as a case study, I sketch a more ambivalent and reciprocal relationship between major and minor composers than has often been suggested. After illuminating key tropes in Britten's mid-century reception, I examine how the composer and his critics fashioned his canonical minority and, in the process, helped to construct the ‘majority’ of his modernist counterparts. I argue that, far from marginalizing his oeuvre, Britten's ambivalent, peripheral, and even diminutive relationship with the ‘major’ figures of musical modernism was central both to his mid-century appeal and his enduring place in the canon. Ultimately, I suggest that attending to Britten's complex and self-conscious canonical negotiations can teach us a lot not just about his own role in history, but also about the wider ways that twentieth-century canons are negotiated, mediated, transmitted, and performed.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Saylor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Disruption ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Broad Array ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Musical Modernism

The introduction lays out the paradoxical nature of early twentieth-century pastoral music, contrasting its large-scale popularity among listeners with its long-term critical dismissal. However, if considered as a manifestation of what Peter Stansky calls the “radical domestic”—the bringing about of significant cultural changes incrementally, so as to avoid political and social disruption—then pastoralism actually reflects an important facet of British musical modernism. Arising after 1920, this new idiom departed from more traditional evocations of the pastoral associated with the Romantic era, but still embraced a similarly broad array of topics even as the stylistic range began to narrow.

Class Love and the Unfinished Transformation of Social Hierarchy in Nepali Communist Songs

Red Strains ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Stirr
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Stark Contrast ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Strong Concern

Nepal's twentieth-century tradition of leftist music, known as pragatisil git or progressive song, developed musically during the 1960s and 1970s along with state-sponsored nationalist genres meant to serve as musical representations of Nepali identity. The differences were primarily in the lyrics: pragatisil git's leftist themes were deemed too incendiary for a regime that forbade political organization. Composers writing songs for the national radio were encouraged to produce love songs, deemed apolitical and therefore safe. At first glance, communist pragatisil git avoids themes of love, in stark contrast to mainstream folk and popular music. Yet, while themes of romance are indeed absent from most Nepali communist music, a closer look demonstrates a strong concern with other forms of love and sentiment. This chapter focuses upon the theme of class love, examining how it is imagined to be socially transformative, and how it has changed through different communist parties' imaginings.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document