Carla Bley

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy C. Beal
Keyword(s):  
American Music ◽  
Comprehensive Treatment ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Free Jazz ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Pink Floyd ◽  
Professional Control ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Music Distribution ◽  
The Hill

This is the first comprehensive treatment of the remarkable music and influence of Carla Bley, a highly innovative American jazz composer, pianist, organist, band leader, and activist. Giving attention to Bley's diverse compositions over the last fifty years spanning critical moments in jazz and experimental music history, this book provides a long-overdue representation of a major figure in American music. Bley is best known for her jazz opera “Escalator over the Hill,” her role in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s, and her collaborations with artists such as Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Robert Wyatt, and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason. She has successfully maneuvered the field of jazz creating works that range from the highly accessible and tradition-based to commercially unviable and avant-garde. The book details the staggering variety in Bley's work as well as her use of parody, quotations, and contradictions, examining the vocabulary Bley has developed throughout her career and highlighting the compositional and cultural significance of her experimentalism. The book also points to Bley's professional and managerial work as a pioneer in the development of artist-owned record labels, the cofounder and manager of WATT Records, and the cofounder of New Music Distribution Service. The book shows Bley to be not just an artist but an activist who has maintained musical independence and professional control amid the profit-driven, corporation-dominated world of commercial jazz.

Jazz in America after 1945

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gennari
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Free Jazz ◽  
Third Stream ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Acoustic Performance ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Rock N Roll ◽  
The 1960S

In the post-1945 period, jazz moved rapidly from one major avant-garde revolution (the birth of bebop) to another (the emergence of free jazz) while developing a profusion of subgenres (hard bop, progressive, modal, Third Stream, soul jazz) and a new idiomatic persona (cool or hip) that originated as a form of African American resistance but soon became a signature of transgression and authenticity across the modern arts and culture. Jazz’s long-standing affiliation with African American urban life and culture intensified through its central role in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. By the 1970s, jazz, now fully eclipsed in popular culture by rock n’ roll, turned to electric instruments and fractured into a multitude of hyphenated styles (jazz-funk, jazz-rock, fusion, Latin jazz). The move away from acoustic performance and traditional codes of blues and swing musicianship generated a neoclassical reaction in the 1980s that coincided with a mission to establish an orthodox jazz canon and honor the music’s history in elite cultural institutions. Post-1980s jazz has been characterized by tension between tradition and innovation, earnest preservation and intrepid exploration, Americanism and internationalism.

Jeanne Lee's Voice

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Porter
Keyword(s):  
Vocal Music ◽  
The Political ◽  
Art World ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Jazz History ◽  
Social Visions ◽  
The 1960S

This essay attempts to recuperate the legacy of Jeanne Lee, an important artist whose work has gone largely unnoticed by scholars, while simultaneously examining the broader social and cultural significance of her work. Using Lee’s 1979 performance of her poem “In These Last Days” as a point of reference, I explore her multidisciplinary artistic practice that extended the parameters of improvised vocal music. “In These Last Days” exemplifies a cultural politics that was both a product of the political moments in which she lived and her interactions with a variety of thinkers and artists. This piece helps situate Lee’s work within the post-nationalist and post-cultural nationalist imaginary —an ethical, political, and cognitive remapping of the world -- informing the creative work and social visions of other African American improvisers during the 1970s. The recording showcases the ways that her incorporation of elements from intermedia performance practices enabled her social vision while implicitly commenting upon the deracinating incorporation of improvisation by the avant-garde art world during the 1960s. Additionally, Lee’s performance of gender on the piece raises a host of issues pertaining to the terrain female improvisers had to negotiate in different improvising communities and ultimately disrupts the privileging of masculinity when defining improvisational artistry. I also consider the ways in which her work encourages us to rethink jazz history as field and method.

Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde:

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 769-824 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Piekut
Keyword(s):  
John Cage ◽  
Free Jazz ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
Sun Ra ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Free Improvisation ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Taj Mahal

John Cage's brand of experimentalism underwent a transformation when it was imported into the UK in the 1960s. There, in contradiction to the American's well-known preferences, indeterminacy became twisted up with jazz-derived free improvisation, owing to discourse that stressed performer freedom and creativity while downplaying notions of non-intention and discipline. The authors of these commentaries created the discursive conditions for a mingling of avant-garde traditions, but the material conditions owed more to the efforts of Victor Schonfield, whose nonprofit organization, Music Now, acquired Arts Council subsidies on behalf of a stylistically heterogeneous avant-garde that included artists working with both improvisation and indeterminacy. Schonfield also invited important guests from overseas, including Ornette Coleman, Musica Elettronica Viva, the Sonic Arts Union, the Instant Composers Pool, Christian Wolff, Sun Ra, the Taj Mahal Travellers, and, in 1972, John Cage himself. In the greater ecology of experimentalism that Schonfield created, improvisation became a kind of contact zone where musicians came together from a number of directions, among them free jazz, score-based indeterminacy, text-based intuitive music, Fluxus-inspired instruction pieces, and even psychedelic rock freak-outs. Music Now produced over 80 concerts between 1968 and 1976, when the organization folded.

Rice, Ron (1935–1964)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Guilford
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
York City ◽  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
Free Jazz ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Soviet Cinema ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Social Marginality ◽  
North Beach ◽  
Late Modern

Ron Rice was a central figure in the 1960s American avant-garde cinema. His films are closely affiliated with beat literature given their emphasis on improvisation and spontaneity, their engagement with themes such as social marginality, drugs, travel, and sexuality, and their documentation of artistic subcultures in San Francisco’s North Beach, Mexico, New York City, and Venice, California. As is suggested by his use of the neologism "Dazendada" to describe his work, Rice was influenced equally by the historical avant-garde (Dada, Soviet Cinema) and distinctly late-modern American cultural developments such as free jazz and the popularization of Zen Buddhism. At the same time, the comedic dimensions of his films have invited comparisons to silent slapstick cinema. Rice only completed three works before his death by pneumonia at the age of 29: The Flower Thief (1960), Senseless (1962), and Chumlum (1964). An additional feature, The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (1963/1982), was assembled posthumously.

SOUND, MEANING AND MUSIC-DRAMA IN LACHENMANN'S DAS MÄDCHEN MIT DEN SCHWEFELHÖLZERN

Tempo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (268) ◽  
pp. 20-33
Author(s):  
Laurence Osborn
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Musique Concrete ◽  
Cultural Baggage

AbstractThis article argues that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern demonstrates a unique approach to music-drama that stems from the perceptual capacities of listeners, and their desire to search for meaning in what they hear. Beginning with the claim that Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern can be viewed as the culmination of an aesthetic project begun at the point of Lachenmann's emergence as a distinctive voice of the European avant-garde during the 1960s, the article first examines two major aspects of Lachenmann's aesthetics – musique concrète instrumentale and aura – outlining a composing philosophy that has been at the heart of Lachenmann's practice throughout his career. The article claims that Lachenmann sought to establish a rejuvenated semiotics, freed from cultural baggage and tied to the perceptual and cognitive capacities of listeners. Drawing upon the studies of Naomi Cumming and Luke Windsor, it outlines a theoretical framework that takes into account this composing philosophy and its implications, applying it in analyses of various excerpts from Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern. My analysis illuminates a music-drama that forms around the interplay of internally represented images and sensations, the emergence of which is facilitated by a musical language that prepares sounds to take on certain types of meaning. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the possible implications this has for audience members.

Zwischen Heroismus und Antiheroismus Ligetis Mikropolyphonie in 2001 revisited

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Beate Kutschke
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The 1960S

This article re-investigates the use of Ligeti’s second movement of his Requiem “Kyrie” (1963/1965) in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 — A Space Odyssey (1968). It does so in light of allusions to heroic models and the – obviously – heroic Zarathustra fanfare, both of which are pervasive in Kubrick’s film. The article aims at determining compositional means that refer to heroic ideas in avant-garde music of the 1960s, a time period in which radically new and skeptical views of heroism came to the fore that also affected the articulation of the heroic in music.

scholarly journals Whose Voices? The Fate of Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Adlington
Keyword(s):  
Compositional Style ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Text Setting ◽  
Factory Workers ◽  
Female Prisoners ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Music ◽  
Small Orchestra ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Current Reality

Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros for female voices and small orchestra was performed for the first and only time at the Holland Festival in 1970. A setting of texts by female prisoners and factory workers, it marks a sharp stylistic departure from Nono's political music of the 1960s by virtue of its audible quotations of revolutionary songs, its readily intelligible text setting, and especially its retention of the diatonic structure of the song on which the piece is based, the communist “Internationale.” Nono's decision, following the premiere, to withdraw the work from his catalogue suggests that he came to regard it as transgressing an important boundary in his engagement with “current reality.” I examine the work and its withdrawal in the context of discourses within the Italian left in the 1960s that accused the intellectuals of the Partito Comunista Italiano of unhelpfully mediating the class struggle. Nono's contentious reading of Antonio Gramsci, offered as justification for his avant-garde compositional style, certainly provided fuel for this critique. But Voci destroying muros suggests receptivity on the part of the composer—albeit only momentary—to achieving a more direct representation of the voices of the dispossessed.

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