Rebonds: Structural Affordances, Negotiation, and Creation

This paper presents a comparative recording analysis of the seminal work for solo percussion Rebonds (Iannis Xenakis, 1989), in order to demonstrate how performances of a musical work can reveal—or even create—aspects of musical structure that score-centered analysis cannot illuminate. In doing so I engage with the following questions. What does a pluralistic, dynamic conception of structure look like for Rebonds? How do interpretive decisions recast performers as agents of musical structure? When performances diverge from the score in the omission of notes, the softening of accents, the insertion of dramatic tempo changes, or the altering of entire passages, do conventions that arise out of those performance practices become part of the structural fabric of the work? Are these conventions thus part of the Rebonds “text”?

Contrasting Effects of World Perception as a Principle of Sofia Gubaidulina's Musical-Philosophical Thinking

Контрастность в представлении о мире была свойственна философии и искусству в разные исторические времена. Причем в западном мышлении она более развита, чем в восточном. С. Губайдулина ощутила в себе это свойство из-за рождения в русско-татарской семье, с перекрещиванием Запада и Востока. Как типичный «шестидесятник», свидетель Второй мировой войны, она всю жизнь думает о коллизиях в жизни людей, что и ввело контрастность в ее музыку любых жанров. На них основаны симфонические полотна, такие как симфония «Слышу...Умолкло...», «Pro et contra». А в концерте для скрипки «Диалог: Я и Ты» она претворила двойственные идеи философа М. Бубера. Контраст же Запада и Востока стал основой драматургии кантаты «Ночь в Мемфисе», концерта для солирующего исполнителя на ударных инструментах и оркестра с участием певицы «Час души», камерных сочинений «Чет и Нечет», «Сад радости и печали». Губайдулина выработала свою, эффективную систему «консонансов» и «диссонансов» всякого рода, которые приносят ясность всей ткани ее музыки. Масштабным духовным сочинением стала ее оратория «О любви и ненависти» на тексты молитв разных собраний. The contrast in the view of the world is characteristic of philosophy and art in different historical times. Moreover, in Western thinking, it is more developed than in the east. S. Gubaidulina felt this property in herself because of her birth in a Russian-Tatar family, with the crossing of the West and the East. As a typical “sixties,” witness of the Second World War, she thinks all her life about the conflicts in people's lives, which introduced contrast to her music of all genres. They are based on the symphonic canvases-the Symphony “I Hear. Silenced...,” “Pro et contra.” And in the violin concerto “Dialogue: Me and You,” she embodied the dual ideas of the philosopher M. Buber. The contrast of the West and the East became the basis of a dramatic cantata “Night in Memphis,” a concert for solo percussion and orchestra with the participation of the singer for “Hour of the soul,” in chamber works “Even and Odd,” “Garden of joy and sorrow.” Gubaidulina developed her own, effective system of “consonances and dissonances” of all kinds, which bring clarity to the entire texture of her music. A large-scale spiritual composition was her oratorio “On Love and Hate” on the texts of prayers of various congregations

Role of Movement and Gesture in Communicating Music Expressiveness to an Audienc

Musical performative gestures are recognised by the majority of theoreticians as a critical factor of a musical performance. Gestures can be considered as operating features of a person’s perception-action system. It presupposes significance of a meaning that involves more than just a physical movement. Movements can be subdivided into specific patterns and conceptualised. Dynamics are one of the most relevant expressive element in music and they are strongly related to the physical musical action - sound producing gestures. Used effectively, dynamics allow sustain narrative pertinence in a musical performance, communicating for example a particular emotional state or feeling. For this research, solo percussion contemporary music performance was in focus and an audience divided in between “visual and non visual” listeners was studied. From this perspective, observation over percussionists’ playing manner and it ́s audience provides the researcher an opportunity to understand dynamics perception through musicians’ gestures in this particular repertoire. The quantitative research design divided in the experiment was chosen for the purpose of this study, which can be referred to as the description of the objective reality by using numbers in order to construct meaningful models reflecting various relationships between objects or phenomena. These numerical entities are not the reality itself, but a way of representing it. How does the percussive gesture influences the perception of musical dynamics by an audience?

Zaum Box: New Music for Speaking Percussionist

Zaum Box is a collection of compositions for solo speaking percussionist setting transrational Russian futurist sound poetry called zaum. Zaum arose among a small interdisciplinary group of artists, writers, musicians and thinkers who invented a beyond-rational language as part of the radical disruption of traditional artistic and expressive forms, necessary to bring about the accelerated experience of a technologically-driven future. The subgenre of contemporary concert music for solo speaking instrumentalist dates from the 1970’s and has grown into a significant branch of the solo percussion repertoire. The composition of Zaum Box was founded on an extended period of research into zaum, futurism and Russian language. The complete set of compositions was produced as a limited-edition box set of uniquely formatted scores, which were realised by percussionist Katelyn Rose King in a set of ten videos. This article by the composer reviews all the phases of this project, including research and production, and examines the relationships between text, sound, music and theatricality in selected scores.

The Solo Percussionist—Center Stage

The virtuoso percussionist, though not unique to the twentieth century, began to appear on both professional and student recitals during the latter decades of the century. This chapter examines the solo literature written for the principal percussion instruments—timpani, xylophone, marimba, vibraphone—and multiple percussion, the latter term describing an array of dissimilar instruments that is novel to the twentieth century. The chapter portrays the evolution of composer Elliott Carter’s timpani solos and his use of metric modulation. Virtuoso artists, such as Vida Chenoweth, Keiko Abe, and others, composed and commissioned new works for keyboard percussion. Their collective efforts brought keyboard percussion to the forefront of the solo percussion literature. The eminent solo artist Evelyn Glennie commissioned over 200 solo works, many of them categorized as multiple percussion. The percussionist, once banished to the back of the orchestra, often appeared center stage by century’s end.

Jim Black, l'Improvibatteur

This musician's portrait is drawn from a first interview carried out on 22/04/14 by Amandine Pras, which was followed by two recording sessions - solo percussion over electronics improvisations - in turn followed by Jim Black's feedback commentaries after listening to the recordings. The latter were realised on 7/05/2014 at iBeam studios, an alternative venue in Brooklyn, by Amandine Pras and Grégoire Lavergne. The exchange is set within the framework of Amandine's ethnographic survey on the New-York improvisation scene. Sessions were carried out in English throughout. The portrait, written out in French, quotes and uses Jim's own words accurately. The approach is cognitive, semantic, and prosodic.