Cybernetic systems of music creation

Simplicity of thought and operation can help to define complex end results, with cybernetic systems being a useful means of defining this within songwriting practices. This study outlines utilization of cybernetic practices by key popular music composers, including David Byrne and Brian Eno, who benefited from an art school education which supported these practices. As postmodern creation became more evident within art colleges, systemized processes of creation, where hierarchies were delineated, supported freedom and experimentation within the creative process. The non-musician was able to express their musical creativity due to the rise of new technologies and the reduction of hierarchies, as exposed from interviews with Eno, his art school tutor Roy Ascott, and experimental composer Gavin Bryars. These elements of art school education that they discussed, helped a new generation of musicians to develop original and dynamic work in the 1970s; the results of this research suggest that these are practices that should be introduced and acknowledged within HPME.

Personal Spin J

Bill Evans Trio: My Foolish Heart Propellerheads: History Repeating The Carla Bley Band: The Lord Is Listenin’ To Ya, Hallelujah! Glenn Gould: The Idea of North from Solitude Trilogy Tom Waits: Tom Traubert’s Blues Richard Strauss: Traumlicht from Drei Männerchöre Richard Wagner: Parsifal Gavin Bryars Ensemble: ...

Moving Through Triadic Space

Using Julian Hook’s theory of Uniform Triadic Transformations as a point of departure, I construct a network in which the “distances” between major and minor triads may be measured and progressions may be compared. From there, the network is used to analyze a portion of the 1992 composition “A Man in a Room, Gambling,” by contemporary British composer Gavin Bryars, revealing harmonic relationships that may otherwise go unnoticed.

London, South Bank Centre: Bryars's ‘From Egil's Saga’

Once again Gavin Bryars confounds many of our expectations with his laid-back take on the world's dramas. The War in Heaven (1992) featured a serene counter-tenor and is anything but bellicose. In The Sinking of the Titanic (1969), performed as a companion-piece in this concert, Bryars's band appropriately plays on undisturbed by the ship sundering all around it. The central drama of Dr Ox's Experiment (1997) is one of celebrating stasis. And so it is that Bryars's latest work From Egil's Saga (2004), a setting of battle-hardened texts by the 13th-century Icelandic poet and warrior Snorri Sturuson, has that calm, quiet, lamenting detachment – ‘a portrait of Egil at the end of his days’, as the composer has characterized it. Once again the world is seen through a piece of interestingly darkened glass.