Metamorphosis in Music

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin R. Levy
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Experimental Period ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Compositional Evolution ◽  
Unpublished Studies ◽  
Sketch Study ◽  
Musica Ricercata

In the 1950s and 1960s György Ligeti went through a remarkable transition from writing music in the style of Bartók to working at the cutting edge of the avant-garde. Through careful study of the sketches and drafts, as well as analysis of the finished scores, Metamorphosis in Music takes a detailed look at this compositional evolution. The book begins with Ligeti’s synthesis of folk music and modernism in Musica ricercata and continues through the turn of the 1970s, examining nearly every major work as well as numerous unpublished studies. It shows Ligeti’s early discovery of twelve-tone technique, the influence of electronic music on his orchestral writing, and his involvement with the absurdist Fluxus group, and it argues that the repertoire of techniques he developed in this experimental period was incrementally codified into the composer’s personal style in the mid- and late 1960s. The conclusion looks at Ligeti’s approach to form and expression at the turn of the 1970s, when one phase of his metamorphosis had run its course, and the new challenge of composing an opera loomed on the horizon. Throughout the book, sketch study works alongside comments from interviews—counterbalancing the composer’s crafted public narrative, revealing hidden influences, lingering attachments, and insights into the creative process, and ultimately helping complete the picture of how he found his voice in a generation straddling the divide between the modern and postmodern eras.

Nono, Luigi (1924–90)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carola Nielinger-Vakil
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Music Theater ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Major Work ◽  
Second Viennese School ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Music ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Law Degree

Luigi Nono stands out as one of the most uncompromising modernist composers of the Italian avant-garde. Together with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Nono was one of the leading representatives of integral serialism in Europe after 1945. Nono is further known for his political music theater, his innovative spatial use of electronic music and live-electronics, avant-garde and microtonal instrumental writing, and an exceptionally lyric and communicative application of complex compositional procedures. Luigi Nono was born into a wealthy Venetian family just after Mussolini came to power. Toward the end of World War II, Nono began to study composition with G Fr Malipiero at the Venice conservatoire (1943–5) while completing a law degree at Padova University (1942–7). At the conservatoire, Bruno Maderna’s influential composition tutorials sparked a life-long interest in Renaissance polyphony and the works of the Second Viennese School. Equally fundamental was Hermann Scherchen’s conducting course (Venice, 1948). Luigi Dallapiccola’s lyric serialism was another formative influence at this time. Nono’s first major work, the Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell’op.41 di Arnold Schönberg, was premiered under Scherchen at the Darmstadt New Music Courses in 1950. Together with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Nono subsequently established himself as one of the leading composers of integral serialism.

scholarly journals ‘There Must Be a Poetry of Sound That None of Us Knows…’: Early British documentary film and the prefiguring of musique concrète

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-186
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Cox
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Coal Face ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Musique Concrete

Standard histories of electronic music tend to trace the lineage of musique concrète as lying mainly in the Futurists’ declarations of the 1910s, through Cage’s ‘emancipation’ of noise in the 1930s, to Schaeffer’s work and codifications of the late 1940s and early 1950s. This article challenges this narrative by drawing attention to the work of filmmakers in the 1930s that foreshadowed the sound experiments of Pierre Schaeffer and thus offers an alternative history of their background. The main focus of the article is on the innovations within documentary film and specifically the sonic explorations in early British documentary that prefigured musique concrète, an area ignored by electronic music studies. The theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the documentary movement’s members, particularly their leader John Grierson, will be compared with those of Pierre Schaeffer, and the important influence of Russian avant-garde filmmaking on the British (and musique concrète) will be addressed. Case studies will focus on the groundbreaking soundtracks of two films made by the General Post Office Film Unit that feature both practical and theoretical correspondences to Schaeffer: 6.30 Collection (1934) and Coal Face (1935). Parallels between the nature and use of technologies and how this affected creative outputs will also be discussed, as will the relationship of the British documentary movement’s practice and ideas to post-Schaefferian ‘anecdotal music’ and the work of Luc Ferrari.

Re-Imagining Westphalia

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-198
Author(s):  
M.I. Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Miles Davis ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Sound Transformation ◽  
The Cold War

Chapter 5 focuses on a work from Karlheinz Stockhausen entitled Hymnen (Anthems). Stockhausen’s influence on the electronic music avant-garde, in classical and popular music domains, on those from his native Germany to the UK, the US, and elsewhere, is legendary. The techniques Stockhausen was refining were also being put to work by the Beatles, Miles Davis, and Frank Zappa, to name a few. Working with national anthems that are sampled and transformed, Hymnen is a landmark work that I argue is as much about “remembering” as it is a research-based experiment in the early years of electronic and acoustic sound transformation. This work, completed during 1960s, evokes the cold war years where space exploration, civil rights, and nuclear (dis)armament standoffs between the communist East and the capitalist West predominated. It is also the decade of Woodstock, political assassinations, civil rights, and antiwar movements in the US and around the world. Hymnen still has a lot to offer for contemporary explorations into the geopolitics of any music-politics nexus.

John Cage (1921–1990)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Shock Waves ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Future ◽  
Musical Sounds

A leading figure in the twentieth-century avant-garde, John Cage was a prolific composer, writer, and artist. His early works show Schoenberg’s influence in their use of a naive modification of the latter’s twelve-tone system. By the late 1930s Cage had begun to pursue his own compositional interests, embarking on a career as a musical innovator who, for fifty years, would send ‘shock waves’ throughout the music world. In ‘The Future of Music Credo’, a manifesto written in 1940, Cage declared that in the future the distinction between ‘noise’ and so-called ‘musical sounds’ would no longer exist.

Scelsi, Giacinto (1905–1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Drott
Keyword(s):  
Musical Training ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Piano Lessons ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Way

Giacinto Scelsi was an Italian avant-garde composer best known for the single-note style he developed during the 1950s and 1960s, which minimizes harmonic and melodic activity in order to allow microtonal fluctuations and subtle transformations in timbre, intonation, dynamics, and articulation to come to the fore. Although his works were little known and infrequently performed during his lifetime, they gained considerable acclaim in the 1980s. Scelsi’s œuvre has proven extremely influential, and is generally regarded as a precursor to the spectral movement. Many of the elements of Scelsi’s biography remain uncertain, due in part to the composer’s penchant for self-mythologization. His family belonged to the southern Italian nobility, and it was in their ancestral chateau in Irpinie that Scelsi’s interest in music first manifested itself. He had little in the way of formal musical training, apart from receiving private piano lessons in his youth. Scelsi spent much of the 1920s and 1930s abroad, principally in France and Switzerland. It was during this period that he composed his first pieces, most notably Rotativa for pianos, strings, brass and percussion (1930). His early music was stylistically eclectic, embracing post-impressionist, neo-classical and twelve-tone idioms at various points in his life.

Paz, Juan Carlos (1897–1972)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Violeta Nigro-Giunta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Chamber Music ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Film Scores ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Press ◽  
Traditional Institutions

Juan Carlos Paz (1897–1972) was an Argentine composer, critic, writer, and self-described "compositional guide" who played a key role in twentieth-century Argentine contemporary music. Known for his rebellious attitude towards traditional institutions and academia, and as an advocate of avant-garde music throughout his life, Paz was a pioneer in the use of the twelve-tone technique in Latin America. Paz founded such groups as Grupo Renovación [Renovation Group] and Asociación Nueva Música [New Music Association], both devoted to promoting and performing new music. Paz wrote music for solo instruments, chamber music, orchestra, and theatre, as well as film scores. He published three important books dedicated to new music and three volumes containing his memoirs, and collaborated intensively with the press and magazines (Crítica, Reconquista, Acción de Arte, La Protesta, La Campana de Palo, Argentina Libre, among others).

Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1928–2007)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Toop
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Graphic Notation ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Public ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
German Composer

For much of the 1950s and 1960s, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was an absolutely seminal figure within the European avant-garde. By the mid-1950s, every new work of his seemed to open up new perspectives for radical composing: key notions and genres such as serialism, electronic music, variable forms, and graphic notation were all crucially affected by his work. Of all post-war composers, Stockhausen best exemplifies Chateaubriand’s dictum that ‘‘the original writer is not the one who imitates no one, but he whom no one can imitate’’; whereas other major figures had hosts of epigones, Stockhausen’s huge influence largely involved his way of thinking about composition, which was constantly evolving and re-forming, rather than attempted emulations. At the same time, by the late 1960s he was also something of a cult figure in the pop/rock world, as witness his appearance on the cover of the Beatles’ ‘‘Sergeant Pepper’’ album. Yet from the mid-1970s, Stockhausen increasingly (though never totally) withdrew from the public eye, working for just over twenty-five years on a massive cycle of seven operas collectively entitled Licht [Light], involving about thirty hours of music––probably the most ambitious (completed) project in the whole of Western art music.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Jennifer Iverson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
New Frontier ◽  
Reliable Marker ◽  
The One ◽  
Opening Up

The Westdeutscher Rundfunk [West German Radio] or WDR studio emerged in the early 1950s in Cologne, West Germany in a conflicted Cold War climate. On the one hand, electronic music signified social and artistic progress; avant-garde music stood as a reliable marker of democracy and freedom in contrast to Nazi and Soviet aesthetic mandates. On the other hand, technophobic audiences and critics reacted with skepticism to de-personalized, machine-mediated concerts, often regarding the new sounds with disdain. Nevertheless, cultural administrators, especially by means of the regional radio network, channeled funding to new music and the electronic studio as a way of rebuilding West Germany’s cultural hegemony. The WDR studio’s heterogeneity—its ability to incorporate and make use of several different types of resources—became a key to its success. The studio’s composers and technicians synthesized new sounds from scientific discourses. They reclaimed military technologies and long-standing musical lineages, opening up a new frontier. By embracing electronic music, West Germany found a way out of its decimated postwar landscape and emerged as a leader in the cultural Cold War.

Genre and Capital in Avant-garde Electronica

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-71
Author(s):  
Eliot Britton
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Music Technology ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Tools And Techniques ◽  
Flexible Boundaries ◽  
Structured Approach

This article applies a genre level approach to the tangled discourse surrounding the points of convergence between avant-garde electronica and electroacoustic music. More specifically the article addresses related experimental practices in these distinct yet related fields of electronic music-making. The democratisation of music technology continues to expand into an increasingly diverse set of musical fields, destabilising established power dynamics. A flexible, structured approach to the analysis of these relationships facilitates the navigation of crumbling boundaries and shifting relationships. Contemporary electronic music’s overlapping networks encompass varying forms of capital, aesthetics, technology, ideology, tools and techniques. These areas offer interesting points of convergence. As the discourse surrounding electronic music expands, so must the vocabulary and conceptual models used to describe and discuss new areas of converging artistic practice. Genre level diagrams selectively collapse, expand and arrange artistic fields, facilitating concrete, coherent arguments and the examination of patterns and relationships. Through the genre level diagram’s establishment of distinct yet flexible boundaries, electronic music’s sprawling discourse can be cordoned off, expanded or contracted to suit structured analyses. In this way, this approach clarifies scope and facilitates simultaneous examination from a variety of perspectives.

Disabling the avant-garde: Listening to Berberian and Lucier

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Jennifer Iverson
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
The Body ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Avant Garde

Abstract Avant-garde electronic music purports to be abstract rather than representational. We are supposed to care only about sound qua sound, but what if the body is fundamentally audible in the musical work? Furthermore, what if the audible body is disabled? This essay pursues several close listenings of the avant-garde electronic works Visage (1961) and I Am Sitting in a Room (1969). Both pieces feature stuttering voices that are highly mediated by technology. Sounding out disabilities from traumatic to mundane, the works promote an aural staring encounter, asking listeners to grapple with the discomfort that they may hear.

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