Electronic Works (1957–58)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin R. Levy
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Experimental Techniques ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Western European ◽  
Future Direction

This chapter examines the compositional processes used in Ligeti’s three electronic pieces. After his flight from Hungary during the 1956 revolution and his arrival in Cologne in 1957, Ligeti began to work at the electronic music studio of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk. There he met luminaries of the Western European avant-garde including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gottfried Michael Koenig, and Mauricio Kagel. Immersing himself in the experimental techniques that they expounded, he produced two finished works for tape, Glissandi and Artikulation. In between time spent on these he started another, now called Pièce électronique no. 3 but originally conceived under the title Atmosphères. These works show a remarkable assimilation of ideas from Stockhausen but also reveal diverging aesthetic goals that anticipate Ligeti’s future direction.

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.

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.

The Shiraz Arts Festival: Western Avant-Garde Arts in 1970s Iran

Leonardo ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Gluck
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Islamic Revolution ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Iannis Xenakis ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Peter Brook ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
Arts Festival ◽  
Theater Directors

Iran in the 1970s was host to an array of electronic music and avant-garde arts. In the decade prior to the Islamic revolution, the Shiraz Arts Festival provided a showcase for composers, performers, dancers and theater directors from Iran and abroad, among them Iannis Xenakis, Peter Brook, John Cage, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Merce Cunningham. A significant arts center, which was to include electronic music and recording studios, was planned as an outgrowth of the festival. While the complex politics of the Shah's regime and the approaching revolution brought these developments to an end, a younger generation of artists continued the festival's legacy.

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.

Reminded by the Instruments

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
You Nakai
Keyword(s):  
Electronic Music ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Electronic Circuits ◽  
Graphic Notation ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Live Electronic Music

David Tudor (1926–1996) is remembered today in two guises: as an extraordinary pianist of postwar avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, influencing the development of graphic notation and indeterminacy; and as a spirited pioneer of live-electronic music who realized idiosyncratic performances based on the interaction of homemade modular instruments, inspiring an entire generation of musicians. However, the fact that Tudor himself did not talk or write much about what he was doing, combined with the esoteric nature of electronic circuits and schematics (for musicologists), has prevented any comprehensive approach to the entirety of his output which actually began with the organ and ended in visual art. As a result, Tudor has remained a puzzle of sorts in spite of his profound influence—perhaps a pertinent status for a figure who was known for his deep love of puzzles. This book sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor as a puzzle that David Tudor made, applying Tudor’s own methods for approaching other people’s materials to the unusually large number of materials that he himself left behind. Patching together instruments, circuits, sketches, notes, diagrams, recordings, receipts, letters, custom declaration forms, testimonies, and recollections like modular pieces of a giant puzzle, the narrative skips over the misleading binary of performer/composer to present a lively portrait of Tudor as a multi-instrumentalist who always realized his music from the nature of specific instruments.

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.

9/11 as Avant-Garde Art?

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1820-1829 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Schechner
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Small Extent ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Social Morality ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Single Moment ◽  
History Of

[The attacks of 9/11 were] the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos. Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 [sic] people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn't do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing. Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world. … It's a crime because those involved didn't consent. They didn't come to the “concert.” That's obvious. And no one announced that they risked losing their lives. What happened in spiritual terms, the leap out of security, out of what is usually taken for granted, out of life, that sometimes happens to a small extent in art, too, otherwise art is nothing.—Karlheinz Stockhausen (“Documentation”)Stockhausen aside, how can anyone call the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers a work of art? Of what value is such a designation? What does calling the destruction of the Twin Towers a work of art assert about (performance) art, the authenticity of “what really happened,” and social morality during and after the first decade of the twenty-first century? To even begin to address these questions, I need to refer to the history of the avant-garde—because it has been avant-garde artists who for more than a century have called for the violent destruction of existing aesthetic, social, and political systems.

scholarly journals Postmodernism, Postmodernist Fiction, Apocalypse and Fantasy

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Dr. S. Z. Abbas
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Logic ◽  
Time Scale ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Experimental Techniques ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Avant Garde

Terms like 'modern', 'postmodern' and 'contemporary' are subject-centered, and not based on any historical or objective phenomenon or personality. Everyone feels that something called 'Postmodernism' has happened, but, as regards its true nature and causes, opinion is divided; a few people say postmodernism is a fiction. There is also a problem with the nomenclature. What was referred to as 'contemporary', for example, in 1956 by the writers of that year will not be so to the generation of Y2K. All these terms tend to shift about what is known as PP in temporal logic, which itself keeps moving on the time scale. When we rename modern literature as the age of T.S. Eliot, we assign it a slot in the historical perspective. A further complication is created by the use of ‘modern’ and 'modernist', ‘postmodern’ and ‘postmodernist' as well as ‘contemporary.’ We may, perhaps, safely assume that its element in each case signifies the avant-garde, a group of authors in the respective period that is distinguished by experimentation and innovation. While attempts to accord the postmodern period a definitive time frame (which includes the postmodernist movement in arts and literature) remain in an inconclusive stage, let us assume that postmodernism encompasses the period from the fifties to the present time, which is open-endeded. It should also be noted that some postmodernist writers concentrate on new tones and new reality rather than experimental techniques.

Electronic Music

Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 107-117
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
John Cage ◽  
World War ◽  
Karlheinz Stockhausen ◽  
Edgard Varese ◽  
American Composer ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Musique Concrete

With the end of World War II came the rebirth of European radio. Government stations in both France and Germany established experimental studios for research, from which arose a new kind of music, “electronic music.” The station in France, Office de Radiodiffusion Télevision Française (ORTF), was directed by the engineer/composer Pierre Schaeffer and his partner, Pierre Henry, who called their musical creations musique concrète. In Germany the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) studio produced music through the process of “synthesis.” This chapter will explain the difference between the two approaches used to create electronic music with examples from the percussion solo and ensemble repertoire. Early experiments using wire recorders, test records, and tape recorders by composers Halim El-Dabh, John Cage, and Edgard Varèse precede the major electronic works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mario Davidovsky, and the American composer Stephen Everett, whose use of computers in “real time” brings the reader into the next century.

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.

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