Download or read book Writings on Music 1965 2000 written by Steve Reich and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-11 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-1960s, Steve Reich radically renewed the musical landscape with a back-to-basics sound that came to be called Minimalism. These early works, characterized by a relentless pulse and static harmony, focused single-mindedly on the process of gradual rhythmic change. Throughout his career, Reich has continued to reinvigorate the music world, drawing from a wide array of classical, popular, sacred, and non-western idioms. His works reflect the steady evolution of an original musical mind. Writings on Music documents the creative journey of this thoughtful, groundbreaking composer. These 64 short pieces include Reich's 1968 essay "Music as a Gradual Process," widely considered one of the most influential pieces of music theory in the second half of the 20th century. Subsequent essays, articles, and interviews treat Reich's early work with tape and phase shifting, showing its development into more recent work with speech melody and instrumental music. Other essays recount his exposure to non-western music -- African drumming, Balinese gamelan, Hebrew cantillation -- and the influence of these musics as structures and not as sounds. The writings include Reich's reactions to and appreciations of the works of his contemporaries (John Cage, Luciano Berio, Morton Feldman, Gyorgy Ligeti) and older influences (Kurt Weill, Schoenberg). Each major work of the composer's career is also explored through notes written for performances and recordings. Paul Hillier, himself a respected figure in the early music and new music worlds, has revisited these texts, working with the author to clarify their central narrative: the aesthetic and intellectual development of an influential composer. For long-time listeners and young musicians recently introduced to his work, this book provides an opportunity to get to know Reich's music in greater depth and perspective.
Download or read book Writings about Music written by Steve Reich and published by Halifax, N.S. : Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design ; New York : New York University Press. This book was released on 1974 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Conversations written by Steve Reich and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A surprising, enlightening series of conversations that shed new light on the music and career of “our greatest living composer” (New York Times) Steve Reich is a living legend in the world of contemporary classical music. As a leader of the minimalist movement in the 1960s, his works have become central to the musical landscape worldwide, influencing generations of younger musicians, choreographers and visual artists. He has explored non-Western music and American vernacular music from jazz to rock, as well as groundbreaking music and video pieces. He toured the world with his own ensemble and his compositions are performed internationally by major orchestras and ensembles. Now Reich speaks with collaborators, fellow composers and musicians as well as visual artists influenced by his work to reflect on his prolific career as a composer as well as the music that inspired him and that has been inspired by him, including: David Lang Brian Eno Richard Serra Michael Gordon Michael Tilson Thomas Russell Hartenberger Robert Hurwitz Stephen Sondheim Jonny Greenwood David Harrington Elizabeth Lim-Dutton David Robertson Micaela Haslam Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker Julia Wolfe Nico Muhly Beryl Korot Colin Currie Brad Lubman Through this series of insightful, wide-ranging conversations starting from his student days to the present pandemic, we gain a compelling glimpse into the mind of “the most original musical thinker of our time” (The New Yorker).
Download or read book Historical Performance and New Music written by Rebecca Cypess and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The worlds of new music and historically informed performance might seem quite distant from one another. Yet, upon closer consideration, clear points of convergence emerge. Not only do many contemporary performers move easily between these two worlds, but they often do so using a shared ethos of flexibility, improvisation, curiosity, and collaboration—collaboration with composers past and present, with other performers, and with audiences. Bringing together expert scholars and performers considering a wide range of issues and case studies, Historical Performance and New Music—the first book of its kind—addresses the synergies in aesthetics and practices in historical performance and new music. The essays treat matters including technologies and media such as laptops, printing presses, and graphic notation; new music written for period instruments from natural horns to the clavichord; personalities such as the pioneering singer Cathy Berberian; the musically “omnivorous” ensembles A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth; and composers Luciano Berio, David Lang, Molly Herron, Caroline Shaw, and many others. Historical Performance and New Music presents pathbreaking ideas in an accessible style that speaks to performers, composers, scholars, and music lovers alike. Richly documented and diverse in its methods and subject matter, this book will open new conversations about contemporary musical life.
Download or read book Writings on Glass written by Richard Kostelanetz and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philip Glass, composer of symphonies, operas (Einstein on the Beach, Akhnaten, Orphe), film scores (Kundun, Mishima, Koyaanisqatsi), songs, and music for dance is a musician who determined early on that he wanted to compose independently, apart from institutions. That decision has made him a controversial figure among academic musicians, in spite of his rigorous training at Juilliard, and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Richard Kostelanetz has gathered a lively and varied collection of writings about Philip Glass's work, along with several interviews and a conversation between Glass and sculptor Richard Serra. The chronology of the works and discography have been updated for the paperback edition. Philip Glass, composer of symphonies, operas (Einstein on the Beach, Akhnaten, Orphe), film scores (Kundun, Mishima, Koyaanisqatsi), songs, and music for dance is a musician who determined early on that he wanted to compose independently, apart from institutions. That decision has made him a controversial figure among academic musicians, in spite of his rigorous training at Juilliard, and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Richard Kostelanetz has gathered a lively and varied collection of writings about Philip Glass's work, along with several interviews and a conversation between Glass and sculptor Richard Serra. The chronology of the works and discography have been updated for the paperback edition.
Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music written by Keith Potter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years the music of minimalist composers such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass has, increasingly, become the subject of important musicological reflection, research and debate. Scholars have also been turning their attention to the work of lesser-known contemporaries such as Phill Niblock and Eliane Radigue, or to second and third generation minimalists such as John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Michael Nyman and William Duckworth, whose range of styles may undermine any sense of shared aesthetic approach but whose output is still to a large extent informed by the innovative work of their minimalist predecessors. Attempts have also been made by a number of academics to contextualise the work of composers who have moved in parallel with these developments while remaining resolutely outside its immediate environment, including such diverse figures as Karel Goeyvaerts, Robert Ashley, Arvo Pärt and Brian Eno. Theory has reflected practice in many respects, with the multimedia works of Reich and Glass encouraging interdisciplinary approaches, associations and interconnections. Minimalism’s role in culture and society has also become the subject of recent interest and debate, complementing existing scholarship, which addressed the subject from the perspective of historiography, analysis, aesthetics and philosophy. The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music provides an authoritative overview of established research in this area, while also offering new and innovative approaches to the subject.
Download or read book The Children of 1965 written by Min Hyoung Song and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1990s, a new cohort of Asian American writers has garnered critical and popular attention. Many of its members are the children of Asians who came to the United States after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted long-standing restrictions on immigration. This new generation encompasses writers as diverse as the graphic novelists Adrian Tomine and Gene Luen Yang, the short story writer Nam Le, and the poet Cathy Park Hong. Having scrutinized more than one hundred works by emerging Asian American authors and having interviewed several of these writers, Min Hyoung Song argues that collectively, these works push against existing ways of thinking about race, even as they demonstrate how race can facilitate creativity. Some of the writers eschew their identification as ethnic writers, while others embrace it as a means of tackling the uncertainty that many people feel about the near future. In the literature that they create, a number of the writers that Song discusses take on pressing contemporary matters such as demographic change, environmental catastrophe, and the widespread sense that the United States is in national decline.
Download or read book Michael Nyman Collected Writings written by Pwyll ap Siôn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over three decades Michael Nyman's music has succeeded in reaching beyond the small community of contemporary music aficionados to a much wider range of listeners. An important element in unlocking the key to Nyman's success lies in his writings about music, which preoccupied him for over a decade from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. During this time Nyman produced over 100 articles, covering almost every conceivable musical style and genre - from the Early Music revival and the West's interest in 'world' music, or from John Cage and minimalism to rock and pop. Nyman initiated a number of landmark moments in the course of late twentieth-century music along the way: he was one of the first to critique the distinction between the European avant-garde and the American experimental movement; he was the first to coin the term 'minimalism' in relation to the music of (then largely unknown) Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and later Philip Glass; the first to seriously engage with the music of the English experimental tradition and the importance of Cornelius Cardew, and to identify the importance of Art Colleges in nurturing and developing a radical alternative to modernism; and one of the first writers to grasp the significance of post-minimalists such as Brian Eno and Harold Budd, and to realize how these elements could be brought together into a new aesthetic vision for his own creative endeavours, which was formulated during the late 1970s and early 80s. Much of what transformed and defined Nyman's musical character may be found within the pages of this volume of his writings, comprehensively edited and annotated for the first time, and including previously unpublished material from Nyman's second interview with Steve Reich in 1976. There is also much here to engage the minds of those who are interested in pre-twentieth century music, from Early and Baroque music (Handel and Purcell in particular) to innovative features in Haydn, spatial elements in Berlioz, or Bruckner and Mahler's symphonic works.
Download or read book From Music to Sound written by Makis Solomos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-28 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Music to Sound is an examination of the six musical histories whose convergence produces the emergence of sound, offering a plural, original history of new music and showing how music had begun a change of paradigm, moving from a culture centred on the note to a culture of sound. Each chapter follows a chronological progression and is illustrated with numerous musical examples. The chapters are composed of six parallel histories: timbre, which became a central category for musical composition; noise and the exploration of its musical potential; listening, the awareness of which opens to the generality of sound; deeper and deeper immersion in sound; the substitution of composing the sound for composing with sounds; and space, which is progressively viewed as composable. The book proposes a global overview, one of the first of its kind, since its ambition is to systematically delimit the emergence of sound. Both well-known and lesser-known works and composers are analysed in detail; from Debussy to contemporary music in the early twenty-first century; from rock to electronica; from the sound objects of the earliest musique concrète to current electroacoustic music; from the Poème électronique of Le Corbusier-Varèse-Xenakis to the most recent inter-arts attempts. Covering theory, analysis and aesthetics, From Music to Sound will be of great interest to scholars, professionals and students of Music, Musicology, Sound Studies and Sonic Arts. Supporting musical examples can be accessed via the online Routledge Music Research Portal.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music written by Nicole V. Gagné and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2011-09-16 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last decade of the 19th century, modernist sensibilities reached a critical mass and emerged more frequently in music as composers began employing dissonance, polyrhythm, atonality, and densities. Conversely, many 20th-century composers eschewed modernist devices and wrote accessible works in a tonal idiom, which drew chiefly on classical, romantic, and folk models. Then the postmodern sensibility followed, with its enthusiasm for the unprecedented availability of virtually every type of music, and it engendered numerous sub-groups, including multiculturalism, minimalism, multimedia, and free improvisation. Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music focuses on modernist and postmodern classical music worldwide from 1890 to the present. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries, with more than 60 entries explaining the methods, styles, and acoustic and electronic media peculiar to new music, and over 350 entries giving essential information on the lives and work of the people who have composed and performed that music. Those entries also include pop, jazz, and rock composer/musicians whose work either overlaps the realm of classical music or else is so radical within its own field that it merits discussion in this context. This book is a must for anyone, musician or non-musician, student or professional, who seeks to research and learn more about any significant aspect of modern and contemporary classical music worldwide.
Download or read book Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music written by Mary Simoni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-12-09 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing extensive artwork serving as demonstration, as well as downloadable resources with sound and video clips, this collection of essays on electroacoustic music explores the creative possibilities to be found in various forms of musical analysis. Taking pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre as the four basic elements of music, the authors discuss electroacoustic works and examine: * the applications of neumes * contemporary staff notation * sound orchestra and score files * time-domain representations * spectrograms. Taking into consideration both the positive aspects (preservation of the abstract) and negative aspects (creative limitation) of these analytical methods, the authors have created a useful resource for students of electroacoustic music.
Download or read book The Music of Stravinsky written by Pieter C. van den Toorn and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2023-05-12 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most celebrated of Western composers in the twentieth century, Igor Stravinskymay have been the greatest as well. Stretching across forty or so years, the essays in this volume address the dynamics of Igor Stravinsky’s music from a variety of analytical, critical, and aesthetic angles. Underscored are the features of melody, harmony, rhythm, and form that would remain consistently a part of Stravinsky’s oeuvre regardless of the changes in orientation from the Russian period to the neoclassical and the early serial. The Rite of Spring (1913), Les Noces (1917–23), the Symphony of Psalms (1930), and the Symphony in Three Movements (1945) are discussed in detail, as are many of the circumstances attending their conception. Other concerns include the composer’s "formalist" aesthetics and the strict performing style he pursued as an interpreter and conductor of his music.
Download or read book On not being Able to Play written by Marla Morris and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars and musicians from many different backgrounds will find this book helpful as it deals with psychic problems in both professions. This book might help scholars and musicians to find a way out of their psychic dilemmas. From classical musicians to rock stars, from curriculum theorists to music teachers, from anthropologists to philosophers, this book takes the reader through a rocky intellectual terrain to explore what happens when one can no longer play or work. The driving question of the book is this: What do you do when you cannot do what you were called to do? This is what the author calls The Crisis of Psyche. The theoretical framework for this book combines curriculum theory, psychoanalysis and phenomenology. Here, the author looks at issues of emotion and the working through of crisis points in the lives of both scholars and musicians. Psychoanalytic theory helps to flesh out and untangle what it means to suffer from a damaged musical psyche and a damaged scholarly psyche. How to work through psychic inertia as a scholar? How to work through through psychic inertia as a musician? From Pink Floyd to Laurie Anderson, from Marion Milner to William F. Pinar, this book draws on the work of a wide range of musicians and scholars to find a way out of psychic blocks. From Philip Glass to Pablo Casals, from Michael Eigen to Mary Aswell Doll, this book draws on the work of composers, cellists, psychoanalysts and educationists to find a way out of psychic meltdowns.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music written by R. T. Dean and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2009-09-16 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides a cross-section of the most field-defining topics and debates in the field of computer music today. From music cognition to pedagogy, it situates computer music in the broad context of its creation and performance across the full range of issues that crop up in discourse in the field.
Download or read book When Music Mattered written by James Wierzbicki and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-04-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the American Sixties, and how that period’s socio-political essence was reflected and refracted in certain forms of the period’s music. Its five main chapters bear the names of familiar musical categories: ’Folk,’ ‘Rock,’ ‘Jazz,’ ‘Avant-Garde,’ ‘Classical.’ But the book’s real subject matter—treated at length in the Prologue and the Epilogue but spread throughout all that comes between—is the Sixties’ tangled mess of hopes and frustrations, of hungers as much for self-identity as for self-indulgence, of crises of conscience that bothered Americans of almost all ages and regardless of political persuasion.
Download or read book Brian Eno s Ambient 1 Music for Airports written by John T. Lysaker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-19 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian Eno's seminal album Ambient 1: Music for Airports continues to fascinate and charm audiences, not only as a masterpiece of ambient music, but as a powerful and transformative work of art. Author John T. Lysaker situates this album in the context of twentieth-century art music, where its ambitions and contributions to avant garde music practice become even more apparent. To appreciate the album's multifaceted character, Lysaker advocates for "prismatic listening," an attentiveness that continually shifts registers in the knowledge that no single approach can grasp the work as a whole. Exploring each of the album's four tracks and their unique sonic arrangements, Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports argues that the album must be approached from at least three angles: as an ambient contribution to lived environments that draws upon cybernetics and the experiments of Erik Satie, as an exploration of what John Cage has termed the "activity of sounds," and as a work of conceptual art that asks us to think freshly about artistic creativity, listening, and the broad ecology of interactions that not only make art possible, but the full range of human meaning. If one listens in this way, Music for Airports becomes a sonic image that blurs the nature-culture distinction and rescues the most interesting concerns of avant-garde music from the social isolation of concert halls and performance spaces.
Download or read book On Minimalism written by Kerry O'Brien and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revisionist history of minimalism's transformative rise, through the voices of the musicians who created it. When composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich began creating hypnotically repetitive music in the 1960s, it upended the world of American composition. But minimalism was more than a classical phenomenon—minimalism changed everything. Its static harmonies and groovy pulses swept through the broader avant-garde landscape, informing the work of Yoko Ono and Brian Eno, John and Alice Coltrane, Pauline Oliveros and Julius Eastman, and many others. On Minimalism moves from the style's beginnings in psychedelic counterculture through its present-day influences on ambient jazz, doom metal, and electronic music. The editors look beyond the major figures to highlight crucial and diverse voices—especially women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ musicians—that have shaped the genre. Featuring more than a hundred rare historical sources, On Minimalism curates this history anew, documenting one of the most important musical movements of our time.
