Download or read book Changing the System The Music of Christian Wolff written by Stephen Chase and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian Wolff is a composer who has followed a distinctive path often at the centre of avant-garde activity working alongside figures such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Cornelius Cardew. In a career spanning sixty years, he has produced a significant and influential body of work that has aimed to address, in a searching and provocative manner, what it means to be an experimental and socially aware artist. This book provides a wide-ranging introduction to a composer often overlooked despite his influence upon many of the major figures in new music since the 1950s from Cage to John Zorn to the new wave of experimentalists across the globe. As the first detailed analysis of the music of this prolific and highly individual composer, Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff contains contributions from leading experts in the field of new and experimental music, as well as from performers and composers who have worked with Wolff. The reception of Wolff's music is discussed in relation to the European avant-garde and also within the context of Wolff's association with Cage and Feldman. Music from his earliest compositions of the 1950s, the highly indeterminate scores, the politically-inspired pieces up to the most recent works are discussed in detail, both in relation to their compositional techniques, general aesthetic development, and matters of performance. The particular challenges and aesthetic issues arising from Wolff's idiosyncratic notations and the implications for performers are a central theme. Likewise, the ways in which Wolff's political persuasions - which arguably account for some of the notational methods he chooses - have been worked out through his music, are examined. With a foreword by his close associate Michael Parsons, this is a valuable addition to experimental music literature.
Download or read book Christian Wolff written by Michael Hicks and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-07-23 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first interpretive narrative of the life and work of Christian Wolff, Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund trace the influences and sensibilities of a contemporary composer's atypical career path and restless imagination. Written in full cooperation with Wolff, including access to his papers, this volume is a much-needed introduction to a leading avant-garde composer still living, writing music, and speaking about his own work. Wolff has pioneered various compositional and notational idioms, including overtly political music, indeterminacy, graphic scores, and extreme virtuosity. Trained as a classicist rather than a musician, Wolff has never quite had both feet in the rarefied world of contemporary composition. Yet he's considered a "composer's composer," with a mind ensconced equally in ancient Greek tragedy and experimental music and an eccentric and impulsive compositional approach that eludes a fixed stylistic fingerprint. Hicks and Asplund cover Wolff's family life and formative years, his role as a founder of the New York School of composers, and the context of his life and work as part of the John Cage circle, as well as his departures from it. Critically assessing Wolff's place within the experimental musical field, this volume captures both his eloquence and reticence and provides insights into his broad interests and activities within music and beyond.
Download or read book Finding Democracy in Music written by Robert Adlington and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-02 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a century and more, the idea of democracy has fuelled musicians’ imaginations. Seeking to go beyond music’s proven capacity to contribute to specific political causes, musicians have explored how aspects of their practice embody democratic principles. This may involve adopting particular approaches to compositional material, performance practice, relationships to audiences, or modes of dissemination and distribution. Finding Democracy in Music is the first study to offer a wide-ranging investigation of ways in which democracy may thus be found in music. A guiding theme of the volume is that this takes place in a plurality of ways, depending upon the perspective taken to music’s manifold relationships, and the idea of democracy being entertained. Contributing authors explore various genres including orchestral composition, jazz, the post-war avant-garde, online performance, and contemporary popular music, as well as employing a wide array of theoretical, archival, and ethnographic methodologies. Particular attention is given to the contested nature of democracy as a category, and the gaps that frequently arise between utopian aspiration and reality. In so doing, the volume interrogates a key way in which music helps to articulate and shape our social lives and our politics.
Download or read book Occasional Pieces written by Christian Wolff and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As one of the original pioneering composers of the American experimental music movement and a well known scholar of classics, Christian Wolff has long been active as a significant thinker and elegant writer on music. With Occasional Pieces, Wolff brings together a collection of his most notable writings and interviews from 1950 to the present, shining a new light on American music of the second half of the twentieth century. The collection opens with some of his earliest writings on his craft, discussing his own proto-minimalist compositional procedures and the music and ideas that led him to develop these techniques. Organized chronologically to give a sense of the development of Wolff's thinking on music over the course of his career, some of the pieces delve into connections of music-making to social and political issues, and the concept of indeterminacy as it applies to performance, while others offer insights into the work of Wolff's notable contemporaries including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, David Tudor, Frederic Rzewski, Cornelius Cardew , Dieter Schnebel, Pauline Oliveros, and Merce Cunningham. An invaluable resource for historians, composers, listeners and students alike, Occasional Pieces offers a deep dive into Christian Wolff's musical world and brings new light to the history of the American experimental movement.
Download or read book Reminded by the Instruments written by You Nakai and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Tudor is remembered today in two guises: as an extraordinary pianist of post-war avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and as a founding figure of live-electronic music. His early realization of indeterminate graphic scores and his later performances using homemade modular instruments both inspired a whole generation of musicians. But his reticence, his unorthodox approaches, and the diversity of his creative output which began with the organ and ended with visual art have kept Tudor a puzzle. Illustrated with more than 300 images of diagrams, schematics, and photographs of Tudor's instruments, Reminded by the Instruments sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor by applying Tudor's own methods for approaching the materials of others to the vast archive of materials that he himself left behind. You Nakai deftly patches together instruments, electronic circuits, sketches, diagrams, recordings, letters, receipts, customs declaration forms, and testimonies like modular pieces of a giant puzzle to reveal the long-hidden nature of Tudor's creative process. Rejecting the established narrative of Tudor as a performer-turned-composer, this book presents a lively portrait of an artist whose activity always merged both of these roles. In reading Tudor's electronic devices as musicological 'texts' and examining his idiosyncratic use of electronic circuits, Nakai undermines discourses on sound and illuminates our understanding of the instruments behind the sounds in post-war experimental music.
Download or read book What s the Matter with Today s Experimental Music written by Leigh Landy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today's education and communications media are seen to be the main cause of the anonymity of contemporary music and suggestions are made to improve this situation. Leigh Landy investigates audio-visual applications that have hardly been explored, new timbres and sound sources, the discovery of musical space, new notations, musical politics, and the 'musical community' in an attempt to incite more composers, musicians and musicologists to get this music out into the works and to stimulate the creation of new experimental works.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination written by Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-26 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether social, cultural, or individual, the act of imagination always derives from a pre-existing context. For example, we can conjure an alien's scream from previously heard wildlife recordings or mentally rehearse a piece of music while waiting for a train. This process is no less true for the role of imagination in sonic events and artifacts. Many existing works on sonic imagination tend to discuss musical imagination through terms like compositional creativity or performance technique. In this two-volume Handbook, contributors shift the focus of imagination away from the visual by addressing the topic of sonic imagination and expanding the field beyond musical compositional creativity and performance technique into other aural arenas where the imagination holds similar power. Topics covered include auditory imagery and the neurology of sonic imagination; aural hallucination and illusion; use of metaphor in the recording studio; the projection of acoustic imagination in architectural design; and the design of sound artifacts for cinema and computer games.
Download or read book Music Books on Music and Sound Recordings written by Library of Congress and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Experimental Music Since 1970 written by Jennie Gottschalk and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-08-11 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is experimental music today? Recent attempts to define or identify examples of experimental music have been cautious and subjective, offering very little guidance to anyone with an interest in this field of activity. Is experimental music a historical event that refers only to John Cage and his influence, or does it have a greater spread and longevity? The development of this musical practice over the last 45 years merits a fresh definition and discussion. An experimental approach is not identifiable in specific sounds or techniques, and its scope would be drastically limited if it were judged on the basis of social or aesthetic groupings or self-identifications of composers.
Download or read book The Voice of New Music written by Tom Johnson and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of articles on the evolution of minimal music in New York in 1972-1982, which originally appeared in the Village Voice (New York).
Download or read book National Union Catalog written by and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Christian Wolff written by Christian Wolff and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Looking and Listening written by Brenda Lynne Leach and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking and Listening: Conversations between Modern Art and Music invites the art and music lover to place these two realms of creative endeavor into an open dialog. Although the worlds of music and visual art often seem to take separate paths, they are usually parallel. Conductor and art connoisseur Brenda Leach takes unique pairings of well-known visual art works and musical compositions from the twentieth century to identify the shared sources of inspiration, as well as similarities in theme, style, and technique, to explore the historical and cultural influences on the great artists and composers in the twentieth century. Looking and Listening asks and answers: What does jazz have in common with paintings by Stuart Davis and Piet Mondrian? How did Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue affect the work of artist Arthur Dove? How did painter Georgia O’Keeffe and composer Aaron Copland capture the spirit of a youthful America entering the twentieth century? What did Kandinsky and Schoenberg share in their artistic visions? Leach takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the lives of these artists, surveying many of the key movements in the twentieth century by comparing representative works from the modern masters of the visual arts and music. Leach’s refreshing and innovation approach will interest those passionate about twentieth-century art and music and is ideal for any student or instructor, museum docent, or music programmer seeking to draw the lines of connection between these two art forms.
Download or read book British Music Yearbook written by and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Beyond Notation written by Rebecca Y. Kim and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-09-28 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive survey of the groundbreaking work of Earle Brown, augmented with several newly published items from his personal archive
Download or read book Interviews with American Composers written by Barney Childs and published by . This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1972-73, Barney Childs embarked on an ambitious attempt to survey the landscape of new American concert music. He recorded freewheeling conversations with fellow composers, most of them under forty, all of them important but most not yet famous. Though unable to publish the interviews in his lifetime, Childs had gathered invaluable dialogues with the likes of Robert Ashley, Olly Wilson, Harold Budd, Christian Wolff, and others. Virginia Anderson edits the first published collection of these conversations. She pairs each interview with a contextual essay by a contemporary expert that shows how the composer's discussion with Childs fits into his life and work. Together, the interviewees cover a broad range of ideas and concerns around topics like education, notation, developments in electronic music, changing demands on performers, and tonal music. Innovative and revealing, Interviews with American Composers is an artistic and historical snapshot of American music at an important crossroads.
