Justin Robert and Jeremy Powell are both enthusiast musicians that play live jazz for a living. Justin is a percussionist and likes to fiddle with analog synths, and Jeremy plays saxophone.
Both musicians love free jazz and improvisation, so one night they got together, Justin on synth and Jeremy on sax, and they put ‘Fluorinescence’ onto tape.
Twelve tracks lasting 65′ 20”. Download the whole album from Test Tube.
Excerpts:
Ragazzi, non so se vi è chiaro, ma se questa legge sulle intercettazioni passa così com’è, è la fine della libertà di stampa in questo paese.
Oggi dicono che hanno tolto il carcere per i giornalisti che pubblicano notizie su un’inchiesta prima della chiusura dell’indagine preliminare, ma è del tutto inutile finché restano le pene pecuniarie (€ 10.000 di ammenda), le sospensive e soprattutto le pene per gli editori (fino a € 464.700 di ammenda). Per pubblicare, infatti, bisogna essere in due: un giornalista e un editore.
Ma soprattutto, saremmo il primo paese occidentale e almeno sulla carta, democratico, in cui entra in vigore una legge che impedisce a un giornalista di fare il suo lavoro, cioè pubblicare le notizie di cui viene a conoscenza.
Infine, vi rendete conto che tutti i regimi autoritari, dico tutti, di destra e di sinistra, militari e mediatici, sono passati, in primis, per una limitazione della libertà di stampa?
Tanto per finire, vi ricordo che la nostra Costituzione, all’art. 21, dice:
Tutti hanno diritto di manifestare liberamente il proprio pensiero con la parola, lo scritto e ogni altro mezzo di diffusione.
La stampa non può essere soggetta ad autorizzazioni o censure.
Tristan Murail – Vampyr! for electric guitar, from Random Access Memory (1984), Wiek Hijmans electric guitar.
To be honest, I know little about this piece. It’s the sixth track from Random Access Memory, a cycle that includes a set of solo pieces for various instruments and a gold dust in the contemporary academic music where the electric guitar is seldom used.
Vampyr! is one of several works in Murail’s catalogue that do not employ spectral techniques. Rather, in the performance notes, the composer asks the performer to play the piece in the manner of guitarists in the popular and rock traditions, with a heavy overdriven rock sound. In the preface to the work, Murail writes: “The desired sound is rather like that of the solo guitar as played by Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton etc.“. And then, in bold type and with an exclamation mark: “The player should put into Vampyr! all the energy of rock music and that includes the appropriate number of decibels!” Would like to see the whole score.
The rather striking title refers to horror movies and sci-fi B-films; other titles in the cycle do so as well. This subject matter is clearly recognizable in the saturated guitar sound and the frequent, hysterical use of the tremolo arm.
Here Wiek Hijmans effortlessly transforms his Gretsch 1967 model Chet Atkins Tennesean into a ruthless yawing, squealing and screaming board.
Iannis Xenakis – Terretektorh (1965/66), for large orchestra of 88 players scattered among the audience
May 16 1960: Theodore Maiman presented the first laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) to the world. 50 years later, lasers are used in everyday life in fiber-optic communications, CDs/DVDs players, laser printers, laser medical procedures, and many more applications.
But the laser has many fathers, as stated in this poetry from PhD Comics
La scomparsa del poeta Edoardo Sanguineti restituisce all’Italia letteraria tutta il proprio anelato, compiaciuto, regressivo, passatista e reazionario provincialismo culturale e accademico.
Edoardo Sanguineti era stato capace di stemperare la «peste mansueta delle discipline», rendendo armonico il distonico, facendo della parola e della musica unico suono.
Aveva traversato il Labirinto disvelandone e destrutturandone la natura, ricordandoci, lucido e incrollabile nel pensiero, l’opportunisticamente obliata connessione tra ideologia e linguaggio, la fallacia di un’estetica e di un’arte solo apparentemente fini a se stesse.
Aveva individuato nella famiglia un nucleo di resistenza e, nel suo basso parlare, nel travestire e nel parodiare, un nucleo operativo.
Ha ancora senso, si chiedevano in troppi, ripercorrere il cammino delle avanguardie, come da Sanguineti propugnato?
Ora più che mai, annaspanti nella mediocrità e nella ripetizione, avvinghiati a discutibili e desuete Muse altrui per celare la mancanza delle proprie, alienati al segno di negare l’alienazione, vinti da uno sperimentalismo solo formale, dal sonno dell’ideologia, e incatenati alle pareti del Louvre, ha senso ripercorrere quel cammino, quello delle avanguardie storiche e delle neoavanguardie, quello di Edoardo Sanguineti, ha senso porsi i quesiti irrisolti e trarne la prassi per approdare a nuovi orizzonti.
Non è questa un’apologia apocrifa o un necrologio, ma un monito, «pietra fondamentale del rifiuto»: oltre ai suoi testi, testimonianza di un praticabile altro, resta di Edoardo Sanguineti il suo motto.
Ideologia e linguaggio.
Che queste parole non si perdano mai nella palude.
Vache Sharafyan (Վաչե Շարաֆյան): Devotion No. 2 (1999) for Tar, Kemanche, Dhol, Tam-Tam, Piano and string quartet.
Tar, Kemanche, Dhol are musical instruments adopted by various middle eastern cultures like Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia to the Indian subcontinent. Click the names to read details from wikipedia.
Gerd Kühr: Trans, from Revue instrumentale et electronique (2004/5 according to the composer’s site, not 2007 as stated in the video)
Austrian composer Gerd Kühr is a professor of composition at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Graz; he also works as a conductor and once studied with Sergiu Celibidache. Kühr has also taken composition with Hans Werner Henze.
Kühr’s piece Revue instrumentale et electronique is divided into six sections. It is scored for nine spatially divided instrumental groups and electronics.
The transitions between the electronics and live sections is seamless; you are listening and you gradually realize “we are hearing electronic music now” as opposed to the live instruments. Kühr is very effective at devising novel instrumental timbres, such as the palpitating percussion and fleeting winds in the opening “Intro” and in the alien atmosphere of sustained notes in “Trans.”
Una bella e recente (11/5) intervista con Umberto Eco è apparsa su wikimedia, qui.
Si discute dei modelli di sviluppo collaborativi nelle scienze hard, in quelle umanistiche e in wikipedia.
And this is the second pièce from the cycle Du Cristal…à la fumée, by Kaija Saariaho.
The last sound of Du Cristal – a cello trill played sul ponticello – becomes retrospectively the first sound of its successor, …à la fumée, which features solo parts for cello and amplified alto flute in addition to large orchestra. Saariaho has commented that
to my way of thinking, Du Cristal … à la fumée is a single work, two facets of the same image, but both fully drawn in, living and independent.
The difference between the two works is already manifest in the title: crystal is a classic example of repeated order, symmetrical, tense, stable mass. Smoke, on the other hand, changes its form constantly, an unpredictable, developing state. Crystal and smoke, like order and entropy, chaos. The title is inspired by a book by Henri Atlan, Entre le cristal et la fumée (Between the Crystal and the Smoke).
The single most important element in the music of Kaija Saariaho is tone colour, attached inseparably to harmony. In this sense she can be thought of as continuing the French orchestral tradition. Her music does not, however, only feast on beautiful sounds. The starting point of composition for her comes from a carefully studied theoretical basis. The origin of her music is a single sound which she penetrates, trying to uncover its structure and the laws that govern it. With these laws, just by changing the scale, the composer builds colours, harmonics, forms, rhythms – music. This starting-point ensures that all the works of Kaija Saariaho have a strong sense of unity. Elements that seem different fit together, because they are basically born from the same source.
Rather than associate Kaija Saariaho’s music with mathematical formulae or computer programs, it is more fruitful to compare it with nature – its biological and physical models. The composer herself has spoken of arctic lights, water-lilies, crystals, spirals: forms and materials which in themselves are perfect and beautiful and create aesthetic experiences, but which offer endless grounds for even scientific study. Observation of how the inner relations of organisms are built, how they change and multiply; how forms that seem simple and natural are of endless variety when examined closely: chaos and order can be closer to each other than we first suspect.
The tensions in Kaija Saariaho’s music, its dramaturgy, are built on pairs of contrasts. One important pair of contrasts is formed by sound and noise. This is manifested, for instance, in the sonority of the cello: when the bow is moved towards the bridge, adding bow pressure, the sound breaks and turns into noise. On the flute, when you blow into the tube you can create noise (which has its own tone colour) and which changes into a sound when the air hits the mouthpiece at the right angle. In rhythm, a simple pair of contrasts is created between repetitive and irregular patterns. Gradual movement between two opposites, interpolations, create and release tensions in the same way as do chordal functions in traditional tonal music.
It is no surprise that the soloists in …a la fumée are flute and cello. These would appear to be Saariaho’s favourite instruments given that many of her solo pieces have been written for them (for the flute, Canvas, Laconisme de l’aile, NoaNoa; for the cello, Petals and Près). …a la fumée however, is not a normal double concerto, in which the solo instruments are contrasted with the orchestra. In this work, flute and cello are like microscopes with which the composer penetrates deep into her material, shedding light from different angles and changing the scale.
György Ligeti, with whose earlier music Kaija Saariaho’s works have certain points in common, has spoken about a phenomenon familiar to most of us. When we go up in an aeroplane, we do not feel ourselves in motion. At the same time, details of the scenery disappear and merge into a whole. A meadow, swarming with inner energy, changes first into fields of colour, then into a bare point in the distance. The amplification of the alto flute and the cello serves this purpose: a whisper from the flute can grow to the scale of a big orchestra, a harmonic from the cello can be outlined above the whole landscape of sound. Is not one of the meanings of music, and all art, simply this? To create illusions, presentiments of a world that could be true.