December 1952 is the notorious Earle Brown’s score consisting only by horizontal and vertical lines varying in width (see it on the video). It’s a landmark piece on graphic notation. The player must translate the symbols in music.
David Tudor, overdubbed pianos.
Graphic Score Web-App Performance
John Zorn: “Goetia” (2002) for solo violin. Jennifer Koh, violin.
Goetia is in fact a demon’s invocation closely tied to numerology. The piece consists of eight variations for solo violin. The work’s guiding feature is that each of the eight movements utilizes the same sequence of 277 pitches transformed by tempo variations, octave displacements, and modifications in rhythm and intensity.
The times of movements are
梁雷 (Lei Liang): YUAN (2008) for saxophone quartet
Lei Liang (b.1972) is a Chinese-born American composer whose orchestral, chamber and stage works have been performed throughout the world.
The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Aaron Copland Award, Lei Liang’s commissions and performances have come from the New York Philharmonic, the Heidelberger Philharmonisches Orchester, the Taipei Chinese Orchestra, the Fromm Music Foundation, Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Manhattan Sinfonietta, the Arditti, Ying and Shanghai Quartets, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, New York New Music Ensemble, Boston Musica Viva, pipa virtuoso Wu Man, percussionist Steven Schick, among others.
Lei Liang’s music is recorded on Telarc, Mode, Innova, GM and New World (forthcoming) Records. As a scholar, he is active in the research and preservation of traditional Asian music. Lei Liang studied composition with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin, and Mario Davidovsky, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (BM and MM) and Harvard University (PhD).
He was named Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University; taught in China as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Shaanxi Normal University College of Arts in Xi’an; served as Honorary Professor of Composition and Sound Design at Wuhan Conservatory of Music and as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College. Since 2007, he has taught as Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.
Her site is here.
Yuan – Prism Quartet
Iannis Xenakis – A Colone (1977) for Choir and Chamber Ensemble
After the Marco’s master, I publish here the link to the IRCAM video about his works for solo instrument and chamber electronics.
Here you can find excerpts from …of silence, hist whist and I will not kiss you f.ing flag. You can also see Arshia Cont, the creator of the astonishing score and tempo following software Antescofo.
I already posted this link on Dec. 12 2009, but now I point out again because here the students can see some applications of the systems that Marco described in his lecture.
In any case, the video is very interesting.
Tōru Takemitsu (武満 徹, Takemitsu Tōru, October 8, 1930 – February 20, 1996) was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Though largely self-taught, Takemitsu is recognised for his skill in the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre, drawing from a wide range of influences, including jazz, popular music, avant-garde procedures and traditional Japanese music, in a harmonic idiom largely derived from the music of Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen.
In 1951 Takemitsu was a founding member of the anti-academic Jikken Kōbō (実験工房, “experimental workshop”): an artistic group established for multidisciplinary collaboration on mixed-media projects, who sought to avoid Japanese artistic tradition. The performances and works undertaken by the group introduced several contemporary Western composers to Japanese audiences. During this period he wrote Saegirarenai Kyūsoku I (“Uninterrupted Rest I”, 1952: a piano work, without a regular rhythmic pulse or barlines); and by 1955 Takemitsu had begun to use electronic tape-recording techniques in such works as Relief Statique (1955) and Vocalism A·I (1956).
During his time with Jikken Kōbō, Takemitsu came into contact with the experimental work of John Cage. Although the immediate influence of Cage’s procedures did not last in Takemitsu’s music, certain similarities between Cage’s philosophies and Takemitsu’s thought remained. For example, Cage’s emphasis on timbres within individual sound-events, and his notion of silence “as plenum rather than vacuum”, can be aligned with Takemitsu’s interest in ma (a japanese concept usually translated as the space between two objects). Furthermore, Cage’s interest in Zen practice (through his contact with Zen Master Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki) seems to have resulted in a renewed interest in the East in general, and ultimately alerted Takemitsu to the potential for incorporating elements drawn from Japanese traditional music into his composition:
I must express my deep and sincere gratitude to John Cage. The reason for this is that in my own life, in my own development, for a long period I struggled to avoid being “Japanese”, to avoid “Japanese” qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition.
In particular, Takemitsu perceived that, for example, the sound of a single stroke of the biwa or single pitch breathed through the shakuhachi, could
so transport our reason because they are of extreme complexity […] already complete in themselves.
This fascination with the sounds produced in traditional Japanese music brought Takemitsu to his idea of ma which ultimately informed his understanding of the intense quality of traditional Japanese music as a whole:
Just one sound can be complete in itself, for its complexity lies in the formulation of ma, an unquantifiable metaphysical space (duration) of dynamically tensed absence of sound. For example, in the performance of nō, the ma of sound and silence does not have an organic relation for the purpose of artistic expression. Rather, these two elements contrast sharply with one another in an immaterial balance.
So we can see this strange situation: an eastern composer that first avoid the eastern music, reconcile with it thanks to a western composer.
About 30 years ago I had a book by Walter Zimmermann called Desert Plants. It was a book of conversations with 23 american composers. A self made book whose pages seem to be the xerox-copy of the sheets the author typed on his typewriter while listening to a tape recorder.
I loved this book because, beyond the interesting conversations, it taught the way of subsistence.
How to SUBSIST during a time where practically no attention is paid to individuals if they are not useful for any commercial tools. And what puts these Individuals into a situation where they are challenged to think about the nature of their integrity, and that because of their integrity become alienated. From there they are getting to understand the necessity to do everything to reduce alienation.
Like a desert plant.
Over the years, Desert Plants get lost in the normal life affairs (loans, moves and so on), but now that it is out of print, it respawn as a free book from the site of Walter Zimmermann itself. If you don’t know Desert Plants, you should. Click here and scroll a little.
G. F. Haas – Blumenstück (2000).
after texts from “Siebenkäs”
For choir (32 voices 8×4), bass tuba, and string quartet
Performed by Tom Walsh on tuba, the Quintett Rigas Kamermuziki, and the Latvian Radio Choir, Wolfgang Praxmarer conductor
Romanian-French composer Horaţiu Rădulescu (1942-2008) was a spectral music composer. But Radulescu’s music differs greatly from the french school (Grisey, Murail, Dufourt, Levinas). This latter uses the sound spectrum analysis to get informations by which to build a musical form.
Instead the work of Radulescu focuses on the exploration of what he considers to be the ultimate sonic archetype: the harmonic spectrum. His compositional aim, as outlined in his book Sound Plasma (1975) was to bypass the historical categories of monody, polyphony and heterophony and to create musical textures with all elements in a constant flux. Central to this was an exploration of the harmonic spectrum, and by the invention of new playing techniques to bring out, and sometimes to isolate, the upper partials of complex sounds, on which new spectra could be built.
Here we can listen to his fifth String quartet, subtitled Before the universe was born (1990/95)
Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas (b. 1953) truly experiments with sound. His extraordinary constructions of micro-intervals and pure harmonics create beautiful and opalescent soundscapes that move in ways that seem at once mysterious and obscure.
Here is the String Quartet No. 2 [1998] played by the Kairos Quartett.