Tactus performs Arabia Felix by Charles Wuorinen at the Manhattan School of Music. Mary Kerr – Flute, Rachel Field – Violin, Anne Rainwater – Piano, Jakob van Cauwenberghe – Guitar, Mike Perdue – Vibraphone, Matthias Kronsteiner – Bassoon, Conductor: John Ferrari
Archivi categoria: Contemporanea
Feldman about De Kooning
Morton Feldman: De Kooning (1963)
Morton Feldman’s elegant chamber work dedicated to the painter “De Kooning” and scored for horn, percussion, piano, violin, and cello was composed in 1963.
After composing works in the early 1950’s that were in graphic notation and left most of the musical parameters (pitch, duration, timbre, event occurence) to the discretion of the performers, Feldman became dissatisfied with the result because although this manner of composing freed the sounds it also freed the kind of subjective expression of the performers that could not create the kind of pure sound-making that Feldman envisioned.
He briefly returned to strictly notated works, found these too confining, and then created works in which most of the parameters were given except for duration and, consequently, coordination among the parts (“The O’Hara Songs” [1962], “For Franz Kline” [1962]). Following this, Feldman began to create works, like “De Kooning”, “False Relationships and the Extended Ending” (1968) and others, which alternate fully determined and indeterminate sections within the same work.
In “De Kooning”, there are coordinated chords (verticalities) and isolated events (single tones and intervals … verticalities stretched out horizontally or melodically) of a duration determined by the performers. The sequence of these single events is given however and players must enter before the last event has died out. These open sequences alternate with traditionally notated measures of rest with exact metronome markings, treating sound and silence in equivalent importance.
The total duration of “De Kooning” is open but tends to be between 14 and 1/2 minutes and 16 minutes. Tiny bells, tubular bells, and vibraphone are mixed with high piano tones and icy string harmonics creating a crystalline texture, that contrasts with a more muted texture of low tympani and bass and tenor drum rolls, pizzicati, low cello tones, low vibraphone notes, lower piano aggregates and sustained horn pitches. The materials are limited to a few gestures on each instrument and create “identities” of a sort (for example, the repeated “foghorn”-like horn notes, the percussion rolls, and so on) that can easily be followed by the ear. The variety of timbre combinations is astonishing and the tempo of their unfolding gives the listeners plenty of time to appreciate their quality. No particular programme is intended, but the changing timbres may spontaneous stimulate imagery for the listener. Or, for another listener, the joy may simply be in sheer richness of the sonic experience, for the sounds themselves.
[“Blue” Gene Tyranny, All Music Guide]
Xenakis drawings
The Drawing Center (35 Wooster Street, New York) opens a large show (nearly 100 works) of drawings by Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), including mathematical renderings, architectural plans and sketches for compositions.
I know that it’s a little away from here, but see this page for drawing examples with video and audio.
Wet Ink
The Wet Ink Ensemble is a New York-based new music collective. Our mission is to present innovative programs of contemporary music, with a focus on creating, promoting, and organizing adventurous American music.
Pendulum V – Alex Mincek – Wet Ink Ensemble from Wet Ink Ensemble on Vimeo.
Chi ha scritto Scelsi?
Fortunatamente sono sfuggito al festival nazional-popolare, ma ho passato la serata di sabato prima dormicchiando e poi riflettendo sulla vicenda di Giacinto Scelsi e del suo principale trascrittore, Vieri Tosatti. Riflessioni stimolate da una bella conferenza di Franco Sciannameo a cui ho assistito, nel pomeriggio, al Conservatorio di Trento, dove insegno.
La vicenda è ben nota agli addetti ai lavori (o almeno dovrebbe esserlo), ma vale la pena di riassumerla. In breve, Giacinto Scelsi (1905 – 1988), ormai riconosciuto come uno dei più importanti compositori contemporanei e anticipatore sia della minimal music che dello spettralismo (con i famosi Quattro pezzi per orchestra su una nota sola del 1959), in realtà non ha mai scritto materialmente una nota. Il suo lavoro, invece, consisteva nel registrare su nastro l’essenza delle proprie idee musicali eseguendole (spesso improvvisando) sull’ondiola (nome originale ondioline), una tastiera elettronica inventata dal francese Jenny, in grado di produrre anche quarti e ottavi di tono.
I nastri venivano poi passati a dei trascrittori che, in concerto con il compositore, trascrivevano il materiale su pentagramma, curando anche l’orchestrazione. Il principale fra costoro fu Vieri Tosatti (1920 – 1999) che, in verità, dopo la morte di Scelsi, creò anche una polemica con la dichiarazione “Scelsi c’est moi”, ma il cui contributo passò rapidamente in secondo piano.
E invece, secondo gli studi e i ricordi di Sciannameo, che fu violinista nel quartetto che curò la prima esecuzione dei brani orchestrati da Tosatti per questo organico, dovrebbe essere rivalutato perché il suo sodalizio trentennale con Scelsi lo pone in una posizione che va sicuramente al di là di quella del semplice trascrittore, al punto che molti critici che osannano la genialità sonora di Scelsi, dovrebbero invece ricordare che il “rendering audio” dei lavori di Scelsi è in gran parte opera di Tosatti, essendo quest’ultimo “l’arrangiatore” che ha materialmente orchestrato il materiale di base.
In realtà, anche secondo me, è giusto affermare che i nastri originali andrebbero stampati e diffusi (mi dicono sia in corso un lavoro di catalogazione e “pulitura” del suddetto materiale da parte della Fondazione Scelsi) perché sono proprio questi ad essere storicamente testimoni dell’idea originale di Scelsi, mentre la musica stampata dovrebbe essere considerata come una “trascrizione approvata dal compositore”.
Ma mi chiedo anche se sia proprio così. Il problema è: in che misura i nastri sono depositari dell’idea compositiva? Rappresentano la composizione in quanto unica testimonianza originale, oppure sono soltanto un ulteriore elemento di passaggio verso la formalizzazione di una idea musicale?
Sciannameo ha portato alla luce una corrispondenza risalente agli anni ’30 fra Scelsi e Walter Kline (descritto spesso come allievo di Schoenberg, ma, secondo Sciannameo, amico di Schoenberg, forse allievo di Berg) che testimonia come l’impostazione compositiva di Scelsi sia stata da sempre un po’ particolare, basata com’era sulla produzione di una idea musicale, lasciando a dei collaboratori il compito di orchestrare e a volte anche di sviluppare il concetto originario.
Questo metodo di lavoro, forse derivante anche dalla condizione aristocratica di Giacinto Scelsi, a mio avviso non ne sminuisce la genialità, ma induce a riflettere sulla genesi e sulla effettiva paternità dell’opera d’arte che, nella tradizione occidentale, è considerata un prodotto del tutto individuale, mentre spesso (e attualmente sempre di più) si rivela essere il prodotto dell’interazione di più di una mente.
Personalmente, devo aggiungere che, alla fine, quello che mi dispiace un po’ in questa vicenda è proprio il fatto che, a causa di un pregiudizio legato alla tradizione individualistica della composizione, il sodalizio Scelsi – Tosatti sia stato tenuto nascosto per molto tempo e sia ancora fonte di studi e polemiche, mentre, secondo me, sarebbe stato vissuto molto meglio dai protagonisti (soprattutto da Tosatti) se fosse stato trasparente e socialmente accettato come una collaborazione perfettamente normale fra due persone, ognuno con il proprio ruolo.
Mixtur 2003
Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Mixtur 2003 (Forward Version)”
for 5 orchestra groups, 4 sine-wave generator players, 4 sound mixers, with 4 ring modulators and sound projectionist
From the Musica Viva Festival
Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Lucas Vis
Recorded January 27, 2008
Muffathalle, Munich
The essential aspect of MIXTUR is, on one hand, the transformation of the familiar orchestra sound into a new, enchanting world of sound. It is an unbelievable experience, for example, to see and hear string players bowing a sustained tone and to simultaneously perceive how this tone slowly moves away from itself in a glissando, the pulse accelerates, and a wonderful timbre spectrum emerges. Orchestra musicians are astonished when they hear the notes they play being modulated timbrally, melodically, rhythmically, and dynamically. All shades of the transitions from tone to noise, noise to chord, from timbre to rhythm and rhythm to pitch come into being from such ring modulations, as if by themselves.
Finest micro-intervals, extreme glissandi and register changes, percussive attacks resulting from normally smooth entrances, complex harmonies (also above single instrumental tones), and many other unheard-of sound events result from this modulation technique and from the variable structuring.
Secondly, the ring modulation adds new overtone- and sub-tone series to the instrumental spectra, which can be clearly heard, especially during sustained sounds in MIXTUR. Such mixtures do not occur in nature or with traditional instruments. Through these mirrored overtone harmonies, one is moved by alien, haunting sensations of beauty, which are completely new in art music.
Only such renewal in how music affects us imbues new techniques with meaning.
— Karlheinz Stockhausen
From ANABlog
Torment of the Metals
The sound of Akashic Crow’s Nest begins with the use of an image synthesizer which turns very long photographic images into audio output, in the manner of a piano roll. The initial part of composing this music is thus designing the picture. For this latest project, the first audio output is converted to midi and run through a different softsynth, before being subjected to a battery of effects to get to the sounds you hear on this album.
Download from Webbed Hand Records
Excerpt:
Interlace
The English netlabel INTERLACE devotes to concerts featuring free improvisation, live electronic music, interactive composition, and, of course, a mixture of it all. It is a continuous series of concerts aiming at 3 or 4 times per year.
Excerpts from the Interlace archives: three improvisations from the concert dated 18 July 2009
4 notes
Tom Johnson is really a minimalist composer; in fact, he coined the term while serving as the new music critic for the Village Voice.
He works with simple forms, limited scales, and generally reduced materials, but he proceeds in a more logical way than most minimalists, often using formulas, permutations, predictable sequences and various mathematical models.
The Four Note Opera (1972) is a work written using four notes only (D, E, A, B). It is scored for 5 singers and a piano (no orchestra) and the singers play the role of singers in a way similar to Pirandello’s Six Characters In Search of an Author:
The only sure thing is that the crucial moment in the evolution of the piece was that evening very long ago when I read, with great excitement, Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters In Search of an Author. Normally characters are not even conscious of their existence on a stage. They are completely obedient to the author, they conform totally to the world the author creates, and they have no thoughts of their own. But Pirandello’s masterpiece was different. His characters knew they existed in a theatrical space, and only for a couple of hours. They were aware of the audience, and of the author as well. It was not the kind of theatre that asks you to believe something that is not true. It was the kind of theatre that you have to believe, because everything is true.
Pirandello’s vision had a strong impact on me, and for years one question lingered in the back of my mind: what would happen if, instead of Six Characters in Search of an Author, there happened to be some opera characters looking for a composer? It happened that some opera characters were looking for a composer, and about 10 years after reading Pirandello they found me and came to life in The Four Note Opera.
[Tom Johnson]
Here are some excerpts in french and italian:
and the whole
Freeman Études
John Cage, Freeman Études for solo violin (1977). A piece whose form is due to a set of misunderstanding.
In 1977 Cage was approached by Betty Freeman, who asked him to compose a set of etudes for violinist Paul Zukofsky (who would, at around the same time, also help Cage with work on the violin transcription of Cheap Imitation). Cage decided to model the work on his earlier set of etudes for piano, Études Australes. That work was a set of 32 etudes, 4 books of 8 études each, and composed using controlled chance by means of star charts and, as was usual for Cage, the I Ching. Zukofsky asked Cage for music that would be notated in a conventional manner, which he assumed Cage was returning to in Études Australes, and as precise as possible. Cage understood the request literally and proceeded to create compositions which would have so many details that it would be almost impossible to perform them.
In 1980 Cage abandoned the cycle, partly because Zukofsky attested that the pieces were unplayable. The first seventeen études were completed, though, and Books I and II (Études 1-16) were published and performed (the first performance of Books I and II was done by János Négyesy in 1984 in Turin, Italy). Violinist Irvine Arditti expressed an interest in the work and, by summer 1988, was able to perform it at an even faster tempo than indicated in the score, thus proving that the music was, in fact playable. Arditti continued to practice the études, aiming at an even faster speed, apparently misreading Cage’s indication in the score to play every measure in “as short a time-length as his virtuosity permits”, in which Cage simply meant that the duration is different for each performer. Inspired by the fact that the music was playable, Cage decided to complete the cycle, which he finally did in 1990 with the help of James Pritchett, who assisted the composer in reconstructing the method used to compose the works (which was required, because Cage himself forgot the details after 10 years of not working on the piece). The first complete performance of all Études (1-32) was given by Irvine Arditti in Zurich in June 1991. Négyesy also performed the last two books of the Etudes in the same year in Ferrara, Italy. [wikipedia]