Archivi categoria: Contemporanea

Passages of the Beast

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Passages of the Beast (1978) by Morton Subotnick

From 1977 Subotnick began to explore the relationship between performers and technology in a series of “ghost” pieces for instruments and interactive electronics. In these compositions, the ghost score is a silent digital program which activates electronic modules to modify the instrumental sounds with regard to pitch, timbre, volume, and location of the sounds. Each work has its own digital program which controls a standardized ghost box. The ghost electronics were designed by Donald Buchla and built by John Payne according to the composer’s specifications; funding was provided by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. There are fourteen ghost works (composed between 1977 and 1983), and, at present, Subotnick feels he has finished this series. While the ghost pieces have used electronics to modify instrumental sounds, it appears Subotnick’s next compositional period will involve having instruments control computer generated sounds.
Subotnick states:

The title Passages of the Beast refers to the rites of passage, of beastness to humanness, the passion of the beast and human awareness joined. The clarinet is treated as both a very old instrument (through a series of invented fingerings to get some of the non-diatonic qualities back into the technique) and a modern instrument, paralleling, more or less, the transition or passages from beast to human. The almost programmatic quality of the work is in keeping with the mainstream of my work for more than a decade. Passages, in particular, deals metaphorically with the evolution of the human spirit, and was one of a group of works which led up to the final (as of this writing) piece in the series, The Double Life of Amphibians, a ninety minute staged tone poem which received its world premiere at the 1984 Olympics Arts Festival in Los Angeles.

 

An Idyll for the Misbegotten

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George Crumb – An Idyll for the Misbegotten (1986)
per flauto amplificato e 3 percussioni
Kristen Halay flauto, Brian Scott, W. Sean Wagoner, Tracy Freeze percussioni

I feel that ‘misbegotten’ [trad: figlio illegittimo, bastardo] well describes the fateful and melancholy predicament of the species homo sapiens at the present moment in time. Mankind has become ever more ‘illegitimate’ in the natural world of plants and animals. The ancient sense of brotherhood with all life-forms (so poignantly expressed in the poetry of St. Francis of Assisi) has gradually and relentlessly eroded, and consequently we find ourselves monarchs of a dying world. We share the fervent hope that humankind will embrace anew nature’s ‘moral imperative.’
[George Crumb]

Crumb suggests, “impractically,” that the music be “heard from afar, over a lake, on a moonlit evening in August.” (Crumb) Over a slow bass drum tremolo, the flute begins its haunting melody, which over the course of the piece includes quotations of Claude Debussy’s solo flute piece Syrinx and spoken verse by the eighth-century Chinese poet Ssu-K’ung Shu: “The moon goes down. There are shivering birds and withering grasses.” Far from a traditionally peaceful idyll, the music’s energy and dynamics gradually rise and fall, with a sense of desolation throughout.

Parallel Lines

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https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Simultaneous_MIDI_control_and_Buchla_touch_keyboard.jpg

MORTON SUBOTNICK (b. 1933, Los Angeles) is a pioneer in the field of electronic music as well as an innovator in works involving instruments and other media. He was the first composer to be commissioned to write an electronic composition expressly for phonograph records, Silver Apples of the Moon (Nonesuch, 1967), a work that was later choreographed by the Netherlands Ballet, Ballet Rambert of London and the Glen Tetley Dance Company. Subotnick was co-founder of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (now at Mills College) and was Music Director of Ann Halprin’s Dance Company and the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop. He served as Music Director of the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre during its first season and was director of electronic music at the original Electric Circus on St. Mark’s Place in New York City. Subotnick has held several faculty appointments, including Yale University, and was Composer-in-Residence in West Berlin under the auspices of the DAAD. Since 1970, he has chaired the composition department of the California Institute of the Arts.

PARALLEL LINES is one of Subotnick’s “ghost” pieces for live soloist and electronics. The ghost series is a unique method of blending electronics with live performances so that the effect of the electronics is not audible unless the performer is making a sound. The electronic ghost score is a digital control system which activates an amplifier, a frequency shifter, and a location device. These process the instrumental sound according to the plan of each composition. The ghost electronics were made possible by a Creative Arts grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and were designed by Donald Buchla to the composer’s specifications and constructed by John Payne at the California Institute of the Arts. Other ghost pieces include Last Dream or the Beast for singer and tape, Liquid Strata for piano, The Wild Beasts for trombone and piano, Passages of the Beast for clarinet, and Two Life Histories for male voice and clarinet. The composer writes:

PARALLEL LINES was commissioned by Laurence Trott and the Piccolo Society. The title has to do with the way in which the ‘ghost’ electronics interact with the piccolo. In previous ‘ghost’ pieces the electronics were used to produce an acoustic environment within which the solo manifested itself, but in this case the ‘ghost’ score is a parallel composition to the piccolo solo. The ghost score amplifies and shifts the frequency of the original non-amplified piccolo sound. The two (‘ghost’ and original piccolo sounds), like a pair of parallel lines, can never touch, no matter how quickly or intricately they move.
The work, a continuation of the butterfly-beast series, is divided into three large sections: (1) a perpetual-motion-like movement in which all parts play an equal role; (2) more visceral music, starting with the piccolo alone and leading to a pulsating ‘crying out,’ and (3) a return to the perpetual motion activity, but sweeter.

[from ANABlog]

Morton Subotnick – Parallel Lines – Laurence Trott, piccolo soloist
Members of the Buffalo Philharmonic and Buffalo Creative Associates; Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor

Credo in Us

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Credo in Us di John Cage.

Dated: New York, July, 1942. Revised October 1942
Instrumentation: 4 performers: pianist; 2 percussionists on muted gongs, tin cans, electric buzzer and tom-toms; one performers who plays a radio or phonograph;
Duration: 12′
Premiere and performer(s): August 1, 1942 at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, performed with the choreography by Merce Cunningham and Jean Erdman

The work was composed in the phraseology of the dance by Cunningham and Erdman. For the first time Cage uses records or radios, incorporating music of other composers in his own works. He suggests music by Dvorak, Beethoven, Sibelius or Shostakovich. Cage describes the work as a suite with a satirical character.
Jean Erdman recalls that for the first performance a ‘tack-piano’ was used (a piano with tumbtacks inserted onto the felt of the hammers). The pianist mutes the strings at times or plays the piano body (as a percussionist).

Black Angels

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Black Angels (Images I), quartetto d’archi amplificati di George Crumb, probabilmente l’unico quartetto ispirato alla guerra in Vietnam. È una bella partitura, anche graficamente. I titoli dei movimenti, poi, sono fantastici (mi piace molto il 2.3 “Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura”).

Movements
I. DEPARTURE

  1. Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects
  2. Sounds of Bones and Flutes
  3. Lost Bells
  4. Devil-music
  5. Danse Macabre

II. ABSENCE

  1. Pavana Lachrymae
  2. Threnody II: Black Angels!
  3. Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura
  4. Lost Bells (Echo)

III. RETURN

  1. God-music
  2. Ancient Voices
  3. Ancient Voices (Echo)
  4. Threnody III: Night of the Electric Insects

Program Notes (from the author’s site)

Black Angels (Images I)
Thirteen images from the dark land

Things were turned upside down. There were terifying things in the air … they found their way into Black Angels. – George Crumb, 1990

Black Angels is probably the only quartet to have been inspired by the Vietnam War. The work draws from an arsenal of sounds including shouting, chanting, whistling, whispering, gongs, maracas, and crystal glasses. The score bears two inscriptions: in tempore belli (in time of war) and “Finished on Friday the Thirteenth, March, 1970”.

Black Angels was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world. The numerous quasi-programmatic allusions in the work are therefore symbolic, although the essential polarity — God versus Devil — implies more than a purely metaphysical reality. The image of the “black angel” was a conventional device used by early painters to symbolize the fallen angel.

The underlying structure of Black Angels is a huge arch-like design which is suspended from the three “Threnody” pieces. The work portrays a voyage of the soul. The three stages of this voyage are Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation) and Return (redemption).

The numerological symbolism of Black Angels, while perhaps not immediately perceptible to the ear, is nonetheless quite faithfully reflected in the musical structure. These “magical” relationships are variously expressed; e.g., in terms of length, groupings of single tones, durations, patterns of repetition, etc. An important pitch element in the work — descending E, A, and D-sharp — also symbolizes the fateful numbers 7-13. At certain points in the score there occurs a kind of ritualistic counting in various languages, including German, French, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese and Swahili.

There are several allusions to tonal music in Black Angels: a quotation from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet (in the Pavana Lachrymae and also faintly echoed on the last page of the work); an original Sarabanda, which is stylistically synthetic; the sustained B-major tonality of God-Music; and several references to the Latin sequence Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”). The work abounds in conventional musical symbolisms such as the Diabolus in Musica (the interval of the tritone) and the Trillo Di Diavolo (the “Devil’s Trill”, after Tartini).

The amplification of the stringed instruments in Black Angels is intended to produce a highly surrealistic effect. This surrealism is heightened by the use of certain unusual string effects, e.g., pedal tones (the intensely obscene sounds of the Devil-Music); bowing on the “wrong” side of the strings (to produce the viol-consort effect); trilling on the strings with thimble-capped fingers. The performers also play maracas, tam-tams and water-tuned crystal goblets, the latter played with the bow for the “glass-harmonica” effect in God-Music.

George Crumb – Black Angels (Images I) performed by the Miró Quartet Daniel Ching (violin), Sandy Yamamoto (violin), John Largess (viola), Joshua Gindele (cello)

Musical Erratum

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Nel 1913, Duchamp creò un ‘musical erratum’ che portava lo stesso titolo del suo Grande Vetro, “La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même” (il che, visto che oggi è un giorno di matrimoni (non il mio) mi sembra appropriato).
Più che di un brano, si tratta di un metodo compositivo che utilizza un imbuto, delle palline e un trenino con vagoncini aperti.
Le palline sono numerate per indicare le note e vengono buttate a caso nell’imbuto posizionato sui vagoncini del trenino che avanza lentamente. In tal modo ogni vagoncino viene riempito casualmente da una pallina e la loro sequenza designa la serie dei suoni nella composizione.
Duchamp non esprime preferenze di organico, salvo indicare che gli strumenti devono essere di nuovo tipo. Questa versione, eseguita da Mats Persson and Kristine Scholz nel 1980, utilizza un panoforte preparato le cui corde sono messe in vibrazione da un disco rotante collegato a un motore elettrico.

Marcel Duchamp
La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (musical erratum)
Version by Mats Persson and Kristine Scholz

Postclassic Radio

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Postclassic Radio, tenuta dal compositore e musicologo Kyle Gann, fa parte del circuito Live365 e trasmette “Weirdly beautiful new music from composers who’ve left the classical world far behind.”

L’ascolto è libero beccandosi un po’ di pubblicità (raramente); a pagamento senza.
Cliccate qui, poi l’icona gialla/nera

Il circuito Live365, comunque, è molto attivo nell’area della musica sperimentale. Vi segnalo anche:

  • free103point9 nyc – Transmission art, free jazz, noise, dub, mash-ups, avant folk, turntablism, generative sound, field recordings, and other fringe styles.
  • Iridian Radio – Music that’s smart, but still warm to the ears -John Adams, Kronos Quartet, Bang on a Can, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson
  • Le radio gestite dall’etichetta innova.mu
    • innova.mu-Experimental – Radical music you won’t hear elsewhere Harry Partch, electroacoustic, experimental, computer generated, homemade instruments
    • innova.mu-Classical – New Classical music by today’s finest American composers: chamber, vocal, choral, orchestral
    • innova.mu-World – World, ethnic, international, tribal, folk, traditional Native American
    • innova.mu-SonicCircuits – The best selections from 10 years of the famous electronic music festival
    • innova.mu-Avant Jazz – Avant jazz, free Downtown improv, radical Ancient Futurism to blow your mind

Crumb – Makrokosmos I

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Un lavoro importante di Crumb sono i quattro libri del Makrokosmos (1972-1974). I primi due libri sono per pianoforte solo (amplificato), mentre il terzo (chiamato anche Music for a Summer Evening) è per due pianoforti e percussioni ed il quarto (noto anche con il titolo Celestial Mechanics) per pianoforte a quattro mani.
Il nome di questo ciclo allude ai sei libri pianistici del Microcosmos di Béla Bartók; come il lavoro di Bartók, il Makrokosmos è costituito da una serie di brevi pezzi dal carattere differenziato. Oltre a quella di Bartók, George Crumb ha riconosciuto in questo ciclo influenze di Claude Debussy, sebbene le tecniche compositive utilizzate siano molto differenti da quelle di entrambi gli autori citati. Il pianoforte viene amplificato e preparato sistemando vari oggetti sulle sue corde; in alcuni momenti il pianista deve cantare o gridare alcune parole mentre sta suonando.

Note di programma dell’autore / Author’s program notes:

The title and format of my Makrokosmos reflect my admiration for two great 20th-century composers of piano music — Béla Bartók and Claude Debussy. I was thinking, of course, of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos and Debussy’s 24 Preludes (a second zodiacal set, Makrokosmos, Volume II, was completed in 1973, thus forming a sequence of 24 “fantasy-pieces”). However, these are purely external associations, and I suspect that the “spiritual impulse” of my music is more akin to the darker side of Chopin, and even to the child-like fantasy of early Schumann.

And then there is always the question of the “larger world” of concepts and ideas which influence the evolution of a composer’s language. While composing Makrokosmos, I was aware of certain recurrent haunting images. At times quite vivid, at times vague and almost subliminal, these images seemed to coalesce around the following several ideas (given in no logical sequence, since there is none): the “magical properties” of music; the problem of the origin of evil; the “timelessness” of time; a sense of the profound ironies of life (so beautifully expressed in the music of Mozart and Mahler); the haunting words of Pascal: “Le silence éternel des espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of infinite space terrifies me”); and these few lines of Rilke: “Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit. Wir alle fallen. Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält” (“And in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness. We are all falling. And yet there is One who holds this falling endlessly gently in his hands”).

Each of the twelve “fantasy-pieces” is associated with a different sign of the zodiac and with the initials of a person born under that sign. I had whimsically wanted to pose an “enigma” with these subscript initials; however, my perspicacious friends quickly identified the Aries of Spring-Fire as David Burge, and the Scorpio of The Phantom Gondolier as myself.

Il primo libro, del 1972, ha come sottotitolo “Twelve fantasy pieces after the Zodiac” e infatti i movimenti sono ispirati ai segni zodiacali.

Potete ascoltarlo tutto o selezionare i singoli movimenti riportati sotto:

Part 1: 00:09 – Primeval Sounds (Genesis 1), Cancer 04:26 – Proteus, Pisces 05:44 – Pastorale (From the Kingdom of Atlantis, сa. 10,000 B.C.), Taurus 07:51 – Crucifixus [Symbol], Capricorn

Part 2: 10:25 – The Phantom Gondolier, Scorpio 13:12 – Night-Spell 1, Sagittarius 17:00 – Music of Shadows (for Aeolian Harp), Libra 19:50 – The Magic Circle of Infinity [Symbol], Leo

Part 3: 21:16 – The Abyss of Time, Virgo 23:46 – Spring Fire, Aries 25:31 – Dream Images (Love-Death Music), Gemini 29:40 – Spiral Galaxy [Symbol], Aquarius

Opus 21

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Described by The New Yorker as “a vibrantly broad-minded new-music group,” Opus 21 features works by composers from many different genres, including contemporary classical, jazz, pop, and world music, as well as those whose works fall in the hard-to-define categories in between. The ensemble was founded by composer Richard Adams and gave its debut performance at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City in Spring 2003. Opus 21 has since established itself as a truly innovative new music group, and has revamped the traditional concert-going experience by presenting side by side a diversity of art music and crossover works geared toward audiences with eclectic, wide-ranging musical tastes.

Comprised of virtuoso performers from diverse musical circles, Opus 21 is capable of performing works by composers from many different genres. Its programming has ranged from the contemporary classical works of William Bolcom, John Harbison, and Steve Reich, to the jazz compositions of Dave Brubeck and Fred Hersch; from the art rock music of Frank Zappa to a collaborative performance with legendary Motown pianist Joe Hunter.

The goal of Opus 21 is to create a collaborative venue for performers, composers, and audiences whose interests extend beyond a single type of music. Its programs seek to increase public awareness and understanding of art music in the twenty-first century, introduce the public to works it might not otherwise hear, and build bridges between audiences of different musical backgrounds. The group also maintains an open call for scores in order to be able to present the music of both established and emerging composers. In all its activities, Opus 21 is committed to the proposition that great music is without boundaries.

Opus 21 is an independent, not-for-profit performing arts organization.
Site: opus21.org