Electronic and Experimental Music

Electronic and Experimental Music
Author: Thom Holmes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 564
Release: 2012-05-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1136468951

Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture, Fourth Edition provides a comprehensive history of electronic music, covering key composers, genres, and techniques used in both analog and digital synthesis. This textbook has been greatly expanded and revised with the needs of both students and instructors in mind. The reader-friendly style, logical organization, and pedagogical features provide easy access to key ideas, milestones, and concepts. Now a four-part text with fourteen chapters, the new fourth edition features new content: Audio CD of classic works of electronic music—a first for this book. Listening Guides providing annotated, moment-by-moment exploration of classic works—a new chapter feature that improves critical listening skills. Expanded global representation with new discussions of classic electronic music in the United Kingdom, Italy, Latin America, and Asia New discussion of early experiments with jazz and electronic music More on the roots of electronic rock music. Additional accounts of the under-reported contributions of women composers in the field, including new discussions of Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Lily Greenham, Teresa Rampazzi, and Jacqueline Nova Two appendices that trace the evolution of analog and digital synthesis technology. The companion website, launching June 2012, includes a number of student and instructor resources, such as additional Listening Guides, links to audio and video resources on the internet, PowerPoint slides, and interactive quizzes.

Singers, Scores and Sounds

Singers, Scores and Sounds
Author: Ellen Hooper
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 100082506X

This book develops ways of discussing musical practices to articulate a new approach to understanding connections between recordings, singers, and singing. Centred around materials from the mid-twentieth century, this book focuses on a time when composers and performers were questioning the idea of authorship within their musical practice. Materials drawn upon include recordings, scores, archival content, visual art, interviews, and liner notes to develop a rich conception of practices of performance. Analysis of performances include recordings of singers such as Cathy Berberian, Linda Hirst, Loré Lixenberg, Angelika Luz, and Meredith Monk. Compositions by Cathy Berberian, Luciano Berio, John Cage, and Manuel De Falla are considered. The book utilizes these sources to examine the collective way in which singers and composers form practices as multiple, transforming, emergent, and not hierarchical. The book articulates – with a detailed, close consideration of specific instances in recordings and scores – a relational understanding of performance. This book will be useful reading for students and scholars of music analysis, musicology, performance practice, and twentieth century vocal music.

The Music of Sounds and the Music of Things

The Music of Sounds and the Music of Things
Author: Leigh Landy
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2024-09-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 104015218X

This book investigates two areas in which the appreciation of sonic creativity can be easily acquired across diverse cultures, ages and interests: the music of sounds – making music with any sounds, part of today’s sampling culture and the music of things – and the creation of instruments using existent materials (another type of sampling?) involving the notion of ‘instrument as composition’ as part of today’s DIY (or DIT, do it together) culture. The book offers broad discussions regarding the music of things (written by John Richards) followed by the music of sounds (written by Leigh Landy). These chapters are followed by a focus on the workshop demonstrating the collaborative and inclusive potential in both areas, and a spotlight on eight artists with a broad diversity of backgrounds and approaches to sound and music who discuss their perceptions. The book’s conclusion focuses on similarities and differences between the music of sounds and the music of things, suggesting, finally, that both might form part of the 21st- century’s folk music landscape. The book is primarily aimed towards students interested in current forms of sonic creativity but will be of interest to those interested in broader issues of sampling culture, hacking and sound studies.

Electronic Inspirations

Electronic Inspirations
Author: Jennifer Iverson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190868198

For a decimated post-war West Germany, the electronic music studio at the WDR radio in Cologne was a beacon of hope. Jennifer Iverson's Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde traces the reclamation and repurposing of wartime machines, spaces, and discourses into the new sounds of the mid-century studio. In the 1950s, when technologies were plentiful and the need for reconstruction was great, West Germany began to rebuild its cultural prestige via aesthetic and technical advances. The studio's composers, collaborating with scientists and technicians, coaxed music from sine-tone oscillators, noise generators, band-pass filters, and magnetic tape. Together, they applied core tenets from information theory and phonetics, reclaiming military communication technologies as well as fascist propaganda broadcasting spaces. The electronic studio nurtured a revolutionary synthesis of science, technology, politics, and aesthetics. Its esoteric sounds transformed mid-century music and continue to reverberate today. Electronic music--echoing both cultural anxiety and promise--is a quintessential Cold War innovation.

All Music Guide to Classical Music

All Music Guide to Classical Music
Author: Chris Woodstra
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Total Pages: 1620
Release: 2005
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780879308650

Offering comprehensive coverage of classical music, this guide surveys more than eleven thousand albums and presents biographies of five hundred composers and eight hundred performers, as well as twenty-three essays on forms, eras, and genres of classical music. Original.

Settling Scores

Settling Scores
Author: Joseph Franklin
Publisher: Sunstone Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780865344785

"SETTLING SCORES: A Life in the Margins of American Music" details one life lived in the margins of America's musical consciousness. From a working-class background in gritty North Philadelphia to the sanctity of European concert stages, from imagined dangers lurking along the waterfronts in mysterious Asian cities to the real dangers lurking in the narrow minds of those who uphold the status quo in American music, this book reveals the life of one who embraced change, and, in the process, gained political leverage and intellectual freedom. It is the story of Joseph Franklin and a legion of collaborators, and it is a snapshot view of a slice of America's musical landscape in the final quarter of the 20th century, including a history of Relâche and The Relâche Ensemble. Born in Philadelphia, Joseph Franklin is a graduate of the Philadelphia Musical Academy and Temple University's Graduate School of Music. He has composed works for mixed instrumental/vocal ensembles, film, video, theater and dance. In 1977 he co-founded The Relâche Ensemble, which evolved into Relâche, Inc. a presenting and producing organization in support of the Relâche Ensemble. He served as founding executive and artistic director of Relâche until 1998. Independently, and as Director of Relâche, he has been a producer of concerts, festivals, recordings, radio programs, residency programs, international tours and other related music events, including the NEW MUSIC AMERICA 1987 Festival, NEW MUSIC AT ANNENBERG at The University of Pennsylvania and MUSIC IN MOTION, a nationwide audience development project. He formerly served as Artistic Director for Helena Presents--The Myrna Loy Center, a performing arts and film center located in Helena, Montana. He has published criticism and book reviews in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia City Paper. While living in Louisiana he developed and taught courses in arts administration and an overview of 20th century music at the University of New Orleans while serving as an independent consultant to arts organizations. He currently serves as executive director for Chamber Music Albuquerque, a presenting organization dedicated to presenting world-class chamber music ensembles in concert.

Electronic and Computer Music

Electronic and Computer Music
Author: Peter Manning
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 570
Release: 2013-02-27
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199912599

In this new edition of the classic text on the evolution of electronic music, Peter Manning extends the definitive account of the medium from its birth to include key developments from the dawn of the 21st century to the present day. The scope of the many developments that have taken place since the late 1990s are considered in a series of new and updated chapters, including topics such as the development of the digital audio workstation, laptop music, the Internet, and the emergence of new performance interfaces. Emphasizing the functional characteristics of emerging technologies and their influence on the creative development of the medium, Manning covers key developments in both commercial and the non-commercial sectors to provide readers with the most comprehensive resource available on the evolution of this ever-expanding area of creativity.

Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality

Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality
Author: Pamela Karantonis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317169115

Cathy Berberian (1925-1983) was a vocal performance artist, singer and composer who pioneered a way of composing with the voice in the musical worlds of Europe, North America and beyond. As a modernist muse for many avant-garde composers, Cathy Berberian went on to embody the principles of postmodern thinking in her work, through vocality. She re-defined the limits of composition and challenged theories of the authorship of the musical score. This volume celebrates her unorthodox path through musical landscapes, including her approach to performance practice, gender performativity, vocal pedagogy and the culturally-determined borders of art music, the concert stage, the popular LP and the opera industry of her times. The collection features primary documentation-some published in English for the first time-of Berberian’s engagement with the philosophy of voice, new music, early music, pop, jazz, vocal experimentation and technology that has come to influence the next generation of singers such as Theo Bleckmann, Susan Botti, Joan La Barbara, Rinde Eckert Meredith Monk, Carol Plantamura, Candace Smith and Pamela Z. Hence, this timely anthology marks an end to the long period of silence about Cathy Berberian’s championing of a radical rethinking of the musical past through a reclaiming of the voice as a multifaceted phenomenon. With a Foreword by Susan McClary.

John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra

John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra
Author: Martin Iddon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2020-05-14
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190938498

John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra is one of the seminal works of the second half of the twentieth century, and the centerpiece of the middle period of Cage's output. It is a culmination of Cage's work up to that point, incorporating notation techniques he had spent the past decade developing - techniques which remain radical to this day. But despite Cage's vitality to the musical development of the twentieth century, and the Concert's centrality to his career, the work is still rarely performed and even more rarely examined in detail. In this volume, Martin Iddon and Philip Thomas provide a rich and critical examination of this enormously significant piece, tracing its many contexts and influences - particularly Schoenberg, jazz, and Cage's own compositional practice - through a wide and previously untapped range of archival sources. Iddon and Thomas explain the Concert through a reading of its many histories, especially in performance - from the legendary performer disobedience and audience disorder of its 1958 New York premiere to a no less disastrous European premiere later the same year. They also highlight the importance of the piano soloist who premiered the piece, David Tudor, and its use alongside choreographer Merce Cunningham's Antic Meet. A careful examination of an apparently bewildering piece, the book explores the critical response to the Concert's performances, re-interrogates the mythology surrounding it, and finally turns to the music itself, in all its component parts, to see what it truly asks of performers and listeners.

The Music of James Tenney

The Music of James Tenney
Author: Robert Wannamaker
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2021-12-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252052579

A work-by-work guide to the composer's groundbreaking music Robert Wannamaker's monumental two-volume study explores the influential music and ideas of American composer, theorist, writer, performer, and educator James Tenney. Delving into the whole of Tenney's far-ranging oeuvre, Wannamaker offers close, aurally grounded analyses of works linked to the artist's revolutionary theories of musical form, timbre, and harmonic perception. Written as a reference work, Volume 2, A Handbook to the Pieces, presents detailed entries on Tenney's significant post-1959 experimental works (excepting pieces covered in volume 1). Wannamaker includes technical information, an analysis of intentions and goals, graphs and musical examples, historical and biographical context, and thoughts from Tenney and others on specific works. Throughout, he discusses the striking compositional ideas found in Tenney's music and, where appropriate, traces an idea's appearance from one piece to the next to reveal the evolution of the composer's art and thought. A landmark in experimental music scholarship, The Music of James Tenney is a first-of-its-kind consideration of the experimental music titan and his work.