Avant-garde Flashcards
Williams Mix
- 1953
- Premiere at uni of Illinois - project for magnetic tape
- 8 simultaneous tapes with hundreds of spliced recordings
- 6 categories of tape representing ideas e.g. city, country
- Cage unahppy because audience couldn’t stay awake because music coming out of loudspeakers
- Context: uni setting less prejudiced than concert hall, but still not popular
Fontana Mix
- 1958
- Any number of tracks with any players of any instruments
- graphic score
- freely for instrumental, electronic, vocal, theatrical purposes
- first use of electronics in chance music
- theatrical purpose main function of electronics for cage
Variations V
- For Merce Cunningham Dance Company 1965
- MC avant-garde choreography
- Electronically ambitious - movement of dancers triggered sounds through antennae and light-beams
- Expansion into performance art, blend of performance and exhibition (musicians raised behind dancers)
- Encapsulation of live electronic performance
Examples of Cage’s non-standard use of instruments
- Sonatas and Interludes (1946), prepared piano. Scarlatti influence and Cowell.
- Living Room Music (1935) - unspecified instruments found in living room
- Imaginary Landscape 1 (1939) - muted piano hitting strings, turntables, frequency recordings
Examples of Cage’s use of electronics
- Imaginary Landscape 1 (1939)
- Imaginary Landscape 4 for 12 radios (1951)
- Imaginary Landscape 5 (1952) for tape recording of any 42 records
Examples of Cage’s aleatoric music
- Fontana Mix
- Living Room Music
- Child of Tree (1975)
- Variations esp V
- 4,33 (1948)
Examples of Cage’s music as conceptual/performance art
- Water Walk (1959) - mixer, duck sounds, bath, radio. Strictly timed and mathematical. Popular medium, cusp between joke and serious. Provocative.
- Variations - Merce Cunningham
David Tudor Rainforest IV
- 1973
- Indeterminacy
- Suspended objects wired with transducers become loudspeakers. ‘Players’ mix sounds which go through them
- More an exhibition but still ‘live’
- Led to composers inside electronics.
Cage’s attitude
- American counterpart to post-war avantgarde in Europe (Darmstadt school and Stockhausen)
- Organised sound, focus on percussion not pitch
- Zen as reaction to Atomic stress, aleatoric as result
- Aleatoricism as removal of composer’s ego, redefining composer role.
But also somehow autonomous - controlling people, not sound. - Intersection of seriousness and farce
Stockhausen
- Composed with electronics from start of career
- Associated with WDR studio
- Elektronische music: using electronically-generated sounds
- Repurposed military/radio equipment
Stockhausen Gesang der Jünglinge
-1956
o First ‘masterpiece’ of electronic music – beyond tapes; integrated electronic sounds with human voice by matching vocal pitch with electronics.
o Meeting of German (abstract) and French (concrete) traditions
o 3 types of electronic sound used: sine-waves, pulses, filtered white noise
o Vocal material divided into phoenemes which corresponded to vowels/plosives/fricatives etc. Deconstruction to furthest level – words as building blocks of material. Almost serialist.
o Performed in concert setting with speakers facing audience (compare to Williams Mix)
o Criticised for disturbing humanisation of machines.
WDR vs Paris
- Musique Concrete 1949 Pierre Schaeffer. GRMC (Groupe de Rechere de Musique Concrete)
- NWDR (Nordwestdeutscher Rudfunk) established 1951 - used electronically generated sounds; magnetic tape from WWII.
- GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) founded 1951 in Paris. State-sponsored. Focus on recorded natural sounds.
- Quickly blended styles as influx of composers to both studios
Studie I
- 1953
- Just for sine waves
- Serialised, mathematical analysis of tones and timbres applied to composition
- Striking bell-like sounds; overlapping sequences give ‘detuned’ feel
- Shows discipline of classically trained composer
Studie II
- Played ‘live’ (on loudspeakers) in concert with Studie I in 1954
- One of first written scores of post-wat tape works, albeit graphic score
- Shapes used to demonstrates occurence and attack of sounds and frequency
- Serialist: 81-tone scale made up of 1/10 octave steps.
- Effects like splicing, looping and reverb used: creates focus on rhythm
- Blueprint for future electronic composers.
Varese - general
- Came to electronic music late in his life, when GRMC was established in Paris
- Previous output had been influenced by electronics: he spoke of need for collaboration of inventors and musicians in 1922
- Spent pre-war years seeking funds for research in the field
