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
Varese - deserts
- 1955
- Combined instruments and tape recordings, in context of live performance in a concert hall
o No interaction between separate entities but instrumental sections still drew from previous style: radical dynamic changes, and focus on rhythm with unpitched percussion.
o Electronic sections influenced by Schaeffer techniques.
o Poorly received, ‘barrage of stamping, clapping’ – organisation of electronic music in between, instead of with live instrumental was downfall.
Poeme Electronique - general
- 1958
o Rejected live instrumental music, and the concert hall. Instead exhibition and pre-recorded tapes. But still arguably live performance.
o Function more than hearing: framed as an instillation, so not just musical.
o Music created for Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who was building a pavilion for 1958 Brussels World Fair.
How did the pavillion in Poeme contribute to the music?
o Arguable that, even Corbusier commissioned it, the pavilion was in fact designed for the music.
o Pavilion had more than 400 speakers, switching on at various intervals to create sweeping sound.
o Avant-garde view of music as contributing to performance piece/art instillation. Music as conceptual art.
o Pavilion shape of circus tent with three peaks
o Visual projections accompanying music
Tapes in Poeme
o Tape controlled sound, techniques expanded by Varèse’s time in Colombia Tape Music Centre.
o Integrated oscillators, microphones and tape recorders into performance space
o ‘Organised sound’, same rigorous structure of musique concrète
o Reproductions of sounds such as moaning voice, organ drones and church bells.
Success of Poeme?
o Success compared to Déserts
o 500 people went to opening, opened to great acclaim
o Success arguably due to removal from live concert hall context – purely electronic music but maintain live aspect.
o Function as art made electronic music seem less offensive – not pitted against tradition of orchestral music etc.
