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Author: Stephen Chase
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317168488
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Christian Wolff is a composer who has followed a distinctive path often at the centre of avant-garde activity working alongside figures such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Cornelius Cardew. In a career spanning sixty years, he has produced a significant and influential body of work that has aimed to address, in a searching and provocative manner, what it means to be an experimental and socially aware artist. This book provides a wide-ranging introduction to a composer often overlooked despite his influence upon many of the major figures in new music since the 1950s from Cage to John Zorn to the new wave of experimentalists across the globe. As the first detailed analysis of the music of this prolific and highly individual composer, Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff contains contributions from leading experts in the field of new and experimental music, as well as from performers and composers who have worked with Wolff. The reception of Wolff's music is discussed in relation to the European avant-garde and also within the context of Wolff's association with Cage and Feldman. Music from his earliest compositions of the 1950s, the highly indeterminate scores, the politically-inspired pieces up to the most recent works are discussed in detail, both in relation to their compositional techniques, general aesthetic development, and matters of performance. The particular challenges and aesthetic issues arising from Wolff's idiosyncratic notations and the implications for performers are a central theme. Likewise, the ways in which Wolff's political persuasions - which arguably account for some of the notational methods he chooses - have been worked out through his music, are examined. With a foreword by his close associate Michael Parsons, this is a valuable addition to experimental music literature.
Author: Stephen Chase
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317168488
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Get Book Here
Book Description
Christian Wolff is a composer who has followed a distinctive path often at the centre of avant-garde activity working alongside figures such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Cornelius Cardew. In a career spanning sixty years, he has produced a significant and influential body of work that has aimed to address, in a searching and provocative manner, what it means to be an experimental and socially aware artist. This book provides a wide-ranging introduction to a composer often overlooked despite his influence upon many of the major figures in new music since the 1950s from Cage to John Zorn to the new wave of experimentalists across the globe. As the first detailed analysis of the music of this prolific and highly individual composer, Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff contains contributions from leading experts in the field of new and experimental music, as well as from performers and composers who have worked with Wolff. The reception of Wolff's music is discussed in relation to the European avant-garde and also within the context of Wolff's association with Cage and Feldman. Music from his earliest compositions of the 1950s, the highly indeterminate scores, the politically-inspired pieces up to the most recent works are discussed in detail, both in relation to their compositional techniques, general aesthetic development, and matters of performance. The particular challenges and aesthetic issues arising from Wolff's idiosyncratic notations and the implications for performers are a central theme. Likewise, the ways in which Wolff's political persuasions - which arguably account for some of the notational methods he chooses - have been worked out through his music, are examined. With a foreword by his close associate Michael Parsons, this is a valuable addition to experimental music literature.
Author: Philip Thomas
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754666806
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Christian Wolff is a composer who has followed a distinctive path often at the centre of avant-garde activity working alongside figures such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Cornelius Cardew. In a career spanning sixty years, he has produced a significant and influential body of work that has aimed to address, in a searching and provocative manner, what it means to be an experimental and socially aware artist. This book provides a wide-ranging introduction to a composer often overlooked despite his influence upon many of the major figures in new music since the 1950s from Cage to John Zorn to the new wave of experimentalists across the globe. Music from his earliest compositions of the 1950s, the highly indeterminate scores, the politically-inspired pieces up to the most recent works are discussed in detail, both in relation to their compositional techniques, general aesthetic development, and matters of performance. With a foreword by his close associate Michael Parsons, this is a valuable addition to experimental music literature.
Author: Michael Hicks
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252037065
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 138
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Book Description
In this first interpretive narrative of the life and work of Christian Wolff, Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund trace the influences and sensibilities of a contemporary composer's atypical career path and restless imagination. Written in full cooperation with Wolff, including access to his papers, this volume is a much-needed introduction to a leading avant-garde composer still living, writing music, and speaking about his own work. Wolff has pioneered various compositional and notational idioms, including overtly political music, indeterminacy, graphic scores, and extreme virtuosity. Trained as a classicist rather than a musician, Wolff has never quite had both feet in the rarefied world of contemporary composition. Yet he's considered a "composer's composer," with a mind ensconced equally in ancient Greek tragedy and experimental music and an eccentric and impulsive compositional approach that eludes a fixed stylistic fingerprint. Hicks and Asplund cover Wolff's family life and formative years, his role as a founder of the New York School of composers, and the context of his life and work as part of the John Cage circle, as well as his departures from it. Critically assessing Wolff's place within the experimental musical field, this volume captures both his eloquence and reticence and provides insights into his broad interests and activities within music and beyond.
Author: Christian Wolff
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190222913
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
As one of the original pioneering composers of the American experimental music movement and a well known scholar of classics, Christian Wolff has long been active as a significant thinker and elegant writer on music. With Occasional Pieces, Wolff brings together a collection of his most notable writings and interviews from 1950 to the present, shining a new light on American music of the second half of the twentieth century. The collection opens with some of his earliest writings on his craft, discussing his own proto-minimalist compositional procedures and the music and ideas that led him to develop these techniques. Organized chronologically to give a sense of the development of Wolff's thinking on music over the course of his career, some of the pieces delve into connections of music-making to social and political issues, and the concept of indeterminacy as it applies to performance, while others offer insights into the work of Wolff's notable contemporaries including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, David Tudor, Frederic Rzewski, Cornelius Cardew , Dieter Schnebel, Pauline Oliveros, and Merce Cunningham. An invaluable resource for historians, composers, listeners and students alike, Occasional Pieces offers a deep dive into Christian Wolff's musical world and brings new light to the history of the American experimental movement.
Author: Robert Adlington
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100016375X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
For a century and more, the idea of democracy has fuelled musicians’ imaginations. Seeking to go beyond music’s proven capacity to contribute to specific political causes, musicians have explored how aspects of their practice embody democratic principles. This may involve adopting particular approaches to compositional material, performance practice, relationships to audiences, or modes of dissemination and distribution. Finding Democracy in Music is the first study to offer a wide-ranging investigation of ways in which democracy may thus be found in music. A guiding theme of the volume is that this takes place in a plurality of ways, depending upon the perspective taken to music’s manifold relationships, and the idea of democracy being entertained. Contributing authors explore various genres including orchestral composition, jazz, the post-war avant-garde, online performance, and contemporary popular music, as well as employing a wide array of theoretical, archival, and ethnographic methodologies. Particular attention is given to the contested nature of democracy as a category, and the gaps that frequently arise between utopian aspiration and reality. In so doing, the volume interrogates a key way in which music helps to articulate and shape our social lives and our politics.
Author: Renee Timmers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198860765
Category : Ensemble playing
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Recent years have seen a rise in interest, from a diversity of fields, in the musical ensemble as an exemplary form of creative group behavior. Musical ensembles can be understood and investigated as high functioning small group organizations that have coordinative structures in place to perform under pressure within strict temporal boundaries. Rehearsals and performances exemplify fruitful contexts for emergent creative behaviour, where novel musical interpretations are negotiated and discovered through improvisatory interaction. Furthermore, group music-making can be an emotionally and socially rewarding experience that enables positive outcomes for wellbeing and development. This book brings together these different perspectives into one coherent volume, offering insight into the musical ensemble from different analytical levels. Part 1 starts from the meso-level, considering ensembles as creative teams and investigating how musical groups interact at a social and organizational level. Part 2 then zooms in to consider musical coordination and interaction at a micro-level, when considering group music-making as forms of joint action. Finally, a macro-level perspective is taken in Part 3, examining the health and wellbeing affordances associated with acoustical, expressive, and emotional joint behavior. Each part contains a balance of review chapters showcasing the most recent developments in each area of research, followed by demonstrative case studies featuring various ensemble practices and processes. A rich and multidisciplinary reflection on ensemble music practice, this volume will be an insightful read for music students, teachers, academics, and professionals with an interest in the dynamics of group behavior within a musical context.
Author: Thomas DeLio
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197759920
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
The Marvelous Illusion studies four works by composer Morton Feldman dating from 1970-71. Focusing on the listener's attention to sounds themselves, Feldman created the "marvelous illusion" of sounds shaping into coherent music through the act of perceiving them, rather than through the act of composing. Each work appears to assemble itself for the listener as they experience it. Author Thomas DeLio frames these analyses with a discussion of Feldman's relationships to important contemporaries in other arts, revealing that above all Morton Feldman's music is about sound and spontaneity, connections arising for the listener as the composition is heard.
Author: Mine Dogantan-Dack
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317178203
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice brings together internationally renowned scholars and practitioners to explore the cultural, institutional, theoretical, methodological, epistemological, ethical and practical aspects and implications of the rapidly evolving area of artistic research in music. Through various theoretical positions and case studies, and by establishing robust connections between theoretical debates and concrete examples of artistic research projects, the authors discuss the conditions under which artistic practice becomes a research activity; how practice-led research is understood in conservatoire settings; issues of assessment in relation to musical performance as research; methodological possibilities open to music practitioners entering academic environments as researchers; the role of technology in processes of musical composition as research; the role and value of performerly knowledge in music-analytical enquiry; issues in relation to live performance as a research method; artistic collaboration and improvisation as research tools; interdisciplinary concerns of the artist-researcher; and the relationship between the affordances of a musical instrument and artistic research in musical performance. Readers will come away from the book with fresh insights about the theoretical, critical and practical work being done by experts in this exciting new field of enquiry.
Author: Richard Glover
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152754947X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
This volume represents the second proceedings of the Royal Musical Association’s (RMA) Music and/as Process Study Group. It is not surprising that a large number of the contributors to the Music and/as Process Study Group are active practitioners in the performance and composition of contemporary music. The collaborations documented here represent the bringing together of disciplines, joint work between practitioners who contribute their own specific areas of expertise to a composite creative activity, and work that crosses disciplines in order to make a critical comment in each of them. In this collection, these three types of collaborative work describe an increasing amount of contemporary music practice. In addition to the increasing involvement of practice in research, the understanding and prevalence of practice methodologies in the form of practice research has also increased in musicology. This volume reflects these concerns through contributions from authors who are all active practitioners in their respective fields of music performance, composition, improvisation, and conducting. The diversity of these contributions shows the variety of processes and practices that are currently being undertaken by proponents of the field of contemporary music. These essays provide a snapshot of the current collaborative and distributed processes that are employed by today’s contemporary music practitioners. The chapters contained in this volume reveal the varied nature of the approaches to creativity in music making, and the ways that these are distributed across its practitioners during each stage of the development of musical works.
Author: John Cage
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819575925
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 673
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Book Description
This annotated selection of more than five hundred letters by the groundbreaking composer and avant-garde icon covers every phase of his career. This volume reveals the intimate life of John Cage with all the intelligence, wit, and inventiveness that made him such an important composer and performer. The missives range from lengthy reports of his early trips to Europe in the 1930s through his years with the dancer Merce Cunningham. They shed new light on his growing eminence as an iconic performance artist of the American avant-garde. Written in Cage’s singular voice—by turns profound, irreverent, and funny—these letters reveal Cage’s passionate interest in people, ideas, and the arts. They include correspondence with Peter Yates, David Tudor, and Pierre Boulez, among many others. Readers will enjoy Cage's commentary about the people and events of a transformative time in the arts, as well as his meditations on the very nature of art. This volume presents an extraordinary portrait of a complex, brilliant man who challenged and changed the artistic currents of the twentieth century.
