Contemporary Music Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Brian Ferneyhough wrote six challenging and complex pieces for flute solo: Cassandra’s Dream Song (1970), Unity Capsule (1975-1976), Superscriptio (1981), Carceri d’Invenzione IIb (1985-1986), Mnemosyne (1986) and Sisyphus Redux(2011).... more

For many composers, remaining in the secluded world of the studio allows one to completely internalize one’s ideas, to control every element, and to realize one’s exact musical imagination. While Normandeau is certainly most known for his... more

For many composers, remaining in the secluded world of the studio allows one to completely internalize one’s ideas, to control every element, and to realize one’s exact musical imagination. While Normandeau is certainly most known for his fixed acousmatic works, he does not restrict himself to the closed and controlled world of the electronic music studio. He embraces process, change, and adaptation, in this case adapting the acousmatic work Le renard et la rose (1995) for four singers, six percussionists, and electroacoustics in Baobabs (2012). This article first contextualizes vocal onomatopoeias in twentieth-century compositions and Normandeau’s output. Following an overview of the Onomatopoeias cycle and Baobabs, analysis is divided into rhythm, tonal and formal relationships, and texture and timbre. The article concludes with a reflection on the fundamental differences between the two works, particularly as they relate to control and the composer/performer binary.

An insurance man, a rocker, a partisan, a deportee, a bandoneonist.... What can such different figures have in common? Very little, you might say, apart from the fact that they are among the main protagonists of "contemporary music", a... more

An insurance man, a rocker, a partisan, a deportee, a bandoneonist.... What can such different figures have in common? Very little, you might say, apart from the fact that they are among the main protagonists of "contemporary music", a world from which people generally prefer to keep away because it seems distant, complicated and incomprehensible. But is it really so?
The exciting story proposed in the book intends to bring contemporary music closer to its potential listeners through the stories of people such as Stockhausen, Gershwin, Berio, Xenakis, Takemitsu, Piazzolla or Sofija Gubajdulina who, in their variety, give an idea of the exceptional richness of the musical languages of the 20th and 21st centuries and their closeness to the human condition of our time.

Welcome to this Special Issue of Array: Proceedings of Si15, the 2nd International Symposium on Sound and Interactivity. The articles in the present issue originated in the Si15 Soundislands Festival, which was held in Singapore 18–23... more

Welcome to this Special Issue of Array: Proceedings of Si15, the 2nd International Symposium on Sound and Interactivity.
The articles in the present issue originated in the Si15 Soundislands Festival, which was held in Singapore 18–23 August 2015. The festival events included five invited artist performances, two scientific keynotes and two days of proceedings, a commissioned sound installation, an afternoon of public talks, an internet panel, two pedagogic workshops, a concert with young performers, and more than fifty artworks and scientific papers in numerous forms and formats selected from an open call (http://soundislands.com/si15).
We are thrilled to present 20 articles, by 31 authors, emanating from Si15. The articles have been extended and thoroughly revised for this special issue of Array. They cover a range of topics related to aesthetics, percep-tion, technology, and sound art. We hope that you will enjoy the fruits of the authors' labour and therein discover many a stimulating thought.

Excerpt from the book on the contemporary playing technique of percussion with special emphasis on mallets and other types of excitation. The book also contains a series of essays written by renowned composers and performers such as... more

Excerpt from the book on the contemporary playing technique of percussion with special emphasis on mallets and other types of excitation.
The book also contains a series of essays written by renowned composers and performers such as Nicolaus A. Huber, Jan Williams, Steven Schick and Alberto Posadas (see "contents").
Additionally, a database with instructive videos is available on the website of the publisher (https://www.baerenreiter.com/shop/produkt/details/BVK2406/).
In collaboration with the percussionists Christian Dierstein and Jens Ruland. Part of the well-known Bärenreiter Series of Books on playing techniques.

Excerpt from the book on contemporary trombone playing techniques (in collaboration with Mike Svoboda). Part of the Bärenreiter Verlag's well-known series on contemporary playing techniques and awarded with the German Music Edition Prize... more

Excerpt from the book on contemporary trombone playing techniques (in collaboration with Mike Svoboda).
Part of the Bärenreiter Verlag's well-known series on contemporary playing techniques and awarded with the German Music Edition Prize as "Best Edition".

This book by pioneering guitarist Seth F. Josel with composer Ming Tsao is dedicated to the presentation and explanation of contemporary guitar techniques. Relying on extensive use of tables, charts and musical examples as well as an... more

This book by pioneering guitarist Seth F. Josel with composer Ming Tsao is dedicated to the presentation and explanation of contemporary guitar techniques. Relying on extensive use of tables, charts and musical examples as well as an accompanying CD, various novel techniques ranging form multiphonics to percussive actions are discussed in detail, including the analysis of salient passages from the literature of the 20th and 21st century. What is unique about this book is the historical contextualization of each technique along with discussions around the orchestration of the guitar in chamber and orchestral musical settings.

An attempt to reconsider an area that has become semiotically unknown: musical notation in its twentieth-century developments. What this study proposes is an introductory reflection to semiotics of notation considered both as a reflection... more

An attempt to reconsider an area that has become semiotically unknown: musical notation in its twentieth-century developments. What this study proposes is an introductory reflection to semiotics of notation considered both as a reflection on notation in the light of semiotics and as a semiotic work which is typical of notation as such.
On the one hand, it is a matter of taking into account the historicity of the phenomenon and the semiotic reflection that has stimulated it; the particular scale of the problem in the period 1950-70 is then investigated in relation to causes that could be defined both as "internal" (the changed state of musical matter, serial and post-serial compositional practices, happening and improvisation) and "external" (the relationship with other sectors of culture: from visual arts to literature, to philosophy).
On the other hand, the examples considered in the text are a test bench of absolute importance for the observation of the dynamics underlying a semiotically central problem such as that of notation, and of the double order (between what signs and what is signed) that it immediately evokes.

Between 1971 and 2006, James Tenney created more than fifty significant works of what is now commonly called ‘spectral music’. In their materials and procedures, his compositions frequently paralleled, sometimes anticipated, and in some... more

Between 1971 and 2006, James Tenney created more than fifty significant works of what is now commonly called ‘spectral music’. In their materials and procedures, his compositions frequently paralleled, sometimes anticipated, and in some instances strikingly contrasted with spectralist developments in Europe. This article provides an analytical introduction to the spectralist component of Tenney’s large and varied output, and explores its emergence and place within a North American tradition of spectral music composition. Among the compositional concerns addressed are the duality of timbre and harmony, the harmonic series as a structural resource, the instrumental synthesis of speech, rhythmic analogs of spectral structures, the expansion of traditional harmonic means, and practical performance considerations.

Review of Björk's 2017 studio album Utopia. Published on Sequenza 21, December 21, 2017.

The aim of this article is to interpret the musical layer of Andrzej Wajda’s 2009 movie Tatarak (Sweet Rush), based on the novel by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. In the first part, the author attempts to depict the complex relationship between... more

The aim of this article is to interpret the musical layer of Andrzej Wajda’s 2009 movie Tatarak (Sweet Rush), based on the novel by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. In the first part, the author attempts to depict the complex relationship between the literary and film works of these two artists and emphasizes three main motifs used by both of them: love and death, water and women’s themes. Next, Wajda’s attitude to music is analyzed. He treats sounds as an element of everyday life and, as is typical for our times, he is aware of the “dissolution” of musical works. In the next part, the author articulates the main problems of Sweet Rush, drawing attention to both Iwaszkiewicz’s novel and Wajda’s movie. The director’s adaptation, which is full of intermedia references, revolves around the theme of death and seems to underestimate the sexual aspect of Iwaszkiewicz’s work. Finally, Pawel Mykietyn’s soundtrack to Sweet Rush is interpreted. The composer used one of his earlier Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2000), which plays the role of a leitmotif, to illustrate the
most enigmatic, inexplicable scenes from Wajda’s movie. Thanks to its discrete, sparing and “austere” nature, Mykietyn’s music made the artistic composition of Sweet Rush more balanced and revealed the suggestiveness of this work.

Preface Alessandro Spazzoli is proving to be one of today’s composers who is not a guitarist but who is most interested in the guitar – and also one of the most versatile... and sensitive to my requests! These tributes to various... more

Preface
Alessandro Spazzoli is proving to be one of today’s composers who is not a guitarist but who is most
interested in the guitar – and also one of the most versatile... and sensitive to my requests!
These tributes to various composers, whose anniversaries are celebrated in 2019, arise as an answer to
my suggestions to the Composer: Sinfonia (Homage to Haydn) was written in 2017 starting from the
possibility of my performing the piece, planned (and then put into practice) in 2019 in Eisenstadt, a city
where Haydn lived and worked for many years in the castle belonging to the Esterhazy family. The year
of composition of the piece inspired Alessandro also to remember Prokofiev and his Classical Symphony
(written 100 years before).
A more recent composition is Elegía (Homage to Villa-Lobos) where the Composer plunges us into
the romantic mood saturated in saudade which is so typical of the vast production of this brilliant
Brasilian musician, a Composer – like Rodrigo – to whom not only guitarists owe so much.
Even more recent is another short tribute by Spazzoli (after other pieces already published in this
series) to Joaquín Rodrigo: in this case the Composer has complied with my marked preference for a
piece contained in the Album for Cecilia by Rodrigo, which became the thematic idea for this new piece.
I am grateful and delighted to have been the intermediary for these new compositional engagements
by Alessandro Spazzoli, which make up as many ample possibilities to enrich the guitar repertoire (and
also for his most useful anchorage in a universally famous musical production), and I wish these pieces
all the luck they deserve.
Piero Bonaguri

The attitude to use whole numbers to point out notes in the twelve-tone chromatic scale dates back to about a century ago. Although the trend to quantify and to catalogue has always been present in Western music, it was with the... more

The attitude to use whole numbers to point out notes in the twelve-tone chromatic scale dates back to about a century ago. Although the trend to quantify and to catalogue has always been present in Western music, it was with the dissolution of the tonal system that this trend became urgent, especially among those composers who were looking for new forms of expression.

O presente ensaio propõe uma análise estética e formal da obra Opus 11/3 (1914) de Anton Webern (1883-1945) sob a ótica da Momentform encontrada em obras como Kontakte (1958-60) de Karlheinz Stockhausen – conceito e peça elaborados na... more

O presente ensaio propõe uma análise estética e formal da obra Opus 11/3 (1914) de Anton Webern (1883-1945) sob a ótica da Momentform encontrada em obras como Kontakte (1958-60) de Karlheinz Stockhausen – conceito e peça elaborados na década de 1950 pelo mesmo.

This paper discusses the events that led rhetoric, an essential device to the structuring of musical language, no more being used and studied inside the musical practice. The discussion aims to identify the reasons for this decline... more

This paper discusses the events that led rhetoric, an essential device to the structuring of musical language, no more being used and studied inside the musical practice. The discussion aims to identify the reasons for this decline occurred primarily through changes in philosophical thought, which is reflected in the conception of music at all. After that, we will look for traces of rhetoric in music later.

Professional singers and studio vocal teachers can be assisted to perform and learn modern art songs – in this paper, an Australian art song, „I‟m Nobody‟ from Nigel Butterley‟s cycle, “Frogs”, by applying performance strategies to help... more

Professional singers and studio vocal teachers can be assisted to perform and learn modern art songs – in this paper, an Australian art song, „I‟m Nobody‟ from Nigel Butterley‟s cycle, “Frogs”, by applying performance strategies to help resolve challenges encountered in the learning process. The paper aims to give professional singers and studio vocal teachers assistance in learning and performing the work through a performance analysis, a recent approach to writing about vocal performance. The performance analysis draws on some of the strategies submitted from professional singers in a larger study and uses a theoretical framework based on John Rink‟s (2002) principles of performance analysis and Sharon Mabry‟s (2002) ideas for developing confidence in securing pitch in twentieth century music, to discuss my preparation of the song. The main performance challenges performing Butterley‟s song were, for me as a singer, singing the correct pitches, being accurate with the rhythm and g...

All’inizio del XX secolo molti compositori furono attratti dal fascino dei collegamenti accordali ciclici a distanza di intervalli regolari. Questi collegamenti permettevano di allontanarsi in maniera decisa dal sistema tonale, basato sul... more

All’inizio del XX secolo molti compositori furono attratti dal fascino dei collegamenti accordali ciclici a distanza di intervalli regolari. Questi collegamenti permettevano di allontanarsi in maniera decisa dal sistema tonale, basato sul rapporto di quinta, per indagare le caratteristiche dei rapporti intervallari che dividevano l’ottava in parti uguali. Andò così affermandosi una tendenza alla ripetizione periodica di elementi musicali su livelli di trasposizione che tornavano alla posizione iniziale, in una sorta di progressione statica. Alcuni spunti ereditati dalla tradizione novecentesca hanno fornito le basi per sviluppare una tecnica di composizione musicale a carattere ricorsivo denominata ‘caleidociclica’. Applicato alla composizione, un caleidociclo (termine derivato da alcuni procedimenti grafici di M. C. Escher in cui le parti di un oggetto siano copie su scala diversa dell’oggetto stesso) impiega le proprietà verticali degli accordi per regolarne anche lo svolgimento orizzontale. Il calcolo razionale, connaturato a questo specifico modo di affrontare la composizione, non resta comunque mai fine a se stesso, proponendosi piuttosto come banco di prova per saggiare la capacità del musicista di passare da un’applicazione meccanica delle regole e delle tecniche a un’altra ben più flessibile, complessa e creativa.

O trabalho pretende, brevemente, discutir aspectos formais da obra de Rodolfo Caesar e Flo Menezes à luz da discussão sobre o problema da estruturação formal na gênese da música eletroacústica, ao lado do olhar dos próprios compositores... more

O trabalho pretende, brevemente, discutir aspectos formais da obra de Rodolfo Caesar e Flo Menezes à luz da discussão sobre o problema da estruturação formal na gênese da música eletroacústica, ao lado do olhar dos próprios compositores sobre como lidam com a questão da forma em suas poéticas composicionais.
Abstract: this article aims to discuss, briefly, formal aspects of some works by Rodolfo Caesar and Flo Menezes in the perspective of the debate about formal structure in the genesis of electroacoustic music as well as the composers’ view about the form in their own compositional processes

Im Schaffen Olga Neuwirths lassen sich mehrere Begriffsfelder entdecken, die im weitesten Sinne als Naturbezüge begreifbar sind und sich aufgrund ihrer über Jahre hinweg reichenden Beständigkeit zu werkinternen Referenzsystemen... more

Im Schaffen Olga Neuwirths lassen sich mehrere Begriffsfelder entdecken, die im weitesten Sinne als Naturbezüge begreifbar sind und sich aufgrund ihrer über Jahre hinweg reichenden Beständigkeit zu werkinternen Referenzsystemen ausgeweitet haben. Zwei dieser von vielschichtigen kulturgeschichtlichen Diskursen durchdrungenen Begriffsfelder – nämlich Schnee/Eis auf der einen und Meer auf der anderen Seite – stehen im Mittelpunkt des Aufsatzes, der anhand ausgewählter Beispiele skizziert, wie damit verknüpfte Naturbezüge beschaffen sind und welche werkspezifischen Ausprägungen sie erfahren. Dabei dient das jeweils bezeichnete Phänomen vorrangig als Metapher, mit deren Hilfe die Komponistin, ausgehend von konkreten musikalischen und visuellen Gestaltungsmitteln, auf bestimmte außermusikalische Zusammenhänge verweisen kann. Die Natur wird damit als Quelle eines Systems von Referenzen begriffen, das jenseits des in Klang und Bild Fixierten einen Schlüssel zum Verständnis ästhetischer Entscheidungen und kompositorischer Strategien liefern und demzufolge ein tieferes Verständnis von Neuwirths Kunst ermöglichen kann. Dem Bezug auf das solchermaßen konstituierte Symbolsystem wächst durch das Zusammenwirken von persönlicher musikalischer Sprache und szenischen oder filmischen Kontexten eine polyvalente semiotische Funktion zu, die auch im Rahmen anderer Werke wieder aufgegriffen wird und im Prozess dieser Weiterverwendung durch neue Aspekte Bereicherungen und jeweils werkspezifische Ausprägungen erfährt.

À partir du concept de paratexte développé par Genette (1987) et adapté à la musique par Escal (1996), cet article met au jour les modalités de (re)présentation des œuvres jouées par la Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ)... more

À partir du concept de paratexte développé par Genette (1987) et adapté à la musique par Escal (1996), cet article met au jour les modalités de (re)présentation des œuvres jouées par la Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ) telles que véhiculées par les programmes de concerts produits entre 1966 et 2013. Après avoir effectué une mise en contexte de l’historique, du fonctionnement et de la programmation des œuvres de la SMCQ, les programmes de concerts sont examinés dans une perspective comparativiste afin d’en faire ressortir les similarités et les divergences. En premier lieu, la description formelle de la page couverture, du format et de la mise en page des programmes dirige la réflexion sur les paratextes non verbaux. En second lieu, l’examen des notices écrites des œuvres les plus jouées de la SMCQ permet d’affirmer l’importance accordée à l’autorité des compositeurs, principaux auteurs des paratextes verbaux. Ainsi, l’article permet d’éclairer l’articulation et l’évolution de la pensée musicale de la SMCQ pendant cette période.

Saggio pubblicato in “RSI- Rivista di Studi Italiani”, (Peer- reviewed), Anno XXVII, N. 1 Giugno 2009 Perugia, "Futurismo come attualità e divenire" a cura di Ignazio Apolloni e Nino Arrigo. ISSN 1916-5412 Rivista di Studi Italiani... more

Saggio pubblicato in “RSI- Rivista di Studi Italiani”, (Peer- reviewed), Anno XXVII, N. 1 Giugno 2009 Perugia, "Futurismo come attualità e divenire" a cura di Ignazio Apolloni e Nino Arrigo.
ISSN 1916-5412 Rivista di Studi Italiani (Toronto, Canada, online dal 2005) www.rivistadistudiitaliani.it