Search Results

Chapter 1 begins with electroacoustic music inspired by Pierre Schaeffer and its efforts to control the listening process. Much electroacoustic music employs sounds that are not conventionally musical. Some such sounds are abstract and nonreferential, while others are representational and seemingly taken directly from the outside world. Post-Schaefferians are conflicted in their expectations for how listeners should hear such works. Some attempt to dictate to listeners how they should hear, while others insist that composers are responsible for adapting their work to listeners. In all cases, post-Schaefferians treat sound as a sign, a relationship between sound and a concept external to it. The chapter concludes by considering post-Schaefferian anxieties over abandoning the conventions of music.

Chapter 6 takes a step back to consider the three metagenres of institutional electroacoustic, electronica, and sound art. Participants in each metagenre describe their music in terms borrowing from the discourse of experimentalism, a discourse that pits a distinguished minority against a commercial mainstream and an indifferent public. Despite the fact that the three metagenres insist on their difference from one another, all three encourage a type of listening that resembles less what we think to be traditional musical listening (at least in Western art music) than a new type of attention, one this chapter dubs “aesthetic listening.”

The introduction describes the aims and scope of the book, presents its methodology, and states its core argument. The book furnishes an aesthetic theory of several types of post-1980 electronic music, while acknowledging the controversial status of aesthetic theory in contemporary culture. Aesthetic theory can complement existing sociological and cultural histories of electronic music by providing a point of view from an interpretive subject who investigates affinities among musics that current scholarship usually keeps separate. The introduction then identifies these usually discrete styles as “metagenres” of institutional electroacoustic music, electronica, and sound art. The book’s methodology is to present individual works against a background of genre, the expectations that guide listening experience. The introduction concludes by presenting the thesis of the book: that recent electronic music encourages a fundamentally different form of listening experience called “aesthetic listening.”

This chapter explores how electroacoustic music takes the listener on a journey through unreal, imaginary, or hallucinatory sound-worlds. The chapter commences with a general explanation of electroacoustic music, and how it may allow illusory representations of real and unreal sounds and spaces. Following this, various compositions of electroacoustic music are discussed, which are explicitly based on altered states of consciousness such as dreams, shamanic visions, and hallucinations. It is proposed that the typical listening experience of these compositions can be characterized as introspective or meditative in form. The analysis of these works is also used to inform a conceptual model, which defines possible approaches for sound design related to altered states of consciousness according to several dimensions. In particular, this model considers approaches through which sound may either ‘represent’ or ‘induce’ altered states of consciousness—functions that are considered as distinct, yet related.

In small galleries and warehouse lofts, the Boston improvisational scene presents concerts of timbre-and-form-based electro-acoustic music. This vibrant community of musicians is informed by the music of Cage, Feldman, Lachenmann, Eddie Prévost, and others, while coming from backgrounds in classical, jazz, electronica, world, and rock. This chapter focuses on Bhob Rainey and his ensemble, the BSC. A series of interviews with the group provides the basis for exploring their history, how they view their own music, how they listen to it, how they create it, and who inspires them. At the heart of the essay is an analysis of one of the group’s improvisations. In this music, which often lacks pitch and harmonic progression, narrative hinges on the real-time discovery and shaping of unique sounds by performers sensitive to cause and effect. Through a technique called “analytical fantasy,” the intentions behind the player’s musical decisions are surmised, connecting the process of free improvisation to the resulting architectonics (phrases, cadences, and sections). A graphic transcription reveals a counterpoint of sounds supporting an elongated phrase structure and an arching form that does not completely return.

Between 1962 and 1971, a total of fifty-four composers from all across Latin America went to Buenos Aires to study classical music composition at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales, part of the Di Tella Institute. This chapter demonstrates that the practices, sounds, ideas, and attitudes that this community of creators and connoisseurs were calling “experimental” were a sign of not one thing but a cluster of things that included at least four different associations: electroacoustic music, unfamiliar instrumental compositions, live improvisations, and most importantly, a lived, embodied experience of being avant-garde in a way felt as authentic, valid, and truthful. Participation in the musical avant-garde meant not only composing within certain aesthetic ideals but also extending these ideals to everyday practices that directly affected the body. The four snapshots presented create a picture of the complex indexical cluster that was known as “experimental” at the time.

Chapter 5 focuses on a work from Karlheinz Stockhausen entitled Hymnen (Anthems). Stockhausen’s influence on the electronic music avant-garde, in classical and popular music domains, on those from his native Germany to the UK, the US, and elsewhere, is legendary. The techniques Stockhausen was refining were also being put to work by the Beatles, Miles Davis, and Frank Zappa, to name a few. Working with national anthems that are sampled and transformed, Hymnen is a landmark work that I argue is as much about “remembering” as it is a research-based experiment in the early years of electronic and acoustic sound transformation. This work, completed during 1960s, evokes the cold war years where space exploration, civil rights, and nuclear (dis)armament standoffs between the communist East and the capitalist West predominated. It is also the decade of Woodstock, political assassinations, civil rights, and antiwar movements in the US and around the world. Hymnen still has a lot to offer for contemporary explorations into the geopolitics of any music-politics nexus.

This chapter explores how conceptual disputes over genre boundaries, noise, and music open a window into a society that debates and constructs its own contemporaneity, in dialogue with conceptions about what is meant by indigeneity, music, musical composition, musicality, and experimentalism in the twenty-first century. The chapter inquires into how discourses about experimentation and innovation coming from the realm of Noise are constructed under specific technological assumptions; it also explores how these discourses might play out within the Costa Rican artistic scene. On an aesthetic level, this chapter problematizes how the “noise community” (formed by sound artists) imagines itself in the face of a “community of musicians,” separated by the principles of “academic training,” and how Noise, without the noise community, conceives itself as an anomalous zone in Costa Rican society, evidencing processes of “interior coloniality” that function on a micropolitical level.

This chapter uses CLAEM as a window into how musical avant-gardism was understood and experienced. The chapter provides a thick description of how different CLAEM fellows engaged with a wide range of practices that were ultimately manifestations of avant-garde desires. It argues for a plural understanding of the avant-garde and its diverse reception which included life-long embrace, temporary adoption, gradual disillusionment, and even intolerant rejection. The chapter portrays the broad meaning of CLAEM participation for many composers in the musical avant-garde: it meant working within certain aesthetic ideals and extending these ideals to everyday practice as part of fluid and rich identities. These composers went well beyond writing music to militantly organizing events, promoting works, musicological writing, and teaching.

This chapter locates CLAEM as part of a fast-growing cosmopolitan Buenos Aires and within the Di Tella Institute and its other art centers. It then provides an overview of the fellows, professors, facilities, and activities that constituted CLAEM during its ten years of existence, payin attention to the ways material conditions—including infrastructure, salaries, fellowships, guests, library, and the electronic music laboratory— created an ideal space for creativity and experimentation. The chapter reveals how these intellectual, material, and personal conditions made CLAEM a crucial transnational space for the creation of regional professional networks of solidarity and considers how the two-year duration of CLAEM fellowships and the regional focus of the program allowed profound exchange among some of the most talented composers of the entire region.