Search Results

This chapter examines water and seawater as media for modernist and experimental music, representing the ocean as a site of life sublime and endangered. More specifically, it considers the ways that the underwater realm manifests a scientifically, technologically, and epistemologically apprehensible zone. It does so by auditing underwater music, a genre of twentieth- and twenty-first-century composition performed or recorded under water in settings ranging from swimming pools to the ocean, with playback unfolding above water or beneath. Composers of underwater music are especially curious about scientific accounts of how sound behaves in water and eager to acquire technologies of subaqueous sound production. The chapter shows that listening to underwater music reveals water transforming from the static and sonared seas of Cold War modernism to the dynamic and confusing seas of global warming, from seas sound and sounded to seas unsound.

The Ivy‐League pedigrees of many of the Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) composers seems to contradict their anarchic‐Marxist musical activities in Rome during the late 1960s. Influenced by the live‐electronic improvisations of John Cage and David Tudor, the Italian network of avant‐garde composers, and the intense collective work of The Living Theater, these self‐exiled Americans (including Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, and Jon Phetteplace) developed a radical approach to free improvisation during a time of political and social turmoil in Europe. Joining forces in Rome in 1966, they performed throughout Europe during the late 1960s and gained influence as an intensely politicized underground model for musical action. MEV soon made the journey from performing compositions to provoking free sonic rituals where artists and audiences made music with any means available.

This chapter examines musical modernism in relation to the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). It shows that the major characteristics of IRCAM culture are prefigured not only by musical modernism, but by significant features of modernist art in general, and suggests that the evolution of musical modernism must be understood within the context of broader cultural-historical forces. The chapter characterizes modernism and postmodernism in music, and considers experimental musical as musical postmodernism.

Luc Ferrari's 1970 tape composition Presque rien no. 1—an apparently unretouched recording of daybreak on the Black Sea—has long been characterized as a transgressive work, breaking with established notions of compositional craft. However, statements made by the composer in the late 1960s point to a different way of reading Presque rien, one that situates it within contemporaneous debates concerning cultural democratization in France. The use of familiar, recognizable sounds to make experimental music accessible to a mass audience, along with the composer's stated desire that Presque rien might serve as a model for a new kind of amateur musique concrète, are read as responses to contemporaneous calls to reconcile avant‐garde music and popular culture.

This chapter focuses on the time of reactionary conservatism when alternative venues were developed for the production and performance of experimental music in West Germany. It covers the era from the building of the Berlin Wall to the time of student and worker revolts throughout Western Europe in 1968 and after. It suggests that during this period, the contrast between American contemporary classical music and its radical cousins became more defined. It also mentions observations that the freedom inherent in the European system became a breeding ground for reckless programming and that the avant-garde music sector had spun out of control.

This chapter provides a closer look at the differentiation of the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) intellectuals in 1984 in relation to the Institute's two major areas of work, the musical-aesthetic and the technological. It presents a chart that represents an analysis of IRCAM intellectual subjects as interpreted through the lens of the earlier characterizations of modernism and postmodernism. The chapter suggests that the IRCAM subjects' positions can be seen as informed by, and yet as particular expression of, discourses on modernism and postmodernism. It discusses the mechanisms in the construction of aesthetics and technology at IRCAM, and considers experimental music as constituting a marginal subculture and the exclusion of popular music.

This chapter discusses key events in the period from the late 1970s to 1990 relevant to American experimental music. It explains that this was a golden era of public support during which a new generation of patrons decisively continued to feature American experimentalism. It contends that musical, economic and political circumstances of this period provided a rich context for the extensive work of American experimental composers abroad.

This study describes the history of foreign support afforded to American experimental music from 1945 to 1990, particularly West Germany. It explains that during the second half of the twentieth century, American composer-performers and West German cultural institutions contributed to an unprecedented international exchange of musical, aesthetic, and ideological viewpoints. It discusses changing attitudes about American music and contemporary composition during post-war and Cold War eras in West Germany.

This chapter examines a period during the mid-fifties when a series of performances by John Tudor and John Cage in Darmstadt in 1958 established American experimental music as a central part of German new music discourse. It suggests that the performances of Tudor and Cage had a deep impact on the position of American music in West Germany. It discusses Henry Cowell's 1956 tour of West Germany and describes how American musicians acquired new allies in the European avant-garde and gained access to an unrivalled network of support for decades to come.

This chapter outlines the history of the off-Broadway theater in New York going back to the experimental music theater projects of the 1930s and the extended run of the Blitzstein version of the Weill/Brecht 3-Penny Opera in the '60s, along with the inheritance of the various experimental theater companies such as the Living Theater, the Open Theater, the Performance Group, Quog Music Theater, and the Music Theater Group. Non-traditional theaters and other performance venues have developed new theatrical forms that tend strongly towards the condition of music theater. Other downtown developments include the growth of dance theater and the proliferation of what came to be known as performance art (or just “performance”), in lofts, galleries, church basements, and specialized venues, in Manhattan and, afterwards, in Brooklyn and other parts of the country, notably California.

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the acceptance of American experimental music in West Germany. It explains that in the forty-five years after the war, American experimental composers received extensive support in West Germany that nourished their careers as professional composers. It summarizes the complex reasons for American experimental music's prominent position in West German new music circles, intellectual circles that historically have remained skeptical regarding the value of American culture.

In the mid-1960s, Alvin Lucier composed two works utilizing what he called the natural electromagnetic sounds of brainwaves and natural radio, the former being Music for Solo Performer (1965). Background is given on Lucier’s transition to experimental music composition and to the development of Music for Solo Performer, including his relationship with the physicist Edmond Dewan (who first suggested he use brainwaves, supplied the equipment, and assisted with the process) and his relationship with John Cage. The premier of the work at “A Concert of New Music” at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University is discussed.

Many people in America or even the world probably know who John Cage is, but only a few may have actually heard his music. Cage understood how technology altered Western musical culture, yet rejected the basic premises of most Western music early. His interest in composition led him first to Henry Cowell, and then to Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he studied for at least two years. Cage spent the rest of his life in New York, receiving awards from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation that allowed him to spend part of 1949 in Paris, where he became friends with Pierre Boulez and met Pierre Schaeffer. Cage began to experiment with electronic music in the early 1950s. Of all the Cage experiments between 1950 and 1952, 4' 33, the “silent piece,” has remained the most well known. He also turned to theater, the importance of which he articulated clearly and frequently. This chapter focuses on Cage's life and musical career as well as his experimental music.

Concurrent with the developing plenitude of sounds from the early avant-garde through the experimental arts in the 1960s, exemplified in John Cage’s “For More New Sounds” (1941), was an expansion of signals. This is demonstrated in ideas about earth-scale radio by avant-garde composers and writers and in the history of electronic music. Per the latter, the relationship of musicians to engineers, especially at Bell Labs, is discussed, including Alfred Norton Goldsmith, who stated that electronic music belonged to nature, and Max Mathews. Post-Cagean composers Gordon Mumma and James Tenney are noted as having identified characteristics of a signal plenitude in the astro-bio-geo-physical application in live electronic music and a generalized signal and total transducer, respectively.

The historical scope, topical focuses, theoretical positions, and structure of the book are introduced. Natural radio and its early reception on telephone lines serve as means to discuss the relationship between nature and communications. The motivation of the book is described as an attempt to understand specific instances of experimental music and art that incorporate natural radio, require reconceiving several basic historical presumptions, and, in turn, redress larger questions about energy and earth magnitude in the arts and media. The sound and signal in the book’s title are related to the physical classes of mechanical (acoustics/sound) and electromagnetic energy, with emphasis given to the concept of lived electromagnetism played out over locations on the electromagnetic spectrum from telegraphy to nuclear weaponry. Finally, positions are delineated with respect to the term nature, the Aelectrosonic as the electromagnetic equivalent of the Aeolian, ecological analyses of green media, inscriptive versus transmissional media technologies, the concept of variable technology, and the historical media theory of Friedrich Kittler.