-PDF Download- Changing The System The Music Of Christian Wolff EBOOK

Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff

Author: Stephen Chase

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1317168496

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.

Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff

Author: Stephen Chase

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1317168488

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Christian Wolff

Author: Michael Hicks

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2012-07-23

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 0252037065

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Finding Democracy in Music

Author: Robert Adlington

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-02

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 100016375X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Occasional Pieces

Author: Christian Wolff

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-02-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0190222913

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Together in Music

Author: Renee Timmers

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0198860765

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Reminded by the Instruments

Author: You Nakai

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-03-09

Total Pages: 769

ISBN-13: 0190686782

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

David Tudor is remembered today in two guises: as an extraordinary pianist of post-war avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and as a founding figure of live-electronic music. His early realization of indeterminate graphic scores and his later performances using homemade modular instruments both inspired a whole generation of musicians. But his reticence, his unorthodox approaches, and the diversity of his creative output which began with the organ and ended with visual art have kept Tudor a puzzle. Illustrated with more than 300 images of diagrams, schematics, and photographs of Tudor's instruments, Reminded by the Instruments sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor by applying Tudor's own methods for approaching the materials of others to the vast archive of materials that he himself left behind. You Nakai deftly patches together instruments, electronic circuits, sketches, diagrams, recordings, letters, receipts, customs declaration forms, and testimonies like modular pieces of a giant puzzle to reveal the long-hidden nature of Tudor's creative process. Rejecting the established narrative of Tudor as a performer-turned-composer, this book presents a lively portrait of an artist whose activity always merged both of these roles. In reading Tudor's electronic devices as musicological 'texts' and examining his idiosyncratic use of electronic circuits, Nakai undermines discourses on sound and illuminates our understanding of the instruments behind the sounds in post-war experimental music.

Interviews with American Composers

Author: Barney Childs

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2022-01-25

Total Pages: 737

ISBN-13: 0252052927

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In 1972-73, Barney Childs embarked on an ambitious attempt to survey the landscape of new American concert music. He recorded freewheeling conversations with fellow composers, most of them under forty, all of them important but most not yet famous. Though unable to publish the interviews in his lifetime, Childs had gathered invaluable dialogues with the likes of Robert Ashley, Olly Wilson, Harold Budd, Christian Wolff, and others. Virginia Anderson edits the first published collection of these conversations. She pairs each interview with a contextual essay by a contemporary expert that shows how the composer's discussion with Childs fits into his life and work. Together, the interviewees cover a broad range of ideas and concerns around topics like education, notation, developments in electronic music, changing demands on performers, and tonal music. Innovative and revealing, Interviews with American Composers is an artistic and historical snapshot of American music at an important crossroads.

What's the Matter with Today's Experimental Music?

Author: Leigh Landy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-01-11

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1135073171

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Today's education and communications media are seen to be the main cause of the anonymity of contemporary music and suggestions are made to improve this situation. Leigh Landy investigates audio-visual applications that have hardly been explored, new timbres and sound sources, the discovery of musical space, new notations, musical politics, and the 'musical community' in an attempt to incite more composers, musicians and musicologists to get this music out into the works and to stimulate the creation of new experimental works.

Give My Regards to Eighth Street

Author: Morton Feldman

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Afterword by Frank O'Hara Morton Feldman (1926-1987) is among the most influential American composers of the 20th Century. While his music is known for its exteme quiet and delicate beauty, Feldman himself was famously large and loud. His writings are both funny and illuminating, not only about his own music but about the entire New York School of painters, poets and composers that coalesced in the 1950s, including his friends Jackson Pollack, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank O Hara, and John Cage.