Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama

Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama PDF

Author: Jelena . Novak

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-06

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1317145380

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Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s most celebrated collaboration, the landmark opera Einstein on the Beach, had its premiere at the Avignon Festival in 1976. During its initial European tour, Metropolitan Opera premiere, and revivals in 1984 and 1992, Einstein provoked opposed reactions from both audiences and critics. Today, Einstein is well on the way itself to becoming a canonized avant-garde work, and it is widely acknowledged as a profoundly significant moment in the history of opera or musical theater. Einstein created waves that for many years crashed against the shores of traditional thinking concerning the nature and creative potential of audiovisual expression. Reaching beyond opera, its influence was felt in audiovisual culture in general: in contemporary avant-garde music, performance art, avant-garde cinema, popular film, popular music, advertising, dance, theater, and many other expressive, commercial, and cultural spheres. Inspired by the 2012–2015 series of performances that re-contextualized this unique work as part of the present-day nexus of theoretical, political, and social concerns, the editors and contributors of this book take these new performances as a pretext for far-reaching interdisciplinary reflection and dialogue. Essays range from those that focus on the human scale and agencies involved in productions to the mechanical and post-human character of the opera’s expressive substance. A further valuable dimension is the inclusion of material taken from several recent interviews with creative collaborators Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Lucinda Childs, each of these sections comprising knee plays, or short intermezzo sections resembling those found in the opera Einstein on the Beach itself. The book additionally features a foreword written by the influential musicologist and cultural theorist Susan McClary and an interview with film and theater luminary Peter Greenaway, as well as a short chapter of reminiscences written by the singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega.

Laurie Anderson's Big Science

Laurie Anderson's Big Science PDF

Author: S. Alexander Reed

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0190926015

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"Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson's Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the challenging and strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of "now" when time is always moving? How do experiences become memories? This book attends closely to Anderson's artistic voice, detailing its unique capacities for ambiguity and revelation. It traces the sonic histories etched in the record's grooves, from the Cold War to a burning future, from the Manhattan skyline to the empty desert, from the opera house to the pop charts. Ultimately in Big Science, one can hear an invitation to rise above the dualities of parts and wholes, images and essences, the lone individual and the megasystem. The first and most enduring superstar of performance art, Laurie Anderson is recognized here for pioneering philosophically rich techniques within the medium, but is also taken seriously as a musician and composer. Packed with scrupulous new research, reception history, careful description, and dizzying creativity, this book is an interdisciplinary love letter to a record whose sounds, politics, and expressions of gendered identity grow more relevant each day"--

On Minimalism

On Minimalism PDF

Author: Kerry O'Brien

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-04-25

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 0520382099

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A revisionist history of minimalism's transformative rise, through the voices of the musicians who created it. When composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich began creating hypnotically repetitive music in the 1960s, it upended the world of American composition. But minimalism was more than a classical phenomenon—minimalism changed everything. Its static harmonies and groovy pulses swept through the broader avant-garde landscape, informing the work of Yoko Ono and Brian Eno, John and Alice Coltrane, Pauline Oliveros and Julius Eastman, and many others. On Minimalism moves from the style's beginnings in psychedelic counterculture through its present-day influences on ambient jazz, doom metal, and electronic music. The editors look beyond the major figures to highlight crucial and diverse voices—especially women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ musicians—that have shaped the genre. Featuring more than a hundred rare historical sources, On Minimalism curates this history anew, documenting one of the most important musical movements of our time.

No Documents, No Escape

No Documents, No Escape PDF

Author: Christophe Levaux

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0520295269

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Rising out of the American art music movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, minimalism shook the foundations of the traditional constructs of classical music, becoming one of the most important and influential trends of the twentieth century. The emergence of minimalism sparked an active writing culture around the controversies, philosophies, and forms represented in the music’s style and performance, and its defenders faced a relentless struggle within the music establishment and beyond. Focusing on how facts about music are constructed, negotiated, and continually remodeled, We Have Always Been Minimalist retraces the story of these battles that—from pure fiction to proven truth—led to the triumph of minimalism. Christophe Levaux’s critical analysis of literature surrounding the origins and transformations of the stylistic movement offers radical insights and a unique new history.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production PDF

Author: Simon Zagorski-Thomas

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2020-02-06

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1501334034

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The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production provides a detailed overview of current research on the production of mono and stereo recorded music. The handbook consists of 33 chapters, each written by leaders in the field of music production. Examining the technologies and places of music production as well the broad range of practices – organization, recording, desktop production, post-production and distribution – this edited collection looks at production as it has developed around the world. In addition, rather than isolating issues such as gender, race and sexuality in separate chapters, these points are threaded throughout the entire text.

Kinetic Atmospheres

Kinetic Atmospheres PDF

Author: Johannes Birringer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-21

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1000476472

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This book offers a sustained and deeply experiential pragmatic study of performance environments, here defined at unstable, emerging, and multisensational atmospheres, open to interactions and travels in augmented virtualities. Birringer’s writings challenge common assumptions about embodiment and the digital, exploring and refining artistic research into physical movement behavior, gesture, sensing perception, cognition, and trans-sensory hallucination. If landscapes are autobiographical, and atmospheres prompt us to enter blurred lines of a "forest knowledge," where light, shade, and darkness entangle us in foraging mediations of contaminated diversity, then such sensitization to elemental environments requires a focus on processual interaction. Provocative chapters probe various types of performance scenarios and immersive architectures of the real and the virtual. They break new ground in analyzing an extended choreographic – the building of hypersensorial scenographies that include a range of materialities as well as bodily and metabodily presences. Foregrounding his notion of kinetic atmospheres, the author intimates a technosomatic theory of dance, performance, and ritual processes, while engaging in a vivid cross-cultural dialogue with some of the leading digital and theatrical artists worldwide. This poetic meditation will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, performing arts as well as media arts practitioners, composers, programmers, and designers.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music

The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music PDF

Author: Keith Potter

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-23

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 1317042557

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In recent years the music of minimalist composers such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass has, increasingly, become the subject of important musicological reflection, research and debate. Scholars have also been turning their attention to the work of lesser-known contemporaries such as Phill Niblock and Eliane Radigue, or to second and third generation minimalists such as John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Michael Nyman and William Duckworth, whose range of styles may undermine any sense of shared aesthetic approach but whose output is still to a large extent informed by the innovative work of their minimalist predecessors. Attempts have also been made by a number of academics to contextualise the work of composers who have moved in parallel with these developments while remaining resolutely outside its immediate environment, including such diverse figures as Karel Goeyvaerts, Robert Ashley, Arvo Pärt and Brian Eno. Theory has reflected practice in many respects, with the multimedia works of Reich and Glass encouraging interdisciplinary approaches, associations and interconnections. Minimalism’s role in culture and society has also become the subject of recent interest and debate, complementing existing scholarship, which addressed the subject from the perspective of historiography, analysis, aesthetics and philosophy. The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music provides an authoritative overview of established research in this area, while also offering new and innovative approaches to the subject.

Einstein on the Beach

Einstein on the Beach PDF

Author: Robert Wilson

Publisher: Dilecta Edition

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13:

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Debuting at the Avignon Festival in France in 1976, Robert Wilson and Philip Glass' Einstein on the Beach completely reinvented opera, synthesizing the musical and theatrical avant-gardes of its time into one spectacular five-hour extravaganza. Colossal in ambition, length and scale, it appeared on paper to obey all the conventions of opera--four acts, the singers on the stage, duets, choirs, an orchestra pit--but it drastically departed from them in all other respects. Einstein on the Beach had no plot, the singers did not play characters, the music was minimalist and repetitive, and connections between the images and the music were also fairly minimal. Nonetheless, the opera successfully stormed the gates of classical opera and seized the public imagination. Following its 1976 premiere, the work was staged twice, in 1984 (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) and 1992 (at Princeton)--and then, for the first time in 20 years, it was performed in January 2012 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, an event that paved the way for an official tour that commences in March 2012, with stops in London, Toronto, Brooklyn, Berkeley, Mexico City and Amsterdam. This anniversary volume gathers previously unpublished material that includes Robert Wilson's original workbook, sketches and storyboards annotated with Philip Glass' notes, as well as photographs from the opera's various world tours. Together these documents illustrate the genesis of a collaboration that created a revolution in contemporary opera.

Beyond Recognition

Beyond Recognition PDF

Author: Craig Owens

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 9780520077409

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On the arts and postmodernism