Electronic Music

[Mandryka]

Had enough of drones for a while. I can only listen to so much of that stuff in a week! But I am really loving this, for some reason - loud and on a big system! Manoury’s Zeitlauf. (I bet it is highly spacialised in concert - feels like it should be.)

Does anyone have a copy of the text? (In English or French - the only languages I speak.)

Manoury is a composer I kind of blow hot and cold about, but listening to this is making me think that I’m getting the taste for his music more. He has some lectures on the site of Collège de France which I thought were quite interesting.

[Richard Barrett]

I agree that Zeitlauf is one of Manoury's best pieces. I haven't heard it in years though. I've heard a few of his more recent ones, which seemed to be trying to use every possible IRCAM (virtual) gadget to do things with live electronics which could much more easily and reliably be done using much simpler resources or even fixed media.

[Pianoman]

Had enough of drones for a while. I can only listen to so much of that stuff in a week! But I am really loving this, for some reason - loud and on a big system! Manoury’s Zeitlauf. (I bet it is highly spacialised in concert - feels like it should be.)

Does anyone have a copy of the text? (In English or French - the only languages I speak.)

Manoury is a composer I kind of blow hot and cold about, but listening to this is making me think that I’m getting the taste for his music more. He has some lectures on the site of Collège de France which I thought were quite interesting.

I really like his piece ‘B-Partita In Memorium Pierre Boulez’

[Mandryka]

I really like his piece ‘B-Partita In Memorium Pierre Boulez’

I think that Daniel Kawka is such a good conductor, everything he touches turns to gold! The middle is interesting, passages with busy, manic colourful music, lots of notes - and at the same time, a calm pulse, a heart beat, being marked out (does Boulez ever do anything like that? I don’t think so!) I quite like the whole thing in fact.

[Mandryka]

Discovery of the day.

[Quarky]

Good one from David Tudor - lots of "colour" in the music. I guess that's a criticism of some electronic music - black and white timbres, with little subtlety?

[Serial_Apologist]

Good one from David Tudor - lots of "colour" in the music. I guess that's a criticism of some electronic music - black and white timbres, with little subtlety?

I would have thought, quite the opposite! Timbral elaboration had become increasingly emancipated a part of musical structure in "western" music from the time when instrumental music started to usurp vocal, accelerating through the 20th centuiry from the French Impressionists and Austro-German Expressionists onwards. Post-Webernian Pointillism seemed to present a counter in its clearing of the decks to create space afresh, but it is fascinating that those like Stockhausen who were most wedded to its austerity were at the same time elaborating a new world of rich sounds via electronics, for which Boulez and others more wedded to the French orchestral tradition saw less need, until we came to the tactile Spectralists. Meanwhile the world of classical music has become awakened to the sonorities of non- and pre-western musical traditions and instruments, so that, by a process of incorporation into instrumental composition (after having simulated, or tried to) and the arrival of what has generically been classified as Sound Art - an aftershoot of musique concrete and musico-anthropoligical field recording - the resulting multiplicity of interlacings have led to where some contemporary composers are leading the way into its next stage - naming no names.

[Mandryka]

Good one from David Tudor - lots of "colour" in the music. I guess that's a criticism of some electronic music - black and white timbres, with little subtlety?

I also liked the set of pieces he made called Neural Synthesis.

As far as colour is concerned, I would love to know whether anyone’s making music for electronic instruments which is like, for example, classical chamber music for strings - lots of voices with more or less similar timbres creating complex polyphonic textures.

[Joseph K]

Currently listening to the Tudor now.

[Joseph K]

Currently listening to the Tudor now.

Hahahaaaaa ... I had the speed on youtube down to half the original, owing to the fact that I had been transcribing some Joe Pass prior to this, but obviously didn't notice, though actually several times I thought "this is taking a long time"

[Bryn]

Discovery of the day.

I attended a performance of that work, along with others by Cage, at the RAH back in 1972. I still have the programme booklet somewhere. It was probably the biggest, most ambitious event put on by Victor Schoenfeld's "Music Now". I went with a colleague from work for whom I had the hots. Sadly, it was just so damned loud that I felt obliged to submit to her pleas and leave. It was during the period when Cage was particularly interested in very loud sounds. I got that CD several years ago but have never felt able to play it at the sort of level intended by David Tudor. I value both my hearing and my neighbours' friendship too much.

[Mandryka]

It’s true that I like playing this music loud! Normally I listen to harpsichord and clavichord so this makes a change, good work out for the amp and speakers.

Here’s today’s new discovery - this is totally different from the David Tudor and is, in fact, more my cup of tea.

I feel very frustrated that there are no concerts, I feel ready to hear this sort of music being performed.

[Joseph K]

Now listening:

[Mandryka]

Very occasionally I stumble across a piece of music which is so astonishing that I find myself strapped to my seat, and I want to listen to it again just as soon as it's over. That just happened to me with Roger Reynold's Traces -- I'm probably the only person in the world who feels like this, and I may not feel the same way tomorrow. . .

(That one is with Yuji Takahashi, I've been listening to one with Eric Huebner. That recording -- complete piano music on Mode - seems to have a lot of interesting music on it in fact.)
Reynolds is one of those composers whose ideas I want to get to know better -- I've heard only a handful of things and I'm not really sure what he's up to -- but I can sense it's good stuff, "deep."

Actually while searching for that youtube clip I came across this photo - a bit like finding a photo with Brahms, Wagner and Debussy in conversation

[Quarky]

Bernard Parmegiani: De Natura Sonorum (1975)

More soluble than many::

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_JHjUFfOs8