Contemporary Music Research Articles

Illuminations: a proposed taxonomy for death-inspired works in Western art music

Throughout the history of Western art music, death has been a major stimulus for composers, and it continues to be so for contemporary musicians. Composer responses to death have been predominantly associated with emotions of grief, sadness and loss. An examination of responses in the Western art music repertoire of the past five hundred years, however, reveals that there is a diversity of composer reactions, from mourning through prophetic imaginings to resignation, and extending to spiritual affirmation or theological affirmation of an afterlife. Informed by surveying a number of composers’ diverse responses, this article outlines differences found in order to propose a taxonomy of varying creative musical approaches to death.

Analysis of Procedure in Convergence between Church Modes of Medieval Music and Tonality of Contemporary Music - Tonal Application and Convergence of Modal Materials -

Analysis of Procedure in Convergence between Church Modes of Medieval Music and Tonality of Contemporary Music - Tonal Application and Convergence of Modal Materials -

Roman Palester. Kompozytor i intelektualista

ROMAN PALESTER: A COMPOSER AND INTELLECTUAL Roman Palester’s life (1907–1989) can be divided into two periods, with a caesura in 1951, when the artist decided to live in exile and a year later started working as a reporter at the Polish Section of Radio Free Europe in Munich. As early as in the years 1931–1939 he was a successful composer whose works were performed both in Poland and abroad. He spent most of the Nazi occupation of Poland in Warsaw, however, he also stayed at the Przypkowski family home in Jedrzejow, and in the last years of the war in the countryside near Cracow and in Zakopane. He never stopped composing and the amount of compositions and their artistic value make him the most significant Polish artist of the time of the Nazi occupation. After the war he settled in Cracow, where he was nominated deputy vice-chancellor of the State Music Highschool and became a teacher of a composition class; he was also the vice-president of the Polish Composers’ Association and juror at the International Society for Contemporary Music. Although his compositions were often performed and his prestige constantly increased, Palester could not come to terms with the political changes in Poland, which allowed the authorities to interfere in the work of musical institutions and forced artistic expression into the aesthetics of “social realism.” He left for Paris as early as 1947. Initially, he maintained contacts with his home country, but severed the ties in 1951 when he decided not to renew his passport of the Polish People’s Republic. After that his compositions could be neither performed nor published in Poland. His name was crossed out of the list of the Polish Composers’ Association and could not be mentioned in the press and other publications, while the music scores published earlier were destroyed. In 1952 Palester was offered a job at Radio Free Europe in Munich by Jan Nowak-‑Jezioranski and became director of the cultural section. In numerous radio programmes he commented on Polish music life, disapproving of the then cultural policies of the authorities and criticizing the composers’ servility. Throughout his twenty-year professional career he never stopped composing and his best works were created at that time. In 1972 he again moved to Paris and devoted all his time to music. His compositions, virtually unknown in Poland, were becoming increasingly popular. Since 1977 his name has not been censored any longer and his music has been performed again, his works published and albums recorded. Nevertheless, the thirty years since his death hardly compensate for the long lasting period of silence. Palester’s music, despite its significance and artistic value, remains surprisingly little known.

Electric Spring, Huddersfield, 22–26 February 2017.

In the heart of the University of Huddersfield's Creative Arts Building sits the unassuming Phipps Hall, which has given itself over to five days of total electronic sound immersion. The University has grown accustomed to attracting pioneering artists in contemporary music over the last four decades, both to its in-house research centre CeReNeM, and to the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival every November. The relatively younger Electric Spring Festival takes place every February and is now able to stand alongside its older sibling, offering the public an impressive and diverse programme of composers and artists specialising in electronic sound manipulation. This year was no exception. Running from 22 to 26 February, there was something to suit everyone, from improvised live-coded dance music to classic musique concrète masterpieces. From its conception in 1995, the aim of the festival has been to offer breadth and surprise to its audience.

The Presence of Julius Eastman, London Contemporary Music Festival

For four years now, the London Contemporary Music Festival has been organising some of the most exciting new music events in town. In contrast to the eclectic extravaganzas of previous years, LCMF 2016 was tightly focused: three nights only, dedicated to the work of Julius Eastman. The programme was a revelation, even for those who are aware of Eastman and his music.

Impuls Festival, Graz. Collaboratory with Stefan Prins

Impuls, the International Ensemble and Composition Academy for Contemporary Music, has in the past offered a workshop that deviates from the main activities of instrumental classes and ensemble work, composition classes, lectures, and call-for-score reading sessions, taking the form of an intensive course which plays with the grey areas between composer and performer, performance and installation, cochlear and non-cochlear music. In 2017, with the Academy now in its tenth edition, the focus of this workshop moved from ‘Composition Beyond Music’, led in recent years by Peter Ablinger (2013) and by Georg Nussbaumer (2015), to ‘Collaboratory’, a new workshop led by Belgian composer/performer Stefan Prins, imagined in collaboration with Ute Pinter, the festival's secretary general.

Contemporary Music in Odessa: the Festival “Two Days and Two Nights of New Music” in April 2017

On April 22–23, 2017 a notable event happened in Odessa, Ukraine, – namely, the contemporary music festival “Two Days and Two Nights of New Music.” This festival has been organized since 1995by composer Karmella Tsepkolenko and her husband Oleksandr Perepelstya, who are directors of the Odessa-based Association for New Music. Every year, for two days in April, the concerts of the festival have started at 4 PM and have continued non-stop until late at night, about 3 or 4 AM, with merely short 15-minute intermissions between each concert. This year the festival “Two Days and Two Nights of New Music” in Odessa once again impressed and dazzled its audiences with its lively assortment of the most varied trends of new music and created a rare artistic environment, which was greatly appreciated by the composers and performers participating in it, as well as for the regular audiences of Odessa and among the guests from other cities and countries, who came to the city to savor the great celebration of new music. Keywords: contemporary music festivals, musical Odessa.

音楽祭が創る祝祭のリアリティー : 二十世紀音楽研究所主催「現代音楽祭」(一九五七-一九六五年)をめぐって(第 51 回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

音楽祭が創る祝祭のリアリティー : 二十世紀音楽研究所主催「現代音楽祭」(一九五七-一九六五年)をめぐって(第 51 回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

The Contemporary Music Projectの収束期における活動の特質

The Contemporary Music Projectの収束期における活動の特質

Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2016, Huddersfield

The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival leaves an indelible impression on any brave soul who ventures into the chill, dark November nights across its ten days, a rite of passage challenging conceptions of the stuff music is made of. Now in its thirty-ninth year, this is one of the more established contemporary music festivals, yet it never fails to provoke and stimulate, a snapshot of current musical preoccupations. The first weekend traditionally showcases a selection of significant works, setting the tone for the subsequent week, and 2016 was no exception. Jennifer Walshe and the Arditti String Quartet opened the festival in a ‘declaration of love to life on earth’. EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT (2016) is an eco-treatise on the bombardment the world is suffering – a torrent of visual and vocal disturbance with the arch-complexist Arditti gamely along for the ride, a playful synergy of theatre, voice and string quartet, preparing us for what was to come over the next few days.

Georg Friedrich Haas and Rebecca Saunders premieres, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2016

The first weekend of the 2016 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival saw an eclectic and vibrant mix of musical events. Artistic director Graham McKenzie promised a festival that was going to be ‘undoubtedly characterised by the bringing together of often quite disparate forces, to create new sounds, new experiences, and new approaches to music making’, and the opening days also manifested a strong sense of artistic difference and distance as well. The presence of Georg Friedrich Haas, this year's Composer in Residence, and Rebecca Saunders seemed to fire up such underlying dynamic energies. Throughout the weekend both composers took part in public interviews and both had UK and world premieres, yet they only presented in parallel: the programming kept them apart. In turn, the weekend amplified various levels of similarity and divergence between the two composers, exposing some fascinating creative tensions.

The Pan Music Festival in the 1970s: Reconsidering Experiments in Korean Contemporary Music

The Pan Music Festival in the 1970s: Reconsidering Experiments in Korean Contemporary Music

Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music: New Tools in Music Theory and Analysis by Judy Lochhead

FORM AND THEORY Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music: New Tools in Theory and Analysis. By Judy Lochhead. (Routledge Studies in Theory, 2.) New York: Routledge, 2016. [xiv, 179 p. ISBN 9781138824331 (hardcover), $145; ISBN 9781315740744 (e-book), various.] examples, illustrations, bibliographic references, index.Lochhead's recent study is a significant contribution to music analysis that corresponds to the conceptual shiftWestern art music has undergone since the period of high modernism. The book argues that critical engagement with recent music is lagging behind; it aims not simply at reproducing the knowledge inherent in the artwork, but sets out to produce knowledge about musical experience itself-hence its insistence on structuring (rather than structure), conceived as emergent, phenomenal, and malleable (p. 7). This relates to a phenomenology of music, which has to be employed critically by the analyst, invoking a certain post-phenomenological attitude: the object of analysis is the content of listening, as a mediated, self-reflexive (p. 76).The book is divided into two parts comprising theory and practice. The first part traces the concept of in the post- WWII European and U.S. avant-garde, before introducing the tripartite framework of Lochhead's contribution to analysis: Investigating, Mapping, Speculating. The second part comprises four different case studies, designed to demonstrate the main procedures of Lochhead's productive analysis.The opening section attempts a definition of via a historiographical investigation of New according to the scientific research paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s, which served as the foundation of compositional [and therefore analytical] craft (p. 19). The interlinking of composition and analysis was furthered by several factors, examples of which include the founding of Die Reihe in Europe and of Perspectives of New in the U.S., as well as developments in academic practice. Lochhead's central claim here is that today's theory and analysis still bear the traces of the composer-theorist paradigm and of postwar epi stemic authority (p. 37).This epistemic metaphor is further traced via a comparison between musical and sociological references, while musical is shown to be frequently underdefined, at times hovering between the empirical activity of determining structural units (Ian Bent and Anthony Pople) and the discursive effect of evaluative terms such as (Robert Morgan) (pp. 51-52). In a revisiting gesture, Lochhead finds a resonance between Jacques Derrida's proliferating play of structure (p. 63) and the generative structural function of the series in Pierre Boulez (with its overtones of Theodor Adorno's conception of as distinct from the concrete elements of the work, but arising from them) (pp. 48-49).Lochhead's questioning leads not to merely another definition of structure; rather, it opens up the space for an analytical practice that involves musical listening and temporality. The former assumes the possibility of several performances (including indeterminate works) and is viewed as an interpretive activity; the latter implies that analysis is concerned with the work's becoming. As listening is phenomenologically involved in the of the work, the self-aware analyst must employ a reflective approach: Music analysis is a formal process of reflective engagement with musical works with the goal of producing knowledge by proposing new modes of engaging the work and as such contributing to the work's becoming (p. 77). The immediate implication for musical is now obvious: for Lochhead this engaging is dynamic and, to the extent that is a static unity with a fixed single origin (p. 78) it is not the object of analysis. Instead, she proposes the term structuring, to emphasize the temporality of the work's (p. …

Three Approaches to Modularity in Contemporary Music

THREE APPROACHES TO MODULARITY IN CONTEMPORARY MUSIC1 CHRISTOPHER GAINEY MODULAR ANALYSIS,” ACCORDING TO a recent study by Peter Schubert and Marcelle Lessoil-Daelman, “provides a high degree of descriptive precision . . . by showing which . . . ideas the composer thought worthy of repetition and how those repetitions are disposed.”2 Since these scholars focus on Renaissance music, they define a module as “two welldefined melodies in a specific relationship to one another.”3 However, modules may also be conceived more generally as musical elements that gain structural significance—from the perspective of both listeners and performers—through some form of repetition. Such a broad approach to modular analysis can “provide clues to unique aspects of . . . compositional process”4 across a broader stylistic range that includes recent post-tonal music. In this study, I adapt Schubert’s and LessoilDaelman ’s analytical method in order to develop “a narrative of compositional process based on the deployment of modules”5 in Figment No. 2 by Elliott Carter, the second of Thomas Adès’s Mazurkas Op. 27, and “Papillon II” from Sept Papillons by Kaija Saariaho. Prior to discussing these works, it is useful to consider the fundamental concepts of modular analysis and the challenges of applying this analytical perspective to stylistically diverse repertoire. The structural “ 132 Perspectives of New Music significance of modules is rooted in the formative processes of repetition. “All musical structure,” writes John Rahn, “derives from repetition . . . if structure, then repetition, and if no repetition, no structure.”6 Rahn qualifies these rather axiomatic statements by characterizing the most musically satisfying type of repetition as a germinal stage in the formation of a final cause (telos) that points “beyond the thing repeated to the thing being formed.”7 This cognitive framework applies even in the absence of exact repetitions. If a listener relates a series of musical events in some way to a single archetypal module, then there remains a sense that the overall structure of the passage results from repetition. Gretchen Horlacher has applied an analytical perspective to the music of Stravinsky that demonstrates this principle at work. She asserts that words like “block” (i.e., module) and “superimposition” do not necessarily imply interruptions to continuity, as “the contingency of a series of repetitions is paramount: how the series is set forth and plays out ‘shapes’ the quality of the time it inhabits.”8 Thus, by understanding the ways in which modules are deployed, a listener or performer can more fully appreciate the dramatic character of spans of musical time that feature repeating modules. From this perspective, the goal of a modular analytical approach is to highlight and describe a “process of continual transcendence”9 at the heart of the relationship between module, “the thing repeated,” and structure, “the thing being formed.” The fewer discrete modules, the more concise and efficient the analysis as each module contributes relatively more to the structure of the piece. This consideration is moot when comparing, as in Schubert and Lessoil-Daelman’s study, works that are part of an inherently modular and relatively well-defined stylistic tradition.10 When comparing works that are stylistically distinct from one another, however, their relative modularity is an essential factor in the comparison. For example, the structure of the well-known C Major Prelude from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier results from the interaction of fewer discrete modules than Terry Riley’s In C, and thus it can be said to be more highly modular—a quality separate from considerations of style. There is by necessity a retrospective element to parsing a continuous musical experience into structurally significant modules. Christopher Hasty, writing of the challenges inherent in identifying analytically significant pitch structures in post-tonal music, warns that “highly abstracted analytic objects,”11 such as pitch-class sets, are not necessarily important to a listener’s or performer’s experience of the music. Segmentation is the most basic level of structural formation and identifying perceptually salient structures in a piece of music is the first Three Approaches to Modularity in Contemporary Music 133 step toward an appreciation of the network of interactions that shape the music and produce significant formal articulations. “Segmentation,” writes Hasty, “can be understood not...

Three Approaches to Modularity in Contemporary Music

Three Approaches to Modularity in Contemporary Music

Henry Prunières (1886–1942): Un musicologue engagé dans la vie musicale de l'entre-deux guerres ed. by Myriam Chimènes, Florence Grétreau, and Catherine Massip

Henry Prunieres (1886-1942): Un musicologue engage dans la vie musicale de l'entre-deux guerres. Edited by Myriam Chimenes, Florence Gretreau, and Catherine Massip. (Publications de la Societe frangaise de musicologie.) Paris: Societe frangaise de musicologie, 2015. [584 p. ISBN 9782853572460 (paperback), varies]. Illustrations, bibliography, index. No musicologists of the current age can count to their credit multiple monographs, senior editorship of a composer's complete works, scholarly articles, countless pieces of high-quality musicological journalism, the organization of a successful concert series supporting contemporary musicians, founding membership in international musicological societies, and the creation of a music journal that stood for decades as a juncture between academic study and an interested public readership. Yet this list summarizes only highlights from the career of Henry Prunieres. The volume under review is a collection of essays about his work and how it shaped French musicology and the perception of French music abroad. It is unusual for musicologists to study other musicologists rather than musicians or music. But Prunieres was an unusual figure, and the outlines of his career reveal a great deal about the development of the field. He got an auspicious start when he won the favor of Swiss musicologist Romain Rollanti, who shepherded him through a dissertation at the Sorbonne and guaranteed him access to the necessary Italian archives for his probing research. Prunieres completed his dissertation in 1913 and saw it published the same year as the successful book L'Opera italien en France avant Lulli (Paris: E. Champion). Despite this early success, Prunieres did not secure an academic position, and his career took the many winding turns of an entrepreneurial public scholar. His greatest accomplishments were participating in a cultural network that included artists and scholars from across Europe, undertaking projects such as a two-volume history of music and the critical edition of the complete works of Jean-Baptiste Lully, and creating and overseeing La revue musicale for twenty years. In order to capture the contours of Prunieres's varied career and checkered record of success, the editors of the present volume have taken a kaleidoscopic approach. After Rene Prunieres, Henry's son, donated his father's archives to the Bibliotheque nationale de France, the Institut de Recherche en Musicologie (IReMtts) organized a yearlong seminar on the musicologist in 2009-2010. Although the present collection contains the most outstanding papers from that event, the results are as checkered as Prunieres's own professional efforts. The topic is in line with the Societe franchise de musicologie's politic of valorizing French contributions to musical culture, and with the many titles in the Editions Symetrie catalog that center on non-composer participants in French musical life (e.g. Yannick Simon, Jules Pasdeloup et les origines du concert populaire [2011]; Delphine Grivel, Maurice Denis et hi musique [ 20 111; and Brigitte Cormier, Ewa Podles, contralto assoluto [2015]). But while the method ensures that the object of study is presented in his many facets, it provides only a surface level of critical understanding. What were Prunieres's motivations, and how did these inflect his work? Did he steer French musicology or did it steer him? These questions and their answers are missing from the book. The book's twenty-nine articles touch on the three areas in which Prunieres achieved personal success and advanced the mission and visibility of French musicology: his relationships with artists and scholars, his academic work, and his contributions to the Revue musicale as editor and critic. The first, Myriam Chimenes's biographical sketch, introduces Prunieres's unique story and perspective on both history and contemporary music. Chimenes draws on the rich documents at her disposal as research fellow at IReMtts to provide not just the contours of Prunieres's career but to explain his motivations and misgivings as well. …

Review of Judy Lochhead,Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music(Routledge, 2015)

[1] It is rare when reading a book-length music-theoretical work, especially one with a foot firmly in continental philosophical terrain, to wish for the volume to be twice as long as it is. But that was frequently my desire reading Judy Lochhead's Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music.[2] The reasons for this are threefold. First, Lochhead's book covers a lot of ground. The four chapters that comprise Part I function together as a critical reading of the recent history of music-analytic inquiry, a timely intervention into some issues and assumptions in need of address, and a creative plane on which many philosophical concepts come into communication. Part II then comprises a series of analytical forays, each offering a way to engage some particular "problem." Part II also focuses on compositions by four living woman composers, a commendable effort in itself.(1)[3] Second, the book is conceptually rich. Drawing upon and inflecting myriad sources--Ihde's creative reading of Husserl's phenomenology, Heidegger's ontologies of things and worlds, Deleuze's difference, Haraway's situated knowing, and much more--it offers a wealth of music-analytic perspectives that a reader might pick up and carry into new territory. Common terms in music-scholarly discourse are taken apart and redeployed. Assumptions about what "counts" as analytically fruitful loci of attention are overturned.[4] Third, on a slightly less affirmative note, the brevity of the volume often results in a discouraging lack of development of any given thread. A tremendous amount of material is packed into 175 pages. But while several themes "flicker" (to use one of Lochhead's concepts) throughout, many get swept up in the flow, never to appear again. (I will address some instances of this below.) This seems to be Lochhead's gambit, however, and while it requires patience on the reader's part, that patience pays off--if, that is, we read Part I not as a stream of interesting and important points, each aborted prematurely before moving on to the next, but instead as a slow accumulation of concepts. No single theme animates Reconceiving Structure, and that is the point: a productive analytic model, emerging as it does from specific acts of engaging a "musical sounding," should not be guided by a priori ideas of how music should go. The compositions Lochhead examines, each of which resists approach via traditional music-analytic means, bring this fact to the forefront. But the lesson underlying Lochhead's mode of inquiry is that all music should be approached in this way--that through the radically singular ontological status of "recent music" (4ff.) we can rethink what structure means for any kind of musical situation.[5] Part I begins with a historical account of how music analysis, as practiced by certain European and North American musical thinkers, has come to be what it is. Lochhead describes the alignment of music-analytic inquiry with scientific discourse in the post-war years, focusing in large part on ways in which scientific rigor was brought into alignment with music-compositional practice. I encourage the reader to read these early passages alongside, say, the Haraway text that Lochhead cites, which remains one of the more powerful critiques of scientism in contemporary scholarship (Haraway 1988; see Lochhead pp. 8-9, 89, and 98-99).[6] Chapter 2 inquires into what is meant by structure in music-scholarly discourse and critical theory. Lochhead describes four prevailing perspectives:1. structure as an ontological condition--either "that which lies 'underneath' the concrete details" (48) of the musical surface, or a metaphysical structure toward which a work aspires,2. structure conceived in opposition to (a) non-structural elements, (b) process, and (c) expression or meaning,3. inquiry into structure as a "way in"--epistemological considerations of how and why to think about structure,4. …

Dancing to the Loop: Repetition in Contemporary Music - An Interview with Tilman Baumgärtel

Dancing to the Loop: Repetition in Contemporary Music - An Interview with Tilman Baumgärtel

Investigating the Value of DJ Performance for Contemporary Music Education and Sensorimotor Synchronisation (SMS) Abilities

Two studies were conducted to establish a more complete picture of the skills that might be accessed through learning to DJ and the potential value of those skills for music education. The first employed open-ended methods to explore perspectives on the value of DJing for music education. The second employed experimental methods to compare the ability of DJs to synchronise movement to auditory metronomes. Twenty-one participants (seven professionally trained musicians, seven informally trained DJs, seven non-musicians) took part in both studies. Qualitative data suggested that all participant groups felt DJs learn valuable musical skills such as rhythm perception, instrumental skills, knowledge of musical structure, performance skills, and a majority agreed that DJing had equal relevance with other musical forms e.g. classical music. Quantitative data showed that informally trained DJs produced more regular timing intervals under baseline and distracting conditions than the other experimental groups. The implications of the findings for the inclusion of DJing into formal music curricula are discussed.

‘Collaboration’ in Contemporary Music: A Theoretical View

Contemporary composers frequently find themselves working with other artists in composing. The paper presents a framework which aims to provide a better understanding of the working relationships found in such situations, and the factors which affect the type of working relationships which develop. A distinction is drawn between dialogic creative activity—the universal situation of creating in a context—and creating with others actually present. Four different types of relationship which develop when working directly with others are defined. This typology can help in the better understanding of the relationships which composers establish and can act as a stimulus to the review and further development of compositional practice. The relationship between the language of an art form and the language used for communication between creative partners is identified as a key factor in affecting the type of working relationships which develop between artists.