Exploring Contemporary Music: Improvisation, Notation, and Acoustic Space, Exams of Music

Download Exploring Contemporary Music: Improvisation, Notation, and Acoustic Space and more Exams Music in PDF only on Docsity! Music 421, Fall 2007: Materials of Contemporary Music Class 14: December 5, 2007 - improvisation: Braxton, Abrams/Lewis/Mitchell, Oliveros Pauline Oliveros “Acoustic and Virtual Space as a Dynamic Element of Music” & etc., in The Roots of the Moment (New York: Drogue Press), 1998: 3-21. collage format of the book as an invitation: make your own path through this labyrinth deep listening as intensity and attunement: a meditative/transcendental practice (and an “attentional process” of becoming rather than of being: active, not passive) collaboration with the performer (and the listener): a shared responsibility for the work notation as an invitation rather than as a limitation a concern for acoustic: how does the sound resound in the space? can the space influence the music created within it? (again, attention) can this resounding be modified dynamically via electronics? (exploration) Schwartz and Godfrey, “Notation, Improvisation, and Composition,” in Music Since 1945: 394-416. the function of the score for the analyst (versus functions for composer, performer, listener, reader) notation above and beyond the conventions: assessing the balance between freedom and control Lutoslawski String Quartet and Espaces du Sommeil Cage Fourteen Lachenmann Mouvement... Crumb Black Angels Aperghis Recitations Berio Sequenza III what kinds of meaning are conveyed by these notations? why choose these alternate strategies? (indicating freedom from convention or to the interpreter) what is the line (if any) between interpretation and improvisation? comparative melodic notation, Schwartz/Godfrey p. 407 points of entry into improvised music: jazz: free improvisation as the “progressive” or innovative stream of jazz post-bop the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) as one strand grows out of the “Experimental Band” founded by Muhal Richard Abrams in 1961 formed with Abrams as president in 1965 other key figures include Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Wadada Leo Smith (and later Lewis, Fred Anderson, Malachi Thompson, etc.) creative, pedagogical, and political functions.... classical: building on the performative licenses established by Cage, Feldman, Brown, Wolff (and followed by Stockhausen, Cardew, Globokar, Oliveros, among others) and improvisation as a global phenomenon: Terry Riley and South Asian classical music Miya Masaoka and Japanese traditional music Anthony Braxton Composition #118A [intervallic] as a sequence of five crescendi: 0’00”-0’22”, 0’20”-0’53”, 0’55”-2’00”, 2’00”-2’25”, 2’25”-3’10” with the third terminating in the widest intervals and the fifth reaching the loudest point (overlaying the formal archetypes of crescendo and crescendo/descrescendo) 0’00 - 0’22” broken into three phrases (separated by pauses/breaths) expanding phrase lengths: 4”, 6”, 8” separated by 1” pauses expanding intervals: from Bb4/E5 tremolo to Eb4/Eb5 tremolo introduction of a “tail” in the last phrase: non-tremolo pitch 0’22”- 0’53” broken into two subsections (by virtue of harmonic change) increasing tendency towards multiphonics increasing tendency towards complex pitch configurations beyond tremolo first subsection contains three phrases (0’22”-0’36”) contracting phrase lengths: 7”, 5”, 1/2” (last is much shorter) third phrase retains lower notes of first two (G4, A4) but changes upper note (Eb5) second subsection contains seven phrases (0’37”-0’54”) generally contracting and emphasizing short phrases: 5”, 1/2”, 2”, 3”, 1/2”, 1/4”, 1” prominent “tail” on last phrase 0’55” - 2’00” broken into six phrases first phrase is much longer than previous: 29” (circular breathing, presumably) second, third are much shorter than first: 3”, 2” respectively remaining three phrases slow down considerably to facilitate extremely wide tessitura fourth phrase 16”, fifth and sixth phrases 4” each (parallel to first three phrases) the crescendo here is much less pronounced: more timbral (increasing noise) than dynamic continuing tendency to multiphonics, the deliberate “squeaking” of the wide leaps 2’00” - 2’25” momentary pauses at the beginning are gradually reduced: retrospectively, feels like one long phrase with rhythmic/dynamic accents along the way return to relatively “normal” playing techniques, narrower (high) register some durational elongations (as connections to the “tail”?) 2’25” - 3’10”: return to shorter phrases - 22 distinct phrases gradually elongating through the first seventeen (1” -> 6”) and then compressed again: (3”, 1/2”, 1/2”, 1/2”, 1”) lower register than in fourth section very deliberate building up multiphonics to the end of the work first pitch gesture is identical to the opening of the piece (although compacted in time) Abrams/Lewis/Mitchell Bound: live and memorex.... Scrape (track 1) as an example of a “note-y” style of improvisation by the same group (and emphasizing piano and trombone as the “standard” instruments for Abrams/Lewis) Bound as an exploration of EAI (electroacoustic improvisation) or “reductionism” emphasis on timbre, texture, sonority, minimalism of means rather than the more gestural melodic/harmonic vocabulary coming from the jazz tradition assuming that the “frontmost” saxophone is the in-the-moment improvisation and that “background” samples are either captured from earlier in the performance or from another time entirely...