Open thread for discussion and questions related to the fifth of the six-part series.
The Eighties and Nineties. This session discusses a different fin de siècle, with stylistic degeneration in a realm of exhausted ideas and dead ends – with attempts at new aesthetics playing out in a commodified marketplace of ideas. Primary trends in the music of John Adams, Glass and Reich, Henryk Górecki, Arvo Part, John Zorn, and others.
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In session five, we listened to these pieces:
Lou Harrison - Suite For Violin And American Gamelan
Ben Johnston - String Quartets No. 4 and No. 9
Terry Riley - 15/16
Steve Reich - It's Gonna Rain
Reich - Music For 18 Musicians
Reich - Drumming
Reich - City Life
Philip Glass - Two Pages
Glass - Satyagraha
Glass - Symphony #3
Glenn Branca - Symphony No. 3
Giacinto Scelsi - Quattro pezzi per orchestra
Arvo Part - Tabula Rasa
Arvo Part - Fratres
Morton Feldman - For Phillip Guston
Feldman - For Samuel Beckett
People have asked if there are any internet radio stations which focus on new music. There are indeed some good ones, which often focus on new CD releases and the latest music being composed. Check these out:
Radio Molecule - created and maintained by Santa Fe's own Adriana Siso!
http://www.live365.com/stations/dna__
Counterstream Radio, a project of the American Music Center, the composer advocacy organization which was founded by Copland and others in 1939
http://www.counterstreamradio.org/
Postclassic Radio, hosted by composer and writer Kyle Gann, whose music we'll explore in the last session
http://www.live365.com/stations/kylegann
Iridian Radio at Live365, which seems to focus on some of the "bigger names"
http://www.iridianradio.com/
Currently playing at The Screen is
glass:a portrait of Phillip in twelve parts.
We saw it before class yesterday and although it is primarily about Phillip Glass, the man, the shots of some of the opera productions and other composers really augment this class.
I'd like to augment Clo Mingo's
comment:
Pat and I saw the Philip Glass
movie after the last class, which
really prepared us be to be quite enthralled by it. It shows again
Sun. 12:45 and Tues. 5:30, and
I would guess from the attendance
may continue after Thanksgiving also.
Franz Jahoda
We have talked about how throughout 20th Century music, a distinguishing element in the work of many composers is structural and organizational principles based upon time and duration rather than harmony.
We listened only so briefly to Morton Feldman's work, not even beginning to get into the perceptual and aesthetic dimensions which the work explores. Feldman said some interesting things about time which I didn't "have time" to share:
"I am interested in getting Time in its unstructured existence. That is, I am interested in how this wild beast lives in the jungle - not in the zoo."
The zoo perhaps being the very accepted notions of music as existing in the confined space of its measures from beginning to end. The technique I described of Feldman's music including independent metric paths for each musician was one of his approaches to finding the "jungle" - the musicians share the same musical space but pulse, periodicity, and alignment attain a freedom from traditional structures.
In the work which we heard a bit of at the end of class five, Feldman's "For Samuel Beckett", there is a sense that when the work begins, it is already in progress...that we have happened upon a composition which lives independently, and what we hear of it is as if through a passing and overlapping window of time. The piece does not have a beginning, middle, or end, but has a form of development that evokes larger phenomenological cycles.
As mentioned, Feldman and Samuel Beckett became friendly in their later years, and shared an aesthetic landscape. The world of Godot shares affinities with the sonic landscape of late Feldman. Together, Feldman and Beckett worked on the radio play "Words and Music" which SFNM presented in 2006.
"Time has turned into Space and there will be no more Time." – Samuel Beckett
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