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WD_428/ 2008
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 5 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 40.2 x 25.2 | | Size (mm): | 1020 x 640 | | Catalog #: | WD_0428 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Experimental music -
Experimental music is a term introduced by composer John Cage in 1955. Cage defined "an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen" (Cage 1961, 39), and he was specifically interested in completed works that performed an unpredictable action (Mauceri 1997, 197) In a broader sense, it has come to mean any music that challenges the commonly accepted notions of what music is. Avant-garde music is another term for it. David Cope describes experimental music as that, "which represents a refusal to accept the status quo" (Cope, 1997, 222).
Michael Nyman (1974) uses the term "experimental" to describe the work of American composers (John Cage, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Meredith Monk, Malcolm Goldstein, Morton Feldman, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Philip Glass, John Cale, Steve Reich, etc.) as opposed to the European avant-garde at the time (Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis). The word "experimental" in the former cases "is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success or failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown" (Cage 1961, 13).
According to David Nicholls, "...very generally, avant-garde music can be viewed as occupying an extreme position within the tradition, while experimental music lies outside it" (Nicholls 1998, 318). That tradition is the inheritance of common-practice Western art music, with its concern for increased technical complexity, historical inheritance, composer intention and other features. In general, and at least originally, experimental music took its inspiration from non-Western sources and from varying times. It may take its inspiration (directly in terms of generating systems) from other media; practitioners may or may not be professionals in the traditional sense of the word, although they may still be trained in their work and adept at it.
Leonard B. Meyer, on the other hand, includes under "experimental music" composers such as Berio, Boulez, and Stockhausen, as well as the techniques of "total serialism" (Meyer 1994, 106–107 and 266), holding that "there is no single, or even pre-eminent, experimental music, but rather a plethora of different methods and kinds" (Meyer 1994, 237).
As with other edge forms that push the limits of a particular form of expression, there is little agreement as to the boundaries of experimental music, even amongst its practitioners. On the one hand, some experimental music is an extension of traditional music, adding unconventional instruments, modifications to instruments, noises, and other novelties to compositions. At the other extreme, there are performances that most listeners would not characterize as music at all.
While much discussion of experimental music centers on definitional issues and its validity as a musical form, the most frequently performed experimental music is entertaining and, at its best, can lead the listener to question core assumptions about the nature of music.
The term "experimental music" was used contemporaneously for electronic music, particularly in the early musique concrète work of Schaeffer and Henry in France (Vignal 2003, 298) and in the Experimental Studios at the University of Illinois, run by Lejaren Hiller.[citation needed] "Experimental" electronic composition may be "experimental" in the sense used in Nyman (for instance, Cage, Cartridge Music or the early work of Alvin Lucier); it may also lie more comfortably with the avant garde.[citation needed]
Keywords:
Aleatoric music - A term coined by Werner Meyer-Eppler and used by Boulez and other composers of the avant garde (in Europe) to refer to a strictly limited form of indeterminacy, also called "controlled chance". As this distinction was misunderstood, the term is often (and somewhat inaccurately) used interchangeably with, or in place of, "indeterminacy".
Graphic notation - Music which is written in the form of diagrams or drawings rather than using “conventional” notation (with staves, clefs, notes, etc).
Indeterminate music - Related to 'chance music' (one of Cage's terms). Music in which the composer introduces the elements of chance or unpredictability with regard to either the composition or its performance. This term is used by experimental composers, performers and scholars working in experimental music in the United States, Britain, and in other countries influenced by Cagean aesthetics.
Literalism - Music that rejects the aesthetic as motivating force for the creation and pursuit of sound, using either the basic building blocks of orchestral composition (strict literalism) or sounds present at the site of performance (direct literalism) instead.
Microtones - A pitch interval that is smaller than a semitone. This includes quarter tones and intervals even smaller. Composers have, for example, divided the octave into 22, 31, 43, 53, 72, etc. microtones, either equally or unequally, and then used this scale as a basis for composition.
Techniques:
Some of the more common techniques include:
* Extended techniques: Any of a number of methods of performing on a musical instrument that are unique, innovative, and sometimes regarded as improper.
* "Prepared" instruments—ordinary instruments modified in their tuning or sound-producing characteristics. For example, guitar strings can have a weight attached at a certain point, changing their harmonic characteristics (Keith Rowe is one musician to have experimented with such prepared guitar techniques). Cage's prepared piano was one of the first such instruments.A different form is not hanging objects on the strings, but divide the string in two with a third bridge and play the inverse side, causing resonating bell-like harmonic tones at the pick-up side.
* Unconventional playing techniques—for example, strings on a piano can be manipulated directly instead of being played the orthodox, keyboard-based way (an innovation of Henry Cowell's known as "string piano"), a dozen or more piano keys may be depressed simultaneously with the forearm to produce a tone cluster (another technique popularized by Cowell), or the tuning pegs on a guitar can be rotated while a note sounds (called a "tuner glissando").
* Incorporation of instruments, tunings, rhythms or scales from non-Western musical traditions.
* Use of sound sources other than conventional musical instruments such as trash cans, telephone ringers, and doors slamming.
* Playing with deliberate disregard for the ordinary musical controls (pitch, duration, volume).
* Use of graphic notation, non-conventional written/graphic 'instructions' actively interpreted by the performer(s). John Cage is credited with the original development of the radical score,[citation needed] and this influence continued through other composers/artists such as La Monte Young, George Brecht, George Crumb, Annea Lockwood, Yoko Ono, Krzysztof Penderecki and beyond.
* Creating experimental musical instruments for enhancing the timbre of compositions and exploring new techniques or possibilities.
Articles:
MUSIC; Electronic Music, Always Current By KYLE GANN, New York Times, July 9, 2000
It's Sound, It's Art, and Some Call It Music By KYLE GANN, New York Times, January 9, 2000
Further reading:
* Bailey, Derek. 1980. "Musical Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music". Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall; Ashbourne: Moorland. ISBN 0136070442. Second edition, London: British Library National Sound Archive, 1992. ISBN 0712305068
* Experimental musical instruments (magazine). 1985–1999. A periodical (no longer published) devoted to experimental music and instruments
* Holmes, Thomas B. 2002. Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition. Second edition. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415936438
* Smith Brindle, Reginald. 1975.[citation needed] pepr. 1986. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-315471-4
* Sutherland, Roger, 1994. New Perspectives in Music. London: Sun Tavern Fields. ISBN 0-951-7012-6-6
Sources:
* Cage, John. 1961. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. Unaltered reprints: Weslyan University press, 1966 (pbk), 1967 (cloth), 1973 (pbk ["First Wesleyan paperback edition"], 1975 (unknown binding); Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970, 1971; London: Calder & Boyars, 1968, 1971, 1973 ISBN 0714505269 (cloth) ISBN 0714510432 (pbk). London: Marion Boyars, 1986, 1999 ISBN: 0714510432 (pbk); [n.p.]: Reprint Services Corporation, 1988 (cloth) ISBN 9991178015 [In particular the essays "Experimental Music", pp. 7–12, and "Experimental Music: Doctrine", pp. 13–17.]
* Cope, David. 1997. Techniques of the Contemporary Composer. New York, New York: Schirmer Books. ISBN 0-02-864737-8.
* Mauceri, Frank X. 1997. "From Experimental Music to Musical Experiment". Perspectives of New Music 35, no. 1 (Winter): 187-204.
* Meyer, Leonard B. 1994. Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture. Second edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-52143-5
* Nicholls, David. 1998. "Avant-garde and Experimental Music." In Cambridge History of American Music. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521454298
* Nyman, Michael. 1974. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. New York: Schirmer Books. ISBN 0028712005. Second edition, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0521652979
* Vignal, Marc(éd.), 2003, "Expérimentale (musique)" in Dictionnaire de la Musique, Larousse, Paris, (ISBN 2035113547)
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_music
Aleatoric music -
Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin word alea, meaning "dice") is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities.
The term became known to European composers through lectures by acoustician Werner Meyer-Eppler at Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music in the beginning of the 1950s. According to his definition, "a process is said to be aleatoric (from Lat. alea=dice) if its course is determined in general but depends on chance in detail" (Meyer-Eppler 1957, 55).
Early precedents:
An early genre of composition that could be considered a precedent for aleatoric compositions were the Musikalische Würfelspiele or Musical Dice Games, popular in the late 18th and early 19th century. (One such dice game is attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.) These games consisted of a sequence of musical measures, for which each measure had several possible versions, and a procedure for selecting the precise sequence based on the throwing of a number of dice.
Somewhat related to chance music is composer Alan Hovhaness's use of what he called the "spirit murmur" (beginning with his 1944 piano concerto Lousadzak), in which instruments repeat a melodic or rhythmic phrase for a certain amount of time in an uncoordinated fashion.[citation needed] Similar textures had been employed by Charles Ives, as early as The Unanswered Question (1908).[citation needed]
American composer John Cage's Music of Changes (1951) is the first piece to be conceived largely through random procedures (Randel 2002, 17), though for just this reason his indeterminacy is of a different order from Meyer-Eppler's concept.
Modern usage:
The French composer Pierre Boulez was largely responsible for popularizing the term, using it to describe works that give the performer certain liberties with regard to the sequencing and repetition of parts, an approach pioneered by avant-garde American composer-theorist Henry Cowell in his Mosaic Quartet (String Quartet No. 3, 1935). The term was intended by Boulez to distinguish his work from pieces composed through the application of chance operations by John Cage and Cage's aesthetic of indeterminate music or indeterminacy.[citation needed]
Early examples of aleatoric music include Klavierstück XI (1956) by Karlheinz Stockhausen, which features 19 elements to be performed in changing sequences; certain orchestral works of Witold Lutosławski (from after 1959) which contain passages where the musical content is not precisely dictated (Lutosławski calls this 'ad libitum'); and in some works by Krzysztof Penderecki characteristic sequences are repeated quickly, producing a kind of oscillating sound.
There has been considerable confusion of the terms aleatory and indeterminate / chance music. One of Cage's pieces, HPSCHD, itself composed using chance procedures, uses music from Mozart's Musikalisches Würfelspiel, referred to above, as well as original music. He also generally used coin-tossing and other procedures depending on designs involving a pre-defined number of choices to be made.[citation needed] Still, both the aesthetic aims as well as the number of elements controlled by chance make the two methods clearly different.
"Open form" chance music:
Open form is a term sometimes used for mobile or polyvalent musical forms, where the order of movements or sections is indeterminate or left up to the performer.
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati composed a series of influential "mobiles" such as Interpolation (1958). However, "open form" in music is also used in the sense defined by the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (Renaissance und Barock, 1888) to mean a work which is fundamentally incomplete, represents an unfinished activity, or points outside of itself. In this sense, a "mobile form" can be either "open" or "closed". An example of a closed mobile musical composition is Stockhausen's Momente (1962-64/69). Terry Riley's In C (1964) was composed of 53 short sequences; each member of the ensemble can repeat a given sequence as many times as he or she chooses before going on to the next (similar to Hovhaness's "spirit murmer", only with a fixed pulsing rhythm), making the details of each performance of In C unique though, because the overall course is fixed, it is a closed form.
See also:
* Aleatory
* Algorithmic music
* Generative music
* Stochastic music
* Indeterminacy in music
Sources:
* Meyer-Eppler, Werner. 1957. "Statistic and Psychologic Problems of Sound", translated by Alexander Goehr. Die Reihe 1 ("Electronic Music"): 55–61. Original German edition, 1955, as "Statistische und psychologische Klangprobleme", Die Reihe 1 ("Elektronische Musik"): 22–28.
* Randel, Don Michael. (2002). The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians. ISBN 0-674-00978-9.
* Wölfflin, Heinrich. (1888). Renaissance und Barock: Eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung der Barockstils in Italien. Munich: T. Ackermann. English edition: Renaissance and Baroque. Translated by Kathrin Simon, with an introduction by Peter Murray. London: Collins, 1964; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatorism
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