Here is a Deposit Files link an appendix from a book on flute fingering and extended techniques.
I assume that's what the book is about although I can't be sure as the appendix is all I have and I can't trace the origin of it even though I sent my people out amongst the woodwind community to try and find out (no luck.)
It seems fairly obscure and is probably out of print so I think it's fair to share it here as a PDF. If you know what book it's from and can show me it's still in print and/or perhaps you own the rights to it or something then let me know and i'll take it down (and apologise in a sheepish eyes-cast-downwards-shuffling-feet sort of a way.)
The appendix contains various fingerings, normal, trills, quarter tones (24ET), 31-tone, and loads and loads of mulitphonics (over one hundred pages infact), most requiring an open hole/french flute (which I need to get, foolishly opting for a closed hole body when I started playing flute 'properly' last year).
EDIT: Thanks to Daniel M in the comments below for alerting me to the fact that this file/link is now dead. I've uploaded it again HERE.
EDIT (22/08/2010): Thanks again to someone in the comments section for noticing the link is down again. It's back up here on Dropio..
Also a tinyurl link for twitter etc.. http://tinyurl.com/y4lfbhq
Enjoy, if that's the right word for how you'd feel about a large appendix of flute fingerings. Please let me know if this or other links are dead and I'll upload them again. Cheers, ta, etc. Ed 17/04/2010.
Here is a free PDF download of a 1975 masters thesis on quarter tones for saxophone by John William Paulson. It's in two parts (80 pages in total) and features general discussion on the topic, fingering charts for various sizes of saxophone and some exercises and etudes.
Also there are some mp3 examples, six different takes of the first etude, for some reason (UPDATE: it's a 1975 recording of three saxophone students playing the first etude, then they play it again a week later after some practice, 'improvement in performance is ... easily perceived')
Pierre Boulez(game of hide and seek ongoing by the looks of it)
I was reading Dialogues With Boulez the other day and thought some of his views about art, music and technique were a bit odd, contradictory perhaps (though as I go on to suggest, he may have his reasons.)
Boulez...the two people who were most striking for me, I met in New York when I was there for the first time in 1952. They were DeKooning and Pollack. Unfortunately, Pollack was completely drunk, so it was a very chaotic conversation because his nose was on the table, practically. With DeKooning, it was different because I went to his atelier and was looking all the series of women he did at that time, in this period. Unfortunately, most of the painters or artists are not really interested in music. We tried at the Pompidou Centre to have musicians and artists have a dialogue and maybe a project or not, but just to exchange ideas - because not a single figure in the plastic arts comes to our concerts at Ircam. (interview from the late 1990s. pg55)
It seems Boulez was interested in these painters and perhaps abstract-expressionism more generally, not that odd you might think, but then consider this from the same series of interviews..
I will begin with Schoenberg, who is, for me, a more important question than Scelsi or Feldman, who are really marginal for me..... ..and, to tell the truth, individuals like Scelsi and Feldman are amateurs for me. They have fancy ideas and the like, but that's not enough; they have no tools.....if you listen to Scelsi - I mean, first, one does not know if he wrote his pieces - that's the main question!. I know he was improvising on a kind of vague electronic instrument and that somebody was transcribing for him. But, I mean, that's very simplistic, certaintly; but there are no ideas, just a kind of atmosphere for a couple of bars and extended to nothing. For me, I don't understand really how it came to be that there has been a kind of big discovery of Scelsi. Myself, I knew him personally. He was a very intelligent man - nice and cultivated.
But, I mean, he was an amateur, simply that. I knew him in 1949, so I followed all his developments. You know, these kind of anarchic people, they are needed from time to time, because they are subverting the kind of academicism to which everybody finally tends. But, as values, these people's ideas have no values. I put in this category Satie, Ives, Cage; I put Scelsi and I put Feldman - people who are provoking thoughts, but who have not the tools to realise their ideas. Or they realise their ideas in a much too simplistic way; you can see that in two seconds.(pgs 17, 19-20)
Pollack and DeKooning are worthy artists (lets say), but Feldman, Scelsi, Cage, Ives and Satie are not, they are 'amateurs' with some interesting, provocative ideas (at best). Scelsi and Feldman are 'really marginal'.
First, here is Feldman in response (not necessarily in direct response to the interview quoted above, i'm not sure what comments he is referring to, either those made in the discussion he mentions and/or those made elsewhere)..
Feldman: 'I once had a wild six hour discussion walking the streets of New York with Boulez, how he is telling me, he is really telling me but he is using Ives, "Oh, Ives, the amateur!" And I think it's absolutely outstanding, I think it's absolutely incredible why one would think about Ives as an amateur. No. He wrote fantastic things, like the conception of the 4th symphony, I'm talking about the one with the four pianos, he never changed anything, Mahler was changing things all the time. Why was he [Ives] an amateur? Because he wasn't a European? A man does all these innovations, he is an amateur, I, for years, I'm still called an amateur. I'm one of the few original people writing music, I'm an amateur! Is it only that -, I never understood that John Cage is an amateur, I'm an amateur, Ives is an amateur. ' (source)
I should state at this point that unlike Jim O'Rourke ('I'm not into Boulez, but that's kind of obvious.'), I like Boulez's music, quite a lot actually.
I also like Feldman and Ives and some Satie, Cage and Scelsi (less so probably but i've not heard all of their music). I don't care whether or not Feldman is or isn't an 'amateur' and I don't care about his 'tools' or 'technique', he said what he wanted to say and I am glad he did, same goes for the rest.
However, Boulez has the right to state his opinion and I appreciate his honesty, also he prefaces everything with the subjective qualifier 'for me' (rightly so, for me, at least.) He makes no claim about any objective knowledge or universal criteria, no need to get upset and go on the defensive because he has criticised one of your favourite composers or something (a fairly common response in my experience, and actually a backhanded compliment, plenty of anti-Boulez invective on the page I used as one source for this post ... http://ronsen.org/boulez/boulez5.html).
My point is (finally), why is it ok for Pollack to throw paint on a canvas but it's not ok for Cage to throw notes onto manuscript paper? (as it were, not sure if Cage actually did that but he did use chance and metaphor, like the I-Ching and mapping star charts onto manuscript paper, or the contour of a rock and so on, somewhat analogous to dripping paint on a canvas).
Technique and 'tools' are essential one might infer from Boulez's discourse about music, that is if one hopes to avoid being cast into the 'margins', but not so for the visual arts (those not that interested in modern art sometimes claim about work like Pollack's that 'I could have done that myself' and/or make an emperor's new clothes analogy, i.e., there is not much technique on show, putatively at least.)
Odd, isn't it (?). Does contemporary/classical music have to be more technical, complex or 'accomplished' than the visual arts to be considered credible or outside of the 'margins'?, and is music therefore a narrower field of activity? (less diversity of approach).
I would ask Boulez about it but unfortunately I don't know him so instead I ask the interweb (perhaps he thinks the visual arts are different and technique is not as important or something, and/or perhaps his interest in Pollack and DeKooning et al is more tactical/political, hard to say.)
Anagrama was a spectacular success when first performed at the ISCM Festival in Cologne on 11 June 1960, but since then passed into near-oblivion. To have it performed at all, Kagel had to lobby for a change in the ISCM's rules as pieces had to be proposed by the national organisations, and Kagel was considered 'stateless'. (In ensuring that individual composers could propose pieces, Kagel also made possible the inclusion of of Ligeti's Apparitions at the same festival; Toop 1999: 72; Steinitz 2003: 98.)
Anagrama was performed at the same concert as Stockhausen'sKontakte, and led to tensions between the two composers that according to Ligeti, disunited the whole European avant-garde. What happened was that at a post-concert reception at the home of the owner of the DuMont publishing house, Ernst Brücher, everybody was only talking about Anagrama, and nobody about Kontakte, which the touchy Stockhausen appears to have taken personally - even though Kagel was one of the few who did talk to him about his piece (Kurtz 1992: 203f.; Toop 1999: 72). The reversal of fortunes, whereby Kontakte is now almost universally hailed as one of the foremost masterpieces of the time, whereas Anagrama is all but forgotten, remains to be explained.
UPDATE: You can get a free recording of Anagrama plus other Kagel pieces from the Avant Garde Project archive, volumes 40 and 41. (Anagrama is in AGP40).
Well sort of, on the front page of the Guardian website in the side bar (I was somewhat surprised to scroll down see the slightly amusing yearbook style photo of him above).
Yes indeedy, Gramophone Magazine have a beta version of an archive of their magazine online, i'll let them explain it...
The Gramophone Archive is a searchable database containing every issue of Gramophone from April 1923 to the latest issue. Despite the complexities of producing a magazine during wartime, Gramophone has never missed an issue and in 1995 added an extra, 13th, issue each year to coincide with the annual Gramophone Awards.
Looks like a great resource for all sorts of reasons.
Earle Brown: But is there not enough of what you might call reasonable music in the world that might be changing the insights of people? In other words, I always used to agree with Varese, Varese would never join polemical sides you know, ...
Morton Feldman: Not in public.
Brown: ... he said, if you've got a different idea then write the music, and that music will have its effect and it will change things. Don't stand around and holler I have been offended, help! The best thing that you can do is to not put yourself in a polemical position verbally, but just write a better piece of music, if you have got a better idea. Because it is the examples of things, that are better that change people, not forcing them to change.
Yes, that's right, not sure why I didn't include this link with my 'analysis' of Berio's piece Nones as that piece is included in this DL (it's an early, rare piece I think, now out of print so it seems).
Anyway, it's all on the excellent Avant Garde project site, number 27 (not sure why the AGP isn't in my side bar of links either, I shall include it now). It features out of print recordings so don't whine about copyright etc, worth having a hunt around on the site if you haven't come across it before.
I forgot about these concerts after they got a bit of press here and there last year. Worth a look if you like any of these composers, the videos stream easily and are of a decent image/sound quality.
Here is a list of the concerts, composers and performers...
Webcast 1 Larry Goves - Four Letter Words György Kurtág - Signs, Games and Messages György Kurtág - Scenes from a Novel ° György Ligeti - Aventures & Nouvelles Aventures
Webcast 2 Claude Vivier - Et je reverrai cette ville etrange (ensemble, 1981) Claude Vivier - Shiraz (piano, 1977) Claude Vivier - Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele? (voices / ensemble 1983) Claude Vivier - Journal* (voices / percussion, 1977)
View the 3D film by Dave Dunbar which accompanied Gordon McPherson's work Celeste Unborn. The music was recorded live at the performance on 8th March 2008. In order to appreciate the 3D film you will need a pair of 3D glasses which have one Red lens and one Cyan.
Here is number two of my Names and Dates for Piano pieces. I've written four so far and I have gone back and scored number one properly now so it needs re-recording (however the piano I recorded it on has gone even more out of tune now).
You can hear a rough version of number one via this previous post.
I suggested in the previous post I intend to explain the method more clearly soon (when I have more written).
I played this piece on a Fender Rhodes MkII instead, it gives a reasonable impression of what it will sound like on a real piano (also I think the Rhodes needs to be tuned, again, especially low down, it's tricky and time consuming so I have been delaying doing it)
It is the simplest one of the set so far, it's based on the name and the date of birth of my friend Al's newborn son. There are four phrases which are clearly separated, the first three are his names (first, middle and surname) and the last phrase is his date of birth. I wanted to state the facts as plainly as possible and finish (unlike the other pieces which use the usual method of transposition, inversion and complementation, and rhythmic repetition and yes, even some literal repetition).
So no manipulation of sets or rhythms are involved, it's straight through and each phrase has no particular harmonic connection to the other apart from some common intervals (tones and semitones, which can be octave displaced).
The piece is an exercise in trying to relate more or less unrelated material (unlike number one which featured two closely related sets of the same cardinal number, just happened that the name I used mapped that way onto the chromatic scale).
Also given the premise for this series of pieces I have to work with the results of the 'gematria' process (the pitches are determined by their letters and dates by their respective digits) so it's also a handing over of harmonic control to some extent, a limitation to deal with (not something I intend to do a great deal but I quite like the concept and the results so far so I will continue with it for now).
I've attached a draft of the score below (I haven't been using Sibelius very long and I need to work out how to get rid of the time signatures, they are not necessary for this piece as they just make it look more complicated than it needs to be, I can 'hide' them but can't shift the notes along into the middle of each bar)
UPDATE: I worked out how to get rid of the time signatures, better draft score now included below (awaiting some final revisions/checking and/or simplifiations possibly).
UPDATE 2: changed the fermata rests to tied whole notes (clearer than saying rest but with the pedal down, a somewhat convoluted idea perhaps).
Firstly I think this is a great piece, my 'favourite' wind quintet, as with most Ligeti I have heard (nearly all of it, I think) the music is paced just right, the overall duration of the work and its various movements are all digestible (to my ears) and even though it's a fairly 'complex' affair (at times) on first listen you walk away with an idea of the music still ringing in your ears, so to speak.
Also I think the scoring is quite practical, the ideas, however complicated, are expressed with clarity (I am not suggesting these qualities are positive musical 'universals', just my own preferences/predjudices, take them or leave them).
The element I want to look at today (listen up at the back please) is the way the music accelerates and decelerates in a precise way by means of various tuplets/groups as opposed to the more commonplace accelerando or rallentando/ritardando technique.
This acceleration and deceleration is some extent an illusion, it might be better to describe the effect as one of increasing and decreasing density. Why?, because the tempo or pulse is constant, it's the number of attacks per beat that changes. A good analogy, perhaps, are gears.
Think of a bicycle (go on, in your favourite colour), imagine that each revolution of the pedals is one beat, this stays the same, what changes is the gear on the rear wheel. For each turn of the pedals the number of revolutions of the rear wheel differs, increasing or decreasing in number (3 per turn/beat, then 4 then 5, then 7 or going in the other direction to slow down or reduce the density of notes).
Starting with the eighth bar/measure you can see/hear the flute and clarinet moving into some tuplet patterns (after some fairly slow moving polyphony), first a quintuplet and then a sextuplet (for the clarinet) then both instruments play a septuplet in unison before playing a series of straight demisemiquavers/32nd notes. This results in a 'winding up' effect, or a change of gear.
Then the clarinet holds a steady trill pattern while the remaining instruments (except the horn) play a (rather spiffing) melody over the top (in bars/measures 10-13 ish). The flute joins the trill fest with the clarinet and finally, they both decelerate or 'wind down' or 'change gear' using the same technique, first straight hemidemisemiquavers/64th notes then into a diminishing pattern, septuplet, sextuplet, quintuplet and a straight four in hemidemisemiquavers/64th notes, then down into various groups of semiquavers/16ths, then quavers/8ths then a semibreve/whole note with a fermata to end.
This technique is broadly speaking 'micropolyphonic' (one of Ligeti's inventions more or less).
Why is this worth discussing you might ask?, good question..
A more standard accelerando or rall/rit sound wouldn't sound the same at all, it would be much smoother, and arguably, considerably less interesting. The effect Ligeti achieves is something like the sound of a slightly clunky mechanism winding or gearing up and down and he achieves this via fairly simple instructions (even I can read/intepret it so it can't be that complex now can it).
It's almost an illusory effect, the tempo or speed (in one sense) remaining the same while the density of attacks changes. Whether in some ontological sense this results in a speeding up or down is something of a semantic issue (an interesting result for a piece of music perhaps).
This seems a common feature of his music in this period (ive not looked at his later music properly yet, i.e. from late 70s onwards so I can't comment on it).
In terms of the voice leading and harmony, briefly, as you can see the motion between the clarinet and flute is contrary in the decelarating/winding down section (bars/measures 14-15) and mostly contrary in the previous accelerating gesture though the relationship between the two voices is more complicated or less ordered (from a cursory examination anyway). This more- or-less-the-same-but-slightly-different effect is another 'micropolyphonic' gesture/trademark.
The harmony (referring to the flute and clarinet) is generally speaking chromatic and voices move by step, it's clear in the decelarating section that both instruments are playing a repeated semitone gesture/trill in contrary motion on the same two pitches (Bb/10 and A/9) , with the clarinet moving up to B/11 at the end and the flute finishes on A/9 (making this final gesture symmetrical, a tone or major 2nd leaving an axis tone in the middle, a Bb/10, this axis is implied not sounded, perhaps a 'pensanto' if you like, a note 'imagined, not played' - Perle - or perhaps, it's just a major 2nd).
So there you have it, apologies for the brevity of this 'analysis' and if I have made any mistakes (i'll check it again over the next few days). I only analyse pieces like this for my own compositional purposes, not because I intend to be any sort of theorist or analyst so this is something of a cursory, idiosyncratic reading of the piece, better than nothing though eh?.
The score is available here and is published by Schott, the music fragment in the video is from this CD by the Albert Schweitzer Quintet (also featuring a rather good quintet by Kurtág amongst other Hungarian quintet music including one of Ligeti's and Kurtág's teachers, Sándor Veress).
(UPDATED: 08/02/2009 to include the 'gears' analogy)
(UPDATED 15/03/09, sorted out pitches in final harmonic 'analysis' bit)
The score fragments below are marked Lento (crotchet/quarter note = 40). Also, something that caught me out, it's a transposing/conductors score not a usual concert pitch study score (*grumbles.)
A while ago some friends and I (at least two, honest) were discussing the possibility of a movie about the Second Viennese School, who should we cast in the major roles?.
Well, I've expanded the concept somewhat to include a few more composers, some 'modernists' more or less. (or perhaps a 'post-modernist' where Cage is concerned and Debussy and Mahler are more like pre-modernists or something).
I would have included more but after searching around some composers didn't seem easy to cast (Xenakis, Boulez, Feldman, Ligeti and others).
Some 'levity' for those long winter nights anyway, 'enjoy' (if you can name all the composers and their actor 'doubles' in the picture you win a special prize, click on the image above, here is a hint, match the images to the names in the tag list).
Oh and thanks to Ross's The Rest Is Noise blog for reminding me about the Second Viennese School 'movie' concept (via his post about Susan Sarandon's slip of the tongue at the recent Golden Globes).
Elliott Carter: I began to be interested in many of aspects of composition besides the harmonic structure. I felt that if I used a very - not simple, but easily manipulated harmonic structure then I could focus on other aspects of composition, like the spacing of chords and musical characterisation.
And you see one of the very basic problems of all this is I'm really writing contrapuntal music so that these chords are seldom notes played at the same time. And already this ends up causing a conflict of purpose. The problem has always been for the me the desire for a kind of contrapuntal and polyrhythmic structure, which couldn't sound the chords as simultaneous attacks. It involved all kinds of intellectual conflicts. I mean if you have one line going one way and another line coming against it, how do you decide which of the intervals you consider part of the structure?
John Link: And how do you resolve those kinds of questions?.
EC: I resolve them in different ways. Sometimes, for instance, I would just establish one chord and have all the different lines play only those notes. Or play those notes for a short time and then change one of the intervals and gradually move into another chord. I've tried every kind of thing I could think of. And in the end also, I found that the other side of it was that using many chord patterns led me to passages I didn't like.
JL: How so?
EC: I just didn't like the sound of them. So then I worked around until I found passages I did like, even if it didn't follow any of these systems exactly. All through my compositions there are moments when I did things that I thought sounded better than what this chord system produced, because it seemed more in character with what I wanted. There were many different intentions fighting together which in the end soon made me feel that maybe this system was not as useful as it had been to me and that there were other matters I was more concerned with. So I simplified my vocabulary and made it into something more restricted.
In an interview published in 1990 he said he had never seen Howard Hanson's'Harmonic Materials of Modern Music', and downplayed the influence of Forte on his own work. And while Carter may have benefited from the works he did consult, he clearly found them inadequate, otherwise he would never have undertaken the laborious task of compiling the Harmony Book.
An iconoclasitc desire to go his own way may have been one motivating factor, particularly given his attempts to distance himself from the 12-tone practice of Babbitt, Martino and others in the 1960s and 70s. But Carter had other reasons as well. One has to do with his working methods.
Carter sketches incessantly, often making a thousand or more pages of sketches for a single twenty-minute composition. Frequently he will re-copy a passage several times as it takes shape, preferring to put on paper changes that he could easily keep track of in his head. Looking through Carter's manuscripts one gets the feeling that the act of putting musical ideas on paper - of moving the pencil across the page - is his preferred method of getting to know his materials, and an important stimulus for his imagination.
Writing out the chords of the Harmony Book himself may have served a similar purpose, giving Carter the opportunity to become thoroughly familiar with each chord through the process of writing out its subsets and supersets.
In playing 'Melodien', however, all concerned must realise that the basic beat covers a diversity of metre; when he plays soloistic melodies or ornaments each instrumentalist must give a more or less independent, 'elastic' interpretation to his line; it must have an individual inner vitality and a dynamic and agogic shape of its own, which runs contrary to the barring and the beat.
In short, each part must 'breathe' individually. Exceptions, played without rubato: a) when two or more instruments are rhythmically coupled in unison, in octaves or in other intervals: b) subordinate passages such as pedal points and ostinato patterns. Entrances of the parts must occur precisely: only afterwards does the slight rubato take effect.
It's nearly a year since complement.inversion.etc went 'online', or, 'live' and as you can see above (click the picture for a larger image) the blog has been something of an international 'hit' (visited by 'folks' in 75 countries).
However, all is not well, I really need to increase my marketing spend in some areas, the Middle East and Africa are looking a bit threadbare, as is Central Asia, and something of a personal disappointment is the blog's failure to have any impact in two of the Baltic states (can you see which ones?).
Also I note that no one in Papua New Guinea has bothered to visit, and South East Asia in general could be somewhat more social (Laos?, hello?!, guys?).
Well, i'm not complaining but there is room for improvement, who knew anti-exoteric contemporary music ramblings could be so popular?.
btw, if you don't get the pun post title, shame on you, it's a play on the execrable 'Rocking All Over The World' by Status Quo (or simply, 'Status', as they are known round my way).
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