Fear of Music: Visual Art vs Music

Perhaps an interesting book here (I haven't added it to the now world famous Complement.Inversion.Etc shop because it might not be that interesting, I haven't read it, I might do at some point)

Writer/Composer David Stubbs wonders why people 'get' Modern Art like Mark Rothko's but don't 'get' contemporary, avant-garde music like Stockhausen's and Feldman's, listen here on the BBC's Today programme site, including some audio from the programme and some extracts to listen to of pieces Stubbs recommends.

I sort of agree with Stubbs, that contemporary music should be appreciated in the same way as modern art, however, there would be a downside, one thing that is valuable about contemporary music is its resistance to commercial appropriation (commerce being arguably, the most dominant force on the planet, for better or worse.)

I don't want to draw out some extended Adorno like argument about how great it is to resist popular paradigms and so on but I think it's worth mentioning that having some forms of music or art which don't appear in TV commercials or as background music in hotel bars and so on is a good thing.

It's like a musical wilderness or green belt land, somewhere you can go without seeing a Macdonalds or a Barrett home or a billboard advert for underwear or car insurance. In this sense contemporary music is certainly not elitist as it is sometimes claimed, it's our music, not something that can be co-opted and sold back to us as a cliché (perhaps I have tempted fate, expect to see a new iPod advert featuring one of Berio's sequenzas or something)

By the way I am not suggesting commerical music is bad or immoral by comparison (that would be silly), just that there is a place for music that is outside of mainstream discourse, we don't have to feel sorry for contemporary music or seek to change the situation.

While being at the cultural margins relative to the mainstream has its problems - e.g lack of resources, scores going out of print, lack of performances and so on - the plus side is more than a compensation arguably.

Either way, it's a win-win situation in my opinion, if contemporary music suddenly becomes the new pop, fine, if it stays in the margins, fine. I don't see any reason to complain. Foucault said it far more elegantly some time ago (I've quoted this before on this blog, I'll probably do so again.)

'..Painting in those days was something to be talked about; at any rate, aesthetics, philosophy, reflection, taste - and politics, as I recall - felt they had a right to say something about the matter, and they applied themselves to it as if it were a duty: Piero della Francesca, Venice, Cezanne, or Braque. Silence protected music, however, preserving its insolence.'

Michel Foucault: 'Pierre Boulez, passing through the screen'; Aesthetics Vol 2, Essential works of Foucault 1954-1984.

Quote For About Two Thirds Of The Way Through February

Mauricio Kagel

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's Kontakte, 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.

The Music of Mauricio Kagel; Björn Heile (pg21)

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).

Quote of the Month (3) 12/2008

Page from Stockhausen's Studie II

'The generation of rhythmic material was only one side of the problem: its notation also proved a challenge. The more complex it became, the less exact the result in actual performance, so that Stockhausen was able to describe notation as dependent on "uncertainty factors" occuring within fields whose size was relative to the complexity.' 26

26. This, as Ligeti noted, had been a problem since the early twentieth century: see dRV (D), 38-40.

Source: Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics pg139 (M.J. Grant).

Stockhausen, Gruppen, Video, Rattle, Carewe, Harding, CBSO, Etc

Yes indeed, a video of Stockhausen's Gruppen performed by the CBSO conducted by Simon Rattle, John Carewe and Daniel Harding. I'm not sure what year this was but it was performed somewhere in Birmingham as part of the 'Towards The Millenium' project/concert/something (in the late 90s then presumably).

Not sure who owns the copyright to this or where the footage came from but it's there to be seen so get it while you can, Andrew Clements of the Guardian was disappointed back in 2001 that this performance 'never found it's way onto disc', well now it has, sort of.

Via the excellent Aulaelectroacustica blog

[if you own the copyright to this and are selling it somewhere etc then let me know and i'll remove the link, my apologies in advance]

Discovering Electronic Music

Good radio documentary on electronic music by the BBC here.. (part of their excellent Discovering Music archive)

Alwynne Pritchard takes us on a journey through the rich and colourful landscape of electronic music with composer Jonathan Harvey discussing his Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco and pioneering works by Varese and Stockhausen.

The BBC is grateful to Professor Michael Clarke Director of the Electroacoustic Music Studio at the University of Huddersfield for his assistance in making this programme, and in particular for his permission to use his innovative software analysis of Jonathan Harvey's piece which features in chapter 6 of the book Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music, edited by Mary Simoni.


Stockhausen score image from the blog 3282