Ligetti, Berio, Nono, Feldman, Takemitsu

[MiltonParker]

I am a big fan of the drone, and might just make that mix, but that's for another thread

though I will offhandedly recommend this if you like Playthroughs:
http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/...last=garlo&artistfirst=&arraynum=384&limit=20

as well as plug this ILM thread (as always with long ILM lists, find the people who post albums you like, and look for their other posts)

http://ilx.wh3rd.net/thread.php?msgid=4210891

& while it's almost a crime to post an excerpt from a unified one hour piece like Hykes' 'Hearing Solar Winds', track three is a good example of what you're getting into. no electronics; just seven voices with precise overtone control in one cathedral. five star record.

http://s6.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=108YF1BXD0TQL3B51ETPV0RSUL

and here's the performance that sold me on feldman for life, 30 CDs later still in my top 5: 'four pianos' from 1957, played by le bureau des pianistes, from 'pieces for more than four hands' on Sub Rosa, criminally out of print. four people all play the exact same score, a series of staggered chords, but they each choose their own tempo, so the chords fall increasingly out of sync with each other. yet they all just keep landing in place. not unlike Eno's Pachebel ditty two decades later, but much more mysterious. I love playing along.

http://s36.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=0WJ8G0VVZLQU414WCM926KN95I

 

[Woebot]

I am a big fan of the drone, and might just make that mix, but that's for another thread

though I will offhandedly recommend this if you like Playthroughs:
http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/...last=garlo&artistfirst=&arraynum=384&limit=20

as well as plug this ILM thread (as always with long ILM lists, find the people who post albums you like, and look for their other posts)

http://ilx.wh3rd.net/thread.php?msgid=4210891

& while it's almost a crime to post an excerpt from a unified one hour piece like Hykes' 'Hearing Solar Winds', track three is a good example of what you're getting into. no electronics; just seven voices with precise overtone control in one cathedral. five star record.

http://s6.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=108YF1BXD0TQL3B51ETPV0RSUL

and here's the performance that sold me on feldman for life, 30 CDs later still in my top 5: 'four pianos' from 1957, played by le bureau des pianistes, from 'pieces for more than four hands' on Sub Rosa, criminally out of print. four people all play the exact same score, a series of staggered chords, but they each choose their own tempo, so the chords fall increasingly out of sync with each other. yet they all just keep landing in place. not unlike Eno's Pachebel ditty two decades later, but much more mysterious. I love playing along.

http://s36.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=0WJ8G0VVZLQU414WCM926KN95I

thanks for ALL those mp3s Milton. Brilliant! I shall enjoy them on holiday

 

[bruno]

I like the opposites linking thing... but it's not just a 20th C phenomenon is it?

well, you have beethoven. but i think that is more the romantic temperament, where opposites are put on the table precisely so they can recover their value on a scale (a value lost to war or whatever garbage they had to put up with at the time).

in contrast, in a lot of this music opposites are melded: fused to the point where they are one and the same. so you interpret this music as you will (brutal, anguished, serene, etc) but essentially it's neutral, there's no judgement coming from it. very un-western! and maybe another reason it never caught on.

 

[labrat]

Aside from the sound I love graphic scores, however I have enuf problems with standard notation so I just experience them as imagery.
here's a nice one from Xenakis (who the wire have a primer about today-although no-one buys it anymore apparently)

 

[Rambler]

I would absolutely LOVE to hear a drone mix. I've long wondered whether some sort contemporary/avant garde mix was possible, but a) I have no decks b) I have no skills c) I don't think it would work - but I'd love to hear someone try...

My tips:

[beware - plugs ahead]

I'll give anything from 1960s Poland, and 1970s-80s Hungary a try. Everyone knows about Penderecki, Gorecki, Ligeti and so on, but there are loads of composers doing really mad, hit-and-miss things throughout this time - just enjoying it, which is a great tonic against the too-earnest Stockhausen/Boulex/Nono circuit. The Wire primer on Xenakis this month sort of gets it right in calling this stuff 'punk'. Sort of right, anyway - there's much more to it than that. Some names: Rudolf Maros (Eufonia 1-3); Kazimierz Serocki; Tadeusz Baird; there's an LP of Andras Szollosy/Zsolt Durko/Attila Bozay in MVE Notting Hill (£5) which I can strongly recommend as a prime sample of what the Hungarians were up to in the early '70s; Laszlo Melis is a Hungarian minimalist I'd like to know more about... and on and on.

I've said their names before on ILM, but Tigran Mansurian and Avet Terterian are both great (blogged)

Far too much - a whole world and more.

Bartok - yeah, influenced by Hungarian folk music (and later other countries too), but in a very sophisticated way, so it's not just naff pseudo-world music.

Kancheli (and those others that were mentioned) - all post war. You might be interested in the late Ian MacDonald's essay on him.

Milton: thanks for the link and those MP3's. More Feldman always welcome!

 

[Rambler]

Labrat - I don't think that's a graphic score in the sense that you can perform from it. The Polytopes were sort of sound and light installations, and I think that's one of Xenakis' sketches of what he was trying to do with the sound waves. Pretty cool though!

 

[shudder]

thanks for all the MP3s! The Hykes is beautiful. How do people do this with their voices? I remember first hearing Stimmung in a music class ("Orientalism and Primitivism in Western Music"), and I was blown away, but I never pursued that sort of music.

As for drone, I never really new where to start. What are the sort of classical, seminal drone works?

 

[Rambler]

yeah it would be very interesting to talk to Ligetti... is he still alive? there must be interviews and such. I'm a look for 'em. word.

He is, but he's very frail these days and doesn't travel much. There are lots of interviews available in books, journals etc. - best place to start is the bibliography in the back of this

 

[monsterbobby]

do you think formal innovation is a higher pursuit than emotional engagement?

Foucault had an intersting line on formalism (in an essay on Boulez), saying it had always been an enemy of the oppressive state regimes of the 20th C. (stalinism, fascism etc..), he refers to it as a "power of transformation...force for innovation, locus of thought.". I think to attempt to think and expore the boundaries and formal possibilities of the medium your working with and then to try and expand them is always gonna bekinda daring and exciting. emotional engagement, on the other hand, can't really be trusted. too easy to fall into sentimentality, or a kind of quietist 'forget politics man let's just talk about our feelings'sort of attitude. Having said that there does seem to be a lot of talk at the moment in new music circles about how after all the formal innovations of the 20th c, and all the new sounds we have introduced into the pallette, perhaps it's time we started using these sounds to express something, especially amongst minimalists like Sergei Zagny or Michael Blake. Blake;s kind of intersting in regard to the whole Bartok and folk music thing. He says (I went to a lecture by him at Goldsmiths eatrlier this year) that whereas Bartok was attempting to preserve his native folk traditions, in South Africa (Blake;s home) the folk traditions are already well preserved so you can move onto what he calls the 'next stage', experimenting with and deconstructing those traditions - his own work is largely orchestral but heavily infulenced by mbiras and uhadi bows...

as for blissbloggers question about politics and the 'avant-C', no-one seems to have mentioned Fred Rzewski who was very 'engaged' shall we say. actually he bears intersting comparison to Cardew, Rzewski's move from co-founding MEV to The People United Will Never Be Divided (take note Sham69 fans) mirroring Cardew's from Scratch Orchestra to socialist songbooks, and so perhaps the later career of Rzewski might provide some insight into what Cardew might have got up to had his life not been so tragically cut short...

 

[blissblogger]

always wondered where Cornelius Cardew was actually, yknow, like, listenable.... his life story sounds wonderfully Citizen Smith-y.

on a totally superficial commodity-fetishist tip, i love the covers of 20th Century classical etc releases.... sort of severe and gorgeous, often with really nice pieces of modern art on them. sometimes i've almost bought them just for the covers (especially as the non-electronic avant-classical stuff you can find dirt cheap)

that's a point actually---
why do you think there is so much more of a hipster market/fetish for electronic/concrete avant=classical and less for the stuff still using orchestral palette, choral etc?

it seems quite superficial (and it's a superficiliality i'm guilty of too--like them futuristic electronic burbles, but even the most extreme orchestral stuff seems less appealing on account of the symphonic palette)

have we mentioned Messiaen yet? got a bunch of his things (go very cheap) but he's never quite clicked

 

[Rambler]

Messiaen was the don. He's an excellent example of the formalism vs emotionalism question: he was a seriously formalistic composer (he 'invented' total serialism before his pupils Boulez and Stockhausen did - and it was pieces of his that inspired their early works and set up their careers as heads of the avant garde), and wrote a book-length treatise on his personal musical techniques; he was one of France's best musical analysts as well (that's what he taught Boulez and Stockhausen in fact, not composition).

Yet his music is the most brashly, vulgarly ecstatic of any of the 20th century canon. I think that's the trick to listening to him - you can be aware of all the systems that are operating behind his music (and once you are aware of them, they're not that difficult to hear), but what it all comes down to is the sound itself. He certainly isn't to everyone's taste, but if you just think of it as this maximimalist orgy and let your shoulders drop and wallow in it, it's pretty bloody fantastic.

 

[monsterbobby]

that's a point actually---
why do you think there is so much more of a hipster market/fetish for electronic/concrete avant=classical and less for the stuff still using orchestral palette, choral etc?

perhaps simply because the electronic stuff has become part of an official canon of antecedents for techno, ambient, electronica etc. Aphex will namecheck stockhausen but not brian ferneyhough....

 

[zhao]

in contrast, in a lot of this music opposites are melded: fused to the point where they are one and the same. so you interpret this music as you will (brutal, anguished, serene, etc) but essentially it's neutral, there's no judgement coming from it. very un-western! and maybe another reason it never caught on.

interesting take. for me a great example of opposites melding is Latin music. All those old Rumba and Samba tunes... they are very sad and very happy at the same time... subject matter is usually depressing as hell, and when you hear the melodies it makes you want to cry, but at the same time it's like "PARTY TIME!" It's always confused me a little, not knowing how to react. I guess the only thing you are sure about is you want to get drunk

 

[zhao]

here's a nice one from Xenakis (who the wire have a primer about today-although no-one buys it anymore apparently)

I love that. even though it's not exactly a graphic notation system as someone pointed out... modular systems are the cat's meow. a composer friend of mine made giant drawings of a dragonfly's wing, mapped out the coordinates, and transcribed the numbers from the angles and shapes, etc, into a symphony... music school geeks think this sort of thing is cliche but I still think it's cool.

yeah the wire... still on the fence about re-subscribing.

 

[zhao]

thanks for all the MP3s! The Hykes is beautiful. How do people do this with their voices? I remember first hearing Stimmung in a music class ("Orientalism and Primitivism in Western Music"), and I was blown away, but I never pursued that sort of music.

As for drone, I never really new where to start. What are the sort of classical, seminal drone works?

yeah that Hykes record on Harmonia Mundi gives me the chills every time I put it on. otherworldly. like I said, it's a meeting of Tibetan, Tuvian, and Mongolian overtone singing traditions with an European sensibility... you should probablly get some Tuvian throat singing records.

classic drone... well the Tibetan Monks are the Original Gangstas on this block I think we'd all agree. Indian Classical has a lot of drone going on. Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening band... Charlemaign Palestine and Elianne Radigue... all these post-minimalists. what I recommend is Poppy Nogood by Terry Reiley, and if you can find it (for less than $500), The Well Tuned piano by La Monte Young. to me it's not minimalism...

here are 3 mp3s by a friend of mine living in Singapore... very nice Eastern modal drone work:

http://www.ruccas.org/index.php?Hypocrisy International

 

[zhao]

Aphex will namecheck stockhausen but not brian ferneyhough....

he does mention Satie though.

as much as I love the bleeps and hums, the sound of a cello is to die for...

 

[monsterbobby]

i think aphex's interst in satie would be more about his approach to the piano (and his iconoclastic personality). There are certain similarities between some of satie's piano pieces (gymnopedies, vexations, etc) and some of the beatless 'twinkly bits' on drukqs. i think both also had an interst in writing 'piano' music that 'couldn't' be played on a piano by a human..aphex prgrammed his parts on a computer, satie wrote for player pianos (and had one in his house).

 

[Rambler]

i think aphex's interst in satie would be more about his approach to the piano (and his iconoclastic personality). There are certain similarities between some of satie's piano pieces (gymnopedies, vexations, etc) and some of the beatless 'twinkly bits' on drukqs.

The Satie namecheck might also be because together with Darius Milhaud, Satie invented 'furniture music' in the 1920s, ie ambient. For this reason (and other equally radical/mad ideas that he had) he's commonly referenced by peope like Eno, John Cage, etc and that's a lineage Aphex sort of relates to.

i think both also had an interst in writing 'piano' music that 'couldn't' be played on a piano by a human..aphex prgrammed his parts on a computer, satie wrote for player pianos (and had one in his house).

I didn't know this about Satie. Are you thinking of Conlon Nancarrow? I'd bet Aphex knows some of his music. Super-complex rhythms that had to be punched onto piano rolls because you couldn't write them down or get any one to play them otherwise. Bit like the sort of manipulations you can do digitally now.

 

[monsterbobby]

i love Nancarrow's player piano studies. but i don't think i'm confusing the two..Vexations was considered unplayable until Cage performed it, some years after Satie's death. a friend who visited Satie's house (now a museum) fairly recently told me there was a player piano there (perhaps it was a recent addition, but i got the impression that it was part of the original furnishings, perhaps it was just a 'toy', but it seems to fit into Satie's compositional obsessions, i think even if he never published any actual mechanical rolls its presence islikely to have had some influence on his work).

 

[Rambler]

You might be right - I don't know if Satie owned a player piano, although I'm pretty sure he didn't write anything for it that got published.

The thing about Vexations is that it's only difficult because Satie asks for the music to be repeated 840 times: even Cage had a few other pianists to help when he first played it. (There's also the fact that before Cage, no one took the piece particularly seriously.) There's something mechanical/non-human about repeating the piece so many times though, and Satie was all for ironing out the emotional human-intervention side of things in his music.