Let there be writing, not about the body, but the body itself. Not bodihood, but the actual body. Not signs, images, or ciphers of the body, but still the body. This was once a program for modernity, no doubt already it no longer is. —Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus She is known, absolutely—by her blue hair and […]
Tag: Composers
Posted inInterview
Wrangling, Plunging
Beginning with Stockhausen on April 6, “20th Century Radicals” is a new 40-part series about the composers who shaped the previous century. Over the course of 40 weekly episodes, it covers Andriessen and Berio through to Xenakis and La Monte Young, via El-Dabh, Jolas, Murail and Takahashi, and many more. It’s the sort of series […]
Posted inInterview
Unnatural Invisibility
Some composers are celebrated in their lifetimes. Others must wait for history to catch up. A composer faces a plethora of challenges throughout their career, from testing an edgy yet dubious idea or missing a crucial post-concert networking opportunity to simply submitting compositions on time. The odds of slipping into obscurity are extremely high. Add […]
Posted inEssay
The Sacral End
Strange and uneasy, her relation to new music, and in hindsight only growing ever more so. Which is not to say Sofia Gubaidulina did not belong to the field: she carried excellent early modernist credentials handed on from 1950s Moscow, having earned herself a censorship from the Kremlin and, in 1992, the requisite flight into […]
Posted inOpinion
The Work, Naked
The centenary of Pierre Boulez’s birth on March 26 has already had a positive outcome: his music is actually being performed more often this year. More than most composers, he has suffered from being known for something other than his own music, remembered far more as a conductor and a leader of musical organizations like […]
Posted inOpinion
The Hands, Distracting
There’s an image embedded in my head though now lost in the depths of social media. It’s from a minor league baseball game, a promotional night where fans made their own signs and paraded them around the field. And there it was, an ur-meme: “Give Me Ambivalence or Give Me Something Else.” That’s resurfaced in […]
Posted inInterview
The Space of Beauty
The premiere of Klaus Lang’s “tönendes licht” did not take place quite as anticipated. Composed for organ and spatially distributed orchestra, the work was due to be performed at St. Stephen’s cathedral, Vienna, in November 2020. In the end, due to ongoing restrictions brought on by the pandemic, the four sections of the orchestra, spread […]
Posted inInterview
Indeterminate Acts
In 1959, the Smithsonian Folkways label released an album called “Indeterminacy,” a piece that features John Cage speaking, and David Tudor playing mashed-up material from the former’s “Fontana Mix” and “Concert for Piano and Orchestra.” Since comedian Stewart Lee and pianists Tania Caroline Chen and Steve Beresford first decided to perform “Indeterminacy” around 15 years […]
Posted inEssay
Seven Lives
I often think about the life Sibelius led in his remote villa of Ainola. He had stopped traveling to his favorite cities—Berlin, Vienna and London—and must have felt quite lonely and isolated. Perhaps part of the reason he burned his Eighth Symphony was that he didn’t feel connected to the new modernistic trends in Europe. […]
Posted inOpinion
An Expansion of the Project
Artificial intelligence may be able to mimic emotion, but it cannot feel it. It may be able to research the context in which it exists, but it doesn’t know it. AI is based on algorithms, patterns and imitation, so how can it possess creativity? Well, it can’t. But, by embracing what it can do—patterns, pastiches, […]