21st century classical music

[San Antone]

Love this ~

Michael Finnissy - North American Spirituals

https://www.youtube.com/v/JvBEB5ycE70

"North American Spirituals" from volume 1 of "History of photography in sound", played by Marilyn Nonken

[kishnevi]

This morning's listening before errandizing for the day:
[asin]B00FLBA0PI[/asin]

Vigorously dissonant, as opposed to generally atonal.  Works date between 2000 and 2009. Fandango can be categorized as one of those pieces with a noteable ostinato:  the tonal original keeps fighting off bursts of atonality and dissonance, but makes itself heard all through the piece.  The liner notes are by the composer and give an extended description of the music itself, but are too long to copy for here.  So I will quote the Amazon blurb which is a condensation of the blurb on the back cover of the CD.

Over the last decade the music of the Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra has become internationally admired, and this has led to prestigious commissions and performances around the world. Fandangos was heard at the BBC Proms in London and employs a harpsichord work attributed to Antonio Soler as a departure for a richly inventive orchestral fantasy. The dramatic Sinfonía No. 4 was described by ArtsNowNashville as 'a textbook example of how this composer breathes new life into old forms. The piece is basically a classic Germanic symphony imbued with Spanish sensibilities and reinvigorated with new harmonies and rhythms.' Robert Schumann is subtly evoked in Carnaval, five character pieces that explore mythical creatures, both menacing and serene.

[San Antone]

Alistair MacDonald ~ Scintilla (2014)

Soundcloud clip

"Dr. Alistair MacDonald is a composer & performer based in Glasgow. Much of his work is collaborative; working with performers, artists and choreographers from different media and backgrounds, he makes work for performance, broadcast and installation internationally.

Current projects include Strange Rainbow, a live electroacoustic duo with Scottish harp player Catriona McKay (performances include Celtic Connections, sound festival in Aberdeen and the Norwegian Film Festival) and collaboration, with Carrie Fertig, on Glimmer for glass percussion, electronics and live flame-working, recently selected for the Coburg Prize for Contemporary Glass.

Recent works include The Imagining of Things with Brass Art (video and audio installation) for Huddersfield Art Gallery and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Mitaki (string quintet and live electronics) for the Scottish Ensemble, and a number of acousmatic works.

Interactive, performative installation  Sensuous Geographies, in collaboration with Sarah Rubidge (shown in the UK and USA) was was awarded a Creative Scotland Award in 2002;  Silver Wings and Golden Scales (2007), an installation in collaboration with Jennifer Angus, was commissioned for the Chazen Museum of Art in Wisconsin;  SeaUnsea (2006), an interactive dance and video work with programmer Chiron Mottram, choreographer Carol Brown and architect Mette Ramsgard Thomsen was premiered at Dance Umbrella 2006 at the Siobhan Davies Studios. Other commissions include music for The Scottish Ensemble, The Paragon Ensemble, BBC Radio Scotland, Reeling and Writhing, the Australian ensemble Elision, choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh and Theatre Cryptic.

He teaches composition and directs the Electroacoustic Studios at the RCS where he was made a Fellow of the Royal Conservatoire in 2012."

[torut]

Roger Luke DuBois - Vertical Music (2012)



Vertical Music (Video on Vimeo)

A chamber piece written for 12 players, lasting 4 1/2 minutes. Each musician was filmed individually in several takes using a high-speed (300fps) camera and a high definition analog-to-digital audio recording setup. When played back at 30fps, total time is ~45 minutes.

The music is ethereal. The video of 12 musicians filmed and edited by DuBois is also very beautiful.

[Philo]

An extremely interesting piece composed by Dobrinka Tabakova (born 1980):

Suite in Suite in Old Style for viola, strings and harpsichord (composed in 2004)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VXRCNdNc5c

[San Antone]

Roger Luke DuBois - Vertical Music (2012)



Vertical Music (Video on Vimeo)

The music is ethereal. The video of 12 musicians filmed and edited by DuBois is also very beautiful.

Interesting idea.

[San Antone]

erdem helvacioglu - timeless waves

Soundcloud clip

Excerpts from the album. Now available at Experimedia.net. This is #9 in Sub Rosa's limited edition Framework series -- an extension of their Concrete Electronics Noise series.

Erdem Helvacıoğlu was born in Bursa, Turkey in 1975. He is one of the most renowned "contemporary electronic music" composers of his generation in Turkey. His music has been broadcast on national radios such as BBC, ABC, WDR and Radio France, among others. He has received commissions from the 2006 World Soccer Championship, T-B A21 The Morning Line, Borusan Center For Culture & Arts, Arter "Space For Art," The Association For The Art Of The Harp, Novelum Contemporary Music Festival, International Istanbul Biennial (IKSV) and the world-famous new music ensemble Bang On A Can-All Stars. His sound installations have been included at museums and galleries such as the 10th International Istanbul Biennial, Los Angeles Track 16, Indonesia Soemardja, Köln Museum Für Angewandte Kunst and London's Menier Gallery. His film music has been heard at Cannes, Sarajevo, Locarno, Seoul, São Paulo, and Sydney film festivals and he received the "Best Original Soundtrack" award in the 2006 Mostramundo Film Festival. He has received prizes for his electroacoustic compositions from the Luigi Russolo, MUSICA NOVA and Insulae Electronicae Electroacoustic Music Competitions.

Timeless Waves, originally composed for a 47 channel/53 speaker diffusion system running on The Morning Line, is a sonic work based on six basic human emotions. The CD is a stereo version of this multichannel work. The piece was inspired by W. Gerrod Parrott's book Emotions In Social Psychology and has been commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (T-B A21) for The Morning Line -- an interdisciplinary art project by Matthew Ritchie, Aranda/Lasch and Arup AGU -- and premiered in May 2010, when the project was exhibited at Eminonu Square in Istanbul. Sonically, Timeless Waves is based on the timbres of Togaman GuitarViol, Gibson Les Paul electric guitar, sine waves, various analog pedals and hardware fx processors. The music combines elements from genres such as electroacoustic, drone, noise and contemporary music blended with minimal melodies.

[Philo]

Kasia Glowicka:

"In 2010 Glowicka and Flores collaborated again with the 15 minute performance piece RETINa inspired by the pioneering science of Étienne-Jules Marey that impacted cinema and the early documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnXNiacV4tg

[San Antone]

Kasia Glowicka:

"In 2010 Glowicka and Flores collaborated again with the 15 minute performance piece RETINa inspired by the pioneering science of Étienne-Jules Marey that impacted cinema and the early documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnXNiacV4tg

Very nice.

[San Antone]

Robert Ashley recently died, and this is belated acknowledgement, one of his best works, IMO ~

Robert Ashley ‎~ In Sara, Mencken, Christ And Beethoven There Were Men And Women

https://www.youtube.com/v/bcfXWv4vPg0#t=27

Some memories of those who worked most closely with him.

[Octave]

I am sorry to see Robert Ashley go.  I still return to his AUTOMATIC WRITING as a reliably unsettling experience when I am in a dark-room headspace.

[San Antone]

BJNilsen - Londinium

https://www.youtube.com/v/0hAqVP8H9ms

BJNilsen writes this about the work:

"In 2012 I received a scholarship from the Leverhulme Trust for a one-year Artist in Residency at the UCL Urban Laboratory in London, to introduce sound as an art practice to urban scholars and students. As part of my research I decided to derive the city. I spent full days and sometimes nights sweeping the streets and its interiors for sound - walking and listening with no route or intention. A city without sound does not exist. Every location, passageway, alley, road, park, and pub contains its own world of isolated sound events and patterns - the sound of a shopping bag caught by the wind on the asphalt of a busy street when a bus passes by. What seems to be merely a bus is also a cacophony of sounds, a sound world in itself: hydraulics, breaks, interior noise, honking, public announcements, humans, rolling bottles, cell phones, mp3 players. The rattle of an air-conditioning unit in an old pub toilet gradually develops its broken down sound over many years, creating a raga for it own demise. Nobody seems to hear it. Is it there? The choice of sound varies; it's a personal selection, some sounds made it into this composition, many hours of recording didn't. Sound composition can alter space and time and transform a specific location and experience into an imaginary world."

BJ Nilsen (b,1975 Sweden) Is a sound and recording artist. His work is based on the sound of nature and its effect on humans. He primarily uses field recordings and electronic composition as a working method. He has worked for film, television, theatre, dance and as sound designer. His newest album presented here is "Eye Of The Microphone" [Touch # TO:95, 2013] - a somewhat surreal audio rendition of the sounds of The City of London. Currently also working on The Acoustic City, a book publication with CD, co-edited with Matthew Gandy, [2014, JOVIS Verlag, Berlin]

[San Antone]

Adam Stansbie ~ Escapade

Escapade was composed using tiny fragments of sound. At the start of the piece, the individual fragments are not perceived. Instead, they are so densely packed that they (perceptually) fuse into much larger structures; one hears the source recordings, which are largely, but not entirely, orchestral. As the piece progresses, the individual fragments become increasingly prominent; they no longer fuse into larger structures and are subsequently perceived as discrete units or entities. In this respect, Escapade was inspired by pointillist painting – a technique in which small, distinct points of colour are used to form a larger image.

Escapade received First Prize in the Third International Competition of Electroacoustic Composition and Visual Music, Destellos Foundation, Argentina, 2010 and was a finalist Finalist in the VIII International Competition for Composers "Città di Udine", Italy 2010.

Soundcloud clip

[torut]

Susan Philipsz - Study of Strings (2012)


[audio]http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/soundings/common/content/11/media/sp_studyforstrings.mp3[/audio]

Study for Strings is a contemporary interpretation of an eponymous 1943 orchestral work by Pavel Haas (Czech, 1899–1944), who composed the score while imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. The Nazis filmed a performance of the completed work at the camp as part of the 1944 propaganda film Teresiendstadt. Almost immediately after filming was completed, Haas and many members of the prisoners' orchestra were killed. The conductor, Karel Ančerl (Czech, 1908–1973), survived the Holocaust, and after the war he reconstructed the composition.

For her 2012 reworking, Philipsz has isolated only the viola and cello parts. Recorded onto multiple channels, the piece is a note-by-note deconstruction of the original composition, replete with fraught silence. These charged absences call attention to the fact that other instruments—and the musicians who played them—are absent.

[San Antone]

william basinski nocturnes

https://www.youtube.com/v/9VjVvBbVTP4

Material created in 1979-1980 but only recently revised and released.

[San Antone]

José Miguel Fernández - État Intermédiaire (2010) for ensemble and electronics

https://www.youtube.com/v/FAyNx1rHjIQ

[torut]

Robert Ashley recently died, and this is belated acknowledgement, one of his best works, IMO ~

Robert Ashley ‎~ In Sara, Mencken, Christ And Beethoven There Were Men And Women

https://www.youtube.com/v/bcfXWv4vPg0#t=27

Some memories of those who worked most closely with him.

I heard Ashley for the first time and got drawn in. Thank you. Did he influence Paul Lansky?

[jochanaan]

I observe that many of these composers are also performers and can improvise. Am I right in thinking that only since Y2K has electronica advanced enough to allow live, real-time improvisation?

[some guy]

No.

That started as soon as someone figured out that the tape recorder was not just a tool for making compositions with but an instrument as well.

And since then, more and more devices for reproducing music have been played as instruments, turntables, cassette players, CD players, even PA equipment.

And laptops? Whew. The most versatile instrument yet.

Let everything that can make a sound praise the Lord kinda thing, eh?

I think that what advances in technology have meant is that things that were difficult in the 50s are now easy. But there was live electronic improv in the fifties. Maybe even earlier. I ran across some reference to a show that Hindemith and Krenek (I think it was Krenek) put on in 1930, a live show using variable speed turntables to make music with. I've lost that reference. Last time I tried to Google it, what came up was my first post where I had mentioned that. Not useful!! I want the reference!!

[torut]

a live show using variable speed turntables to make music with. I've lost that reference.

Is it John Cage's Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939), using variable speed turntables with frequency records? But it was notated, not improvised. I don't know if anyone around that time used it to improvise, but it could have been possible, I guess.