Max Erwin

University of Malta, School of Performing Arts, Faculty Member

University of Leeds, School of Music, Graduate Student

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Lisa Colton

University of Liverpool

Eliot Bates

Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Katherine Butler Schofield

King's College London

Holly Rogers

Goldsmiths, University of London

Anne C. Shreffler

Harvard University

Egil Bakka

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Javier Marín-López

Universidad de Jaén

Timothy Morton

Rice University

Paulo Castagna

Universidade Estadual Paulista "Júlio de Mesquita Filho"

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Papers by Max Erwin

Cyberbored/Culture-Jammed : the short-circuit of musical progress

Nuove Musiche

Who is Buried in Webern's Tomb? Orientations in the Reception of Serial Music from Messiaen to Stockhausen

Perspectives of New Music, 2020

The category of 'post-Webern' music has recently undergone a significant critical reevaluation, c... more The category of 'post-Webern' music has recently undergone a significant critical reevaluation, challenging both its applicability to composers associated with "citadels of the avantgarde" such as the Darmstadt summer courses and its coherency as a unifying aesthetic concept. Within this re-evaluation, the present study is a work of clarification. Through historical and structural analysis, it proposes a genealogy of Webern reception which, in its initial phase, extends from Olivier Messiaen, to Karel Goeyvaerts, Jean Barraqué, and Michel Fano, on to Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1949 to 1952, a musical practice fundamentally separate from preceding discourse on the Second Viennese School dominated by Theodor Adorno and René Leibowitz. It furthermore suggests that the assimilation of this practice into a linear (albeit dialectical) narrative of historical process resulted from, in part, the projection of Adornian formal categories onto an alien musical tradition. In the programme for the 1959 Donaueschinger Musiktage, the Swiss composer Jacques Wildberger writes: "Tell me your attitude to Webern and I will tell you who you are." 1 By this date, this would hardly be the gauntlet toss that Wildberger might have thought: most composers of the so-called "Darmstadt School", for whom Anton Webern was purportedly the singular figure of their critical reception, had almost entirely ceased to demonstrate any sustained interest in Schoenberg's pupil. Less than a decade prior, Webern's musical practice was heralded by numerous cultural gatekeepers -festival organisers, radio producers, music critics, and the press -as the foremost exemplar of a universally valid musical language of the avant-garde, pointing the way to a generalized adoption of serial procedures to multiple individual parameters of composition. This image of Webern was bitterly contested by an established generation of composers, musicians, and philosophers, most prominently René Leibowitz and Theodor W. Adorno. 2 Their grievances were at once analytical and ideological, claiming that the newly 1 Quoted in Walter Kolneder, Anton Webern: An Introduction to His Works, trans.

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Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2021

Tempo, 2021

Darmstadt was a bit different this year. The original 1946 courses had 120 registered participant... more Darmstadt was a bit different this year. The original 1946 courses had 120 registered participants in situ; I was told that the number this time around was larger (around 140), but only just. As an announcement for the final post-concert wrap stated, these were the COVID-19 courses. So: much smaller, much more concentrated, with almost every performance streamed online, and every other seat in the concert hall marked off with a weird sort of police tape with the Darmstadt logo on it. It's difficult to write about these things without lapsing into world-historical rhetorical posturing, as if the best lens to view the series of overlapping catastrophes we are living through is a biannual summer course for what, for better or worse, continues to be referred to as new music.

Rubble Music: Occupying the Ruins of Postwar Berlin, 1945–1950 by Abby Anderton

Notes, 2021

Michael Finnissy’s three-point plans

Michel Fano, Lulu et après?, Éditions Aedam Musicae, Collection Musiques XXe–XXIe siècles, ed. François Meïmoun, 2020, 180 pp. €27

how replicable are its results going to be for the composer or performer in the field? This is a ... more how replicable are its results going to be for the composer or performer in the field? This is a question to which Fallowfield has dedicated a large part of her research. Her process involved enlisting two cellist colleagues to try and play sustained multiphonics, regularly swapping their three cellos between them to see if they could also be performed on unfamiliar cellos. Fallowfield has also conducted listening tests with music students to see if their perception of the constituent pitches was stable and continuous with the spectral analyses she had made. In this way, she has refined a list of 19 reasonably replicable multiphonics for each string. At the risk of outing myself in a major journal, I’d like to confess that before being asked to write this review my understanding of multiphonics was at about the same level as my understanding of witchcraft. When given multiphonics to perform in scores, I could usually create a passable result through what felt like luck and force of ...

Jenna Lyle - Jenna Lyle, TAPE TAPe TApe Tape tape. Jenna Lyle. Parlour Tapes (Bandcamp)

Tempo, 2021

Donaueschingen 2017

Tempo, 2018

Donaueschingen is three (and a half) days of nearly constant concerts; this review is around 3000... more Donaueschingen is three (and a half) days of nearly constant concerts; this review is around 3000 words. I have divided it into two sections. The first details the concerts that either I or the Donaueschingen audience considered to be of particular note, one way or another. The second deals with approaches to musical practice and issues raised by certain talks and performances. The date of composition for all of the pieces mentioned below is 2017 unless otherwise stated.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, aus LICHT, Holland Festival, 31 May–10 June 2019

Tempo, 2019

Why Karl Heinz [sic] Stockhausen entitled his music for oboe, bass clarinet, piano, and four perc... more Why Karl Heinz [sic] Stockhausen entitled his music for oboe, bass clarinet, piano, and four percussionists Kreuzspiel is incomprehensible. Following a system of ‘static music’, the indefensibleness of which Theodor Adorno already demonstrated the previous year to its Flemish inventor, the sound of the piece goes far beyond that which we have been accustomed to call music. That he finds a few devotees to celebrate his work … doesn't change things a jot. Every idea finds its prophets. And its sect.Albert Rodemann, Darmstädter Tagblatt, 23 July 1952.Quoted and translated in Martin Iddon, New Music at Darmstadt, 84–85. In February 1971, so the story goes, a barefooted figure with a wizard's staff handed Karlheinz Stockhausen a copy of the Urantia Book, a dense, hugely esoteric text describing the spiritual place of mankind in the universe through chapters like ‘Socializing Influence of Ghost Fear’. Most people would probably have politely thanked the figure and then escaped as ...

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Stefan Prins - Stefan Prins: Augmented. Nadar Ensemble, Klangforum Wien, Yaron Deutsch, Stephane Ginsburgh. Kairos, 0015044KAI

Tempo, 2019

tion throughout. Inasmuch as one can situate a piece through a recording, Apartment House manages... more tion throughout. Inasmuch as one can situate a piece through a recording, Apartment House manages to convey an inviting, permissive space – one that accords with Eastman’s scantily clad manuscript. A space of possibility and agency. Listen to it loud, or not. Playfully, or not. Wear a dress. Take off all your clothes. Eat some soup. Make some for friends. Or don’t. Think about what it means to play Femenine in 2019. Think about race, sex, class, disease and fame. Or stop thinking. Do this or that. Or something else. Play. Live. Or not.

Johannes Kreidler, Mein Staat als Freund und Geliebte. Oper Halle

Tempo, 2018

Johannes Kreidler has written an opera. This is, alongside Alexander Schubert making Ensemble Int... more Johannes Kreidler has written an opera. This is, alongside Alexander Schubert making Ensemble Intercontemporain sync up to strobe lights and Jennifer Walshe making Lucas Fels do a silly dance, a symptom of the inevitable institutionalisation of former iconoclasts who less than half a decade ago were still being championed as figures who, in Michael Rebhahn's polemic terms, ‘resigned from New Music’. But Kreidler does not seem to feel threatened by this. Indeed, his willingness to adopt the official genre of opera without qualification – in contrast to Ferneyhough's ‘thought opera’, Lachenmann's ‘musik mit Bildern’, and the more common designations of ‘music theatre’ or ‘musical action’ – signifies just how comfortable he is with his position as an established composer.

Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2018

Tempo, 2018

If this review contained a single sentence on every piece that was performed – let alone every le... more If this review contained a single sentence on every piece that was performed – let alone every lecture, discussion or open forum – from 14 to 28 July in Darmstadt, it would easily be book-length. Like, big book – maybe not Taruskin big, but definitely Rutherford-Johnson big. I have, for the most part, written about the bits that particularly struck me and tried to make sense of them both in themselves and in the context of the courses. This was especially difficult to do this year, because there really was no singular takeaway being presented, advocated or otherwise offered, which is quite remarkable, but makes narrowing down review material even more fraught. None of the pieces discussed below get the full description and analysis that they deserve – this is just a first attempt to make sense of things that happened.

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Wet Hot Kranichstein Summer: Darmstadt 2016

Tempo, 2016

The 2016 Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik took place from 29 July to 14 August. That's ... more The 2016 Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik took place from 29 July to 14 August. That's more than two weeks of concerts and lectures. As anyone who has been to a New Music festival knows, you can't see everything, and you'll end up missing stuff that winds up being extremely important.

Here Comes Newer Despair: An Aesthetic Primer for the New Conceptualism of Johannes Kreidler

Tempo, 2016

This article seeks to clarify the aesthetic precedents for New Conceptualism generally, and Johan... more This article seeks to clarify the aesthetic precedents for New Conceptualism generally, and Johannes Kreidler's work in particular. Pursuant to this end, I examine how Kreidler's approaches to musical and political material are ideologically indebted to his teacher, Mathias Spahlinger, whose dictum that New Music can be socially relevant without resorting to political clichés is taken by Kreidler into the digital age. Finally, by means of a conclusion, I attempt to provide a broad examination of how Kreidler's aesthetic concerns differ from – and sometimes radically conflict with – those other composers who are grouped under the New Conceptualism letterhead.

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Björn Heile, Charles Wilson (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music

This is a very large book. It is over 500 pages of 1.5 spaced A4 paper in very small (11-point, I... more This is a very large book. It is over 500 pages of 1.5 spaced A4 paper in very small (11-point, I believe) font. Its editors, Bjorn Heile and Charles Wilson, have assembled a dense phalanx of scholars offering interpretations and methodological approaches to the question of musical modernism which often diverge and mutually contradict. Some, like J. P. E. Harper-Scott, present what is in essence a primer to a much more detailed and expansive methodological framework. Others, like Mark Berry a...

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Cyberbored/Culture-Jammed : the short-circuit of musical progress

Nuove Musiche

Who is Buried in Webern's Tomb? Orientations in the Reception of Serial Music from Messiaen to Stockhausen

Perspectives of New Music, 2020