Pousseur ’ s Huit Etudes Paraboliques : Musical and Social Contexts

2009

In many ways, all non-representational arts have distanced themselves to a greater or lesser extent from their potential public over the centuries due to the fact that art and life have been largely separated. For example, those who have supported the notion of art for art's sake for over two hundred years have been rather explicit about this separation. Nevertheless, most human beings still enjoy and find it natural to make links between the artistic and lived experience. The inclusion of the sound as potential musical material has not only led to new and radical forms of soundbased music making, but also to the opportunity for life to become part of music. This talk focuses on the impact, perhaps unintended, Pierre Schaeffer had when he coined the term, écoute réduite and considered it to be of importance in terms of the success of what is known today as acousmatic music. An opposing view is presented, namely that of the use of real-life sounds across the innovative sound-based musical spectrum, primarily those genres employing electroacoustic or related new media approaches. It will be suggested that sampling is one case where musical experimentation may actually lead towards increased appreciation and artistic participation in new forms of music making. Regardless of this suggestion, the talk's aim as evidenced in its conclusion is one of synthesis, not opposition. Preface One of the idées fixes throughout my career has been my fairly lonely attack against today's reality of many contemporary artists working their way into a corner due to a lack of connection with a public larger than that of their peers. It is almost as if artists are actively working towards various art musics' own demise. Things need not be so gloomy, however. This talk will take advantage of my view that through sampling some forms of musical experimentation may find greater access than has been achieved by a good deal of contemporary 'academic music' around the globe. The reason for this is sample-based music's ability to connect with human experience, that is, in the sense of using 'recycled' samples from the real world. The discussion will be structured as follows. It will commence with some thoughts regarding the relationship between art and life, both historically and in terms of today's art making to set the context. Then I shall investigate some perceived tensions between reduced and what I call heightened listening. The section that follows concerns music as 'organised samples' discussing issues related to sample-based work which may lead some of you to believe that I am taking sides, but this is only a step towards the talk's conclusion which is one of synthesis. The key focus of this talk, as it is in my scholarly and artistic work, is that of 'soundbased music'. This term is defined as follows: sound-based music typically designates the art form in which the sound, that is, not the musical note, is its basic unit (Landy 2007a, 17). One may query why notes are being excluded here and, also, why the more common terms electroacoustic music and sonic art are being ignored. To cut two long stories short, it was proposed in this book and its successor (Landy 2007b) that sound-based music possesses its own paradigm, as does note-based music. This paradigm is highly associated with that of other new media arts and takes into account both poietic and esthesic aspects. The reason to avoid the two more widely used terms, discussed in my two recent books at length, has to do with the term, electroacoustic music being used inconsistently and also its inclusion of certain notebased works. The issue with sonic arts is that the term can be used as an excuse for works to be considered not to be music, a view that leaves me feeling uncomfortable. The discussion will privilege the reception of sample-based works above the oftendiscussed areas of construction, tools and channels of dissemination. The reason for brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

Proceedings of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference, Florence (Italy), June 20-23, 2018. www.ems-network.org, 2018

Although electroacoustic music was known in the first half of the 20th Century for its liberation of sound, not much has been stated about its social impacts. This research focuses on some singularities of the creational and reception processes in electroacoustic music. Since composers have the potential to become performers as well as instrument designers, electroacoustic music is perhaps the first genre that blends its compositional process with performance practice and instrument design into the same structure, which can be modular, mutable, and custom designed for each piece. In terms of reception of artworks, Fixed-Media works (aka Acousmatic Music) in particular resignify the concepts of copy and reproduction in electroacoustic music. The theories and studies of Walter Benjamin, especially his understanding of the theories underpinning film and photography, are central references for this research as they can be applied to electroacoustic music. Thus, this text focuses on the political, social, and cultural changes found in Fixed-Media musical works, from independent composers' music creation to todays audience's access to the original work.

2016

Music facilitated by technology has led to an unprecedented development in performancepractice: the ability to generate sound without the physical gesture required when performing on an acoustic instrument. Response to this development has resulted in divergent performance aesthetic preferences, ranging from the emphasis of acousmatically– based listening practices to the development of electronic instruments that replicate the type of human gestural interaction present when using acoustic instruments. This paper examines the incorporation of both previously described aesthetics on a continuum as compositional devices that provide dramatic and narrative elements to electroacoustic works with live performers. Two recent electroacoustic works composed by the author are discussed: Memento Mori (2014) for saxophone and live electronics, and Ecclesiastical Echoes (2015) for piano trio. Analytical focus is placed on how the geographical displacement, or lack thereof, between the agent cre...

This paper discusses some implications to electroacoustic music composition and reception of the connections of the genre with science and technology. It is argued that the cross-disciplinary nature of the electroacoustic context opens up a path for the appropriation of concepts that reinforce but paradoxically deny the dichotomy objective versus subjective, when the influence of Cartesian dualism in musical thought has already been identified and criticised within traditional western musical thinking. A misplaced emphasis on the separation between subject and object that assumedly characterises scientific methodologies is discussed as the root of a general disregard for the reception end of the compositional process. This separation is also identified with the fragmentation of the holistic musician into performer or composer, and electroacoustic media are suggested as a possible basis for reversing this process and facilitating a different ethos. It is suggested that electroacoustic media provide a unique substratum for the emergence of new ways of making, experiencing and thinking about music. However, it remains to be seen if the genre will evolve towards some sort of 'classical music of the future' or merely an idiosyncratic form of the mid-late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

2005

One of the highlights of every New Music festival which we attend is the banter that goes on between artists and audiences about what we have experienced together. The Inaugural Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference was a way to formalize these discussions for the 7 th Totally Huge New Music Festival of 2005, and it was a privilege to have been able to attend a conference about New Music in the midst of it actually happening. The Conference was opened by the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Communications and Creative Industries, Edith Cowan University, Professor Robyn Quin, and it provided an opportunity for conversation and debate on New Music practice as it is and as it can be-to enjoy a gathering of diverse minds and music that provided a mixture of composers, academics, sound artists and performers alike. This collection of papers and artist presentations is a reflection of some of the wood used to stoke the fire that made up the three day Conference.