News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) Art by Orb/KLF member James Cauty was removed by municipal workers in Brighton, England, when it was mistaken for graffiti (nytimes.com, ink-d.co.uk). … (2) The Guardian on noise abatement and urban soundscapes: “Visual aesthetics are a major part of the planning system with strong guidelines determining what is acceptable [...]
These are only excerpts, not full pieces, but any survey of the experimental music of World War II (the subject of all five Disquiet Downstream entries this week) would not be complete without mention of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, or Quartet for the End of Time. Messiaen composed the eight-movement work [...]
No WWII-era composer’s work so closely mirrors the mechanization and industrialization inherent in the war effort as that of Conlon Nancarrow. It will always be a repertoire of virtually unplayable player piano roles (well, unplayable by human hands) for which he is best remembered. Not that some human performers haven’t risen to the challenge. Margarent [...]
Charles Amirkhanian’s Ode to Gravity radio program broadcast in December 1987 an evening of John Cage’s music, in part recorded in 1983 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Among the pieces featured were several that Cage composed during World War II, including “Double Music” (1941), a collaboration with Lou Harrison, heard here in a performance [...]
The half-spoken, half-notated text that accompanies the percussion instruments in Harry Partch’s Barstow (1941) may be a bit off-putting to folks whose primary listening more easily serves as background. But speaking of background, all that twangy percussion back there is essential to the history of homemade music. Partch created an extensive collection of instruments in [...]
“What did you do during the war, Daddy?” It’s a question that sums up the collective national consciousness of World War II, whether that is a matter of heroism, guilt, victimization or some combination thereof. Ken Burns’s new WWII documentary, The War, is running currently on PBS. It documents the engagement from 1939 through 1945. [...]
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) An illustrator has taken the concept behind Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” and applied it to his daily self-portraits (snooks.livejournal.com). … (2) The Wild Beast is the name of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) new music pavilion. It was designed by the Los Angeles-based [...]
If the overture to a symphonic work can be understood to prefigure what’s to come, then how about the sounds the orchestra makes before it even gets to the overture?
That’s a question implicit in Favorite Intermissions, a recent release by composer, musician and phonographer (that is, field-recording artist) Christopher DeLaurenti. The album contains six [...]
The unlistenability of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is one of the great overstatements of pop culture. Some 30-plus years have passed since its release, and we now live at a time when the noise of Merzbow and the Boredoms and countless death-metal bands regularly draw sold-out crowds; many listeners today came of age to [...]
Quote of the Week: “It is hard to leave the subject of Minimalism without mention of Count Basie, master of the art of leaving out.” That’s Bernard Holland in his entry as part of a roundup, last week, of the New York Times’ classical-music critics’ take on recorded milestones in minimalism (nytimes.com). The list of [...]