CeReNeM Journal, which comes out of University of Huddersfield’s Centre for Research in New Music, has put out a call for papers “on the subject of temporalities in music, with a particular emphasis towards experimental and minimal musics.” More details are, of course, at the link, and the submission deadline is February 17th, 2012. Issues One and Two of the Journal are well worth your attention as well.
INCITE Journal of Experimental Media is “dedicated to the discourse, culture, and community of experimental film, video, and new media.” They have a short time left in their kickstarter campaign to fund the printing costs of their third issue, “addressing the generational shifts and divides in today’s experimental film, video, and new media spheres.” I can’t imagine failing to find material of relevance to the field of experimental music in this issue. The previous issue, Counter-Archive looks fascinating as well, for example as it applies to the distribution/consumption of scores and performances in this age of pdfs and mp3s.
Another Call for Papers: Noise Please has come from the trans-disciplinary Interference Journal. The bullet points of suggested approaches are clearly the result of a great deal of consideration, and invite a great deal more. My favorite bullet point is the last one: “Inaudible Noise.” Abstracts are due December 16th.
I’d love to be in about four different places this weekend. I’m getting as close as possible to that through a combination of driving, flying, internet radio streaming, friends in other places, and delayed gratification.
A 3-day festival called Alvin Lucier: A Celebration will take place at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. It includes an exhibit called Alvin Lucier (and His Artist Friends) which will run through December 11th.
Concurrent to that will be the soft opening of LISTENING GALLERY on Lincoln Road, “a multichannel sound art lab for the creative engagement of acoustical public space designed and directed by sound artist gustavo matamoros.”
Meanwhile, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Sound Art Theories Symposium will run on November 5th and 6th. Reading the abstracts alone has been quite thought-provoking.
And if that weren’t enough, the Cut & Splice festival, called Grúndelweiser, features members of the Wandelweiser and Grúpat collectives. Hear and Now will feature the festival on their November 5th and 12th shows.
Just before the weekend is a festival and symposium on The Late Music of Morton Feldman at the University of Pittsburgh, and immediately following it is the Basel Sinfonietta’s first performance of From Scratch, which will also be performed in Zürich and Huddersfield.
FIELD FEST is the official launch of the ‘Sounds of Europe’-project initiated by Q-O2 (Brussels), MTG/Sons de Barcelona (Barcelona), IRZU (Ljubljana) and CRiSAP (London). ‘Sounds of Europe’ acknowledges and explores the increase of field recording activity in music, art and science.
I’ve reconfigured the categories of the blog for more effective navigation, and possibly most of all as a prompt to myself of the types of posts that might be useful. I’ve also changed the configuration of the sidebar.
The Donaueschinger Musiktage start tomorrow. Each year, they release the CDs from the previous year. The festival starts tomorrow, so here we go:
Take a look through the radio programming to see what you’ll want to catch from this year’s festival. My guess is that the JetztMusik programs listed at the bottom will each be available for a week, but not the live broadcasts.
There’s quite a lot that I look forward to hearing.
To add to the feast, a number of last year’s events are available to hear online via New Music Up Late:
Now that most radio shows are back in full swing, there are a number of interesting programs scheduled for the month. Let me know of other broadcasts you are aware of, either by email or through this form. I’d be glad to add them both to this post and to the radio listing on the sidebar. More information about regular shows can be found on the radio page.
Philip Cashian: Bone Machine
Laurence Crane: Movement for Ten Musicians
Martin Suckling: Candlebird
Christopher Fox: KK
Bryn Harrison: Six Symmetries
Colin Matthews: Night Rides
11th
10pm PST iTunes stream
(available here until September 25)
John Cage: “26’5’988″ for Pianist and a String Player (1954-55)
David Behrman: Canons for Piano and Percussion (1959-60)
George Brecht: “Incidental Music” (1961)
La Monte Young: “(to Henry Flynt)” (1960)
Johannes Fischer: “Einige Versuche, Dinge in Gang zu setzen”
Joseph Finlay: “A Little Book of Dreams”
Friedemann Amadeus Treiber: “Relief”
Mike Svoboda: Music for trombone, percussion and piano
George Aperghis: “Le corps à corps”
Daniel Schnyder: “Worlds beyond”
Jon Abbey’s AMPLIFY 2011 festival starts up tonight in New York at The Stone, and runs through September 17th, ending at Issue Project Room. Believe me, it’s a big deal.
The program order, and also the order of the broadcast, is:
Michael Finnissy: Aijal
Liza Lim: Invisibility
David Lumsdaine: Kangaroo Hunt
John Rodgers: Amor (from Inferno)
Percy Grainger: Random Round
Richard Craig, flute
Peter Veale, oboe
Peter Neville, percussion
Kerry Yong, piano
Séverine Ballon, cello
The first hour of the broadcast includes a conversation with Daryl Buckley. At the concert, the biggest surprises for me were the Rodgers and Grainger pieces. John Rodgers’ Amor involved wildly imaginative articulations and interactions, including, most theatrically and very effectively, the flute and oboe playing into one another in a progressively deepening V. Fortunately there is another ELISION video of Amor available on YouTube (this time with flutist Paula Francis).
The ensemble brought a strange, beautiful, and untamed sound world to Percy Grainger’s Random Round. In their hands, it sounded as if it had been written in 2011, rather than 1915. The total freshness of this listening experience do great credit to the imaginations of the performers, as well as the composer. I’ve heard and written about Liza Lim’s Invisibility before. This was the first time that Séverine Ballon performed it by memory, and it had a different quality of performance. It is wonderful to have a chance to hear the transformations that the piece allows, and even invites, from one performance to the next.
The second hour includes discussions by Julian Day (of “New Music Up Late with Julian Day”) with two Australian composers, Newton Armstrong and John Chantler, who also discusses Café OTO, a key new music venue in London. The program closes with Finnissy’s Red Earth.
Following up on my interviews with Mary Bellamy and Liza Lim, the composers she worked with on solo pieces for ELISION’s transference CD, I spoke with Séverine Ballon about collaboration, improvisation, and how she goes about finding new sounds on the cello.
How did you begin looking for these new sounds? Was it an accident, or curiosity, or a study, or some combination? What is your motivation in continuing to seek them out?
Even when I was young, I always had a personal way of playing the cello. I was never the typical classical player who wants to have one beautiful bright sound (although I think it is very important to be able to play like that). I always felt attracted to some sounds more than others—the fragile, unstable, breakable sounds are much richer to me. Sounds are colors and materials. Playing music is like cooking, or creating a sculpture with your hands. You feel how strong the vibration is, like earth, metal… Also, in playing a lot of new music, there is the influence of composers and also of the time we are living in, what we hear, see… When you play pieces, you discover sounds, you like them and you start getting them into your palette. Of course I am influenced by the literature I am playing.
As an interpreter and as an improviser, it was important for me to go into sounds and to discover where they take you, and also discover by them new materials. In the last two years I started working for myself on multiphonic and air sounds, really breakable sounds—also sounds really at the edge of sounds, mixing with air, or delicate. I am also working on split sounds on the cello, that can be with preparation on the instrument or with special bow techniques and fingerings. Right now, I’m planning to do a research project on these sounds. I try to improvise every day. It is very important in my practicing. I collect them in a notebook: I write all my sketches, almost like a diary. This work is not something I want to show in front of an audience. It is more a personal research. To be an improviser makes you look at the music in a different way. You focus more, not on the notation, but on what the composer wanted to write behind the notation, or the first idea. Improvising also changes the way of looking at musical structures in written music. My improvisation work helps me as an interpreter. But of course this work doesn’t mean that you “improvise” while you play written music. It is of course very important to be as exact as possible with the text.
What do you look for in a sound? What kinds of things have been surprising?
I’m looking for the vibration in a sound. I’m interested to find sounds which have inner life in them. You become aware of all these broken rhythms and noises and harmonics which are in a sound, almost like making things visible you would get in a microscope. Parallel to my interpretive work, I’m working as an improviser with a few artists, like Alexander Schellow, who draws. His work is really about vibration and density. It’s very interesting to compare the way he has to find a structure with vibrations, and the way I’m just organizing sounds and leaving them to create their own life. Sometimes improvisation is not about playing. It can be about leaving things to exist. I am also working with the photographer Evi Keller, who captures the vibrations of lights and creates a rich and poetic world with them.
What is important for you in your improvisation?
When I’m improvising, it’s very important for me to have a structure. It’s the thing I’m focusing on the most. The structure appears quite often very spontaneously, with the material I use. Because I improvise every day, I’m sometimes trying to give myself some directions, to start with materials I would not use instinctively—today take this sound to try to do something with it.
Can you talk a little bit about your collaborations?
When I’m working with composers, I like to show them what I found, also because quite often composers have no idea about how a cello could sound and how rich it is. Also, I like to have this open collaboration, in which the interpreter really gives ideas and some inspirations and a path. I love when composers get inspired by things you show them, and get ideas with them that I would never have had. I am now working with Rebecca Saunders on a solo. She likes to meet every few months to try sketches, to hear me play and improvise. It is a wonderful collaboration.
Included below are videos of three different performances of Liza Lim’s Invisibility. It’s fascinating to see and hear the differences between the performances. There is another chance to hear Ballon play the Invisibility live, coming up at the City of London Festival on July 15th. I’ll be there.
