Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973

Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973

Douglas Kahn

Language: English

Pages: 396

ISBN: 0520267451

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The journal Source: Music of the Avant-garde was and remains a seminal source for materials on the heyday of experimental music and arts. Conceived in 1966 and published to 1973, it included some of the most important composers and artists of the time: John Cage, Harry Partch, David Tudor, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, and many others. A pathbreaking publication, Source documented crucial changes in performance practice and live electronics, computer music, notation and event scores, theater and installations, intermedia and technology, politics and the social roles of composers and performers, and innovations in the sound of music.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and articles formed around these. introduction   7 For instance, the articles on groups in Issue 3 came about because we observed and wanted to chronicle that composers and performers were making avant-garde music, some with scores, some without scores, but always in dynamic interaction. The issue has several pieces by members of groups, and the core articles on the New Music Ensemble, the ONCE Group, Musica Elettronica Viva, and the Sonic Arts Group. They were the prominent avant-garde

function of a complex process of not totally rational developments within a chain of cause and effect extending from the original conception of the work, through the graphic representation as “score,” to performance realization as actual sound. It is difficult to describe this process because at every point it is more or less a combination of rational and irrational signs and actions. Not irrational in the “mindless” sense but in the sense that the immense number of major and minor decisions

tradition . . . like Africa.  ASHLEY: Yes, but I think we have to accept the fact that, as composers, the aural tradition is becoming very much more important.  STOCKHAUSEN: Naturally.  ASHLEY: And that the more important the aural tradition becomes the less important the composer becomes.  STOCKHAUSEN: He has a new function.  ASHLEY: Yes, he does.  STOCKHAUSEN: He does more research now.  ASHLEY: He’s more than that; he’s a sort of director.  AUSTIN: He does both.  STOCKHAUSEN: He no longer

quarrel with that man in Tempo. I agree with everything he says about music . . . with one difference. I don’t like it. I want to change it. Stravinsky, you see, is alive, and Boulez now “knows every­thing.” He knows how to be silent about Stravinsky. He has learned everything, hasn’t he? Yes, indeed. Everything to his advantage. Forgive me for injecting this jeremiad, but your question really carried me away. When you are involved with a sound as a sound, as a limited yet infinite thought to

picture. Agreed. But does the inventor of the camera sign the photo? The one who snaps the picture does.—Masterpiece = monument = composition: suspect today, it probably will issue no. 3   97 endure (that’s what it is about: nonperishability). I would not want to dismiss the possibility of new monuments.—Whenever monumentbuilding becomes unbearable there is this more fragile, perishable art: performer’s music = composition become perform­ance = a kind of “instant composition” (only one step

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