Perspectives of New Music articles from January 1993

Perspectives of New Music archives from January 1993

Why complexity? (part 1) (guest editor's introduction) (Complexity Forum)
January 1, 1993... The desire to assemble a collection of essays and pieces revolving around the notion of musical complexity arose primarily as a result of purely personal concerns, most of them stemming from my activities as a composer of what some have called...

Il tempo della figura. (Complexity Forum)
January 1, 1993... In his poem "Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror" John Ashbery says of dreams: They seemed strange only because we couldn't actually see them And we realized this only at a point where they lapse Like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up Its...

The tactility of time. (Darmstadt Lecture 1988) (Complexity Forum)
January 1, 1993... In spite of the strange, portentious-seeming title, you should not think of this talk as being some sort of hermetically self-enclosed object. Some of you have, I suppose, attended Darmstadt in earlier years and will thus be aware of the...

Form-figure-style: an intermediate assessment. (Complexity Forum)
January 1, 1993... One of the most unfruitful arenas of confrontation in recent compositional aesthetics has been the question of style and its rationale. The more the general climate of opinion has tended towards embracing some version of panstylistic pluralism,...

On complexity. (Complexity Forum)
January 1, 1993... As Nietzsche once wrote, "to define a thing is to begin to lie about it." It is not my intention to lie to you this evening, nor even to swamp you in half-truths. But I have a difficult subject to deal with, and as I start I have only one word...

Mere complexities. (Complexity Forum)
January 1, 1993... Some years ago, a few days after a concert in which I had included Luciano Berio's splendid Sequenza IV, I received in the mail a polite note from a member of the audience. I have the letter still. In it my listener suggests that I include in...

The complexity of experience. (Complexity Forum)
January 1, 1993... It seems to me that the essence of experience lies not only in its process but also in its particulars, and the interesting artist is one who tries to capture those particulars as accurately as possible. The artwork reflects the uniquenes of...

The minimalist aesthetic in the plastic arts and in music. (Minimalism Forum)
January 1, 1993... Minimalism," as a characterization of music composed by La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass, among others, has been criticized for its inaccurate and misleading connotations. Wim Mertens, for example, asks whether "the...

La Monte Young's 'The Well-Tuned Piano.' (Minimalism Forum)
January 1, 1993... La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano may well be the most important American piano work since Charles Ives's Concord Sonata - in size, in influence, and in revolutionary innovation. Significantly, both immense works were developed through...

States, events, transformations. (Ligeti Forum)
January 1, 1993... In my early childhood I once dreamt that I could not make my way to my little bed (which had bars and for me signified a haven) because the whole room was filled with a finely spun but dense and extremely tangled web, similar to the secretions...

Interval and form in Ligeti's 'Continuum' and 'Coulee.' (Gyorgy Ligeti) (Ligeti Forum)
January 1, 1993... Continuum for Harpsichord (1968) and Coulee for organ (1969) represent a distinct category in Gyorgy Ligeti's work, one in which patterns of pitch and interval evolve gradually and smoothly beneath an articulative surface that behaves, as he...

The pattern-meccanico compositions of Gyorgy Ligeti. (Ligeti Forum)
January 1, 1993... Introduction to the Meccanico Compositions Gyorgy Ligeti has commented often on his interest in machinery and his expression of that interest in his music.(1) He claims that the clicking and ticking of the pieces he calls "meccanico"...

Stochastic composition and stochastic timbre: 'GENDY3' by Iannis Xenakis. (Computer Music Forum)
January 1, 1993... Abstract GEND[UPSILON]3 by Iannis Xenakis is a stochastic music work entirely produced by a computer program written in 1991 by the composer himself at CEMAMu. The work GEND[UPSILON]3 is the continuation of the series of stochastic...

The UPIC system: origins and innovations. (Computer Music Forum)
January 1, 1993... The Origins of the UPIC System The idea of the UPIC system goes back to 1953-54, when Iannis Xenakis wrote music or orchestra, using graphic notation for representing musical effects that were too complicated to be specified with...

Supplementary sets and regular complementary unending canons. (part 4)
January 1, 1993... 8. Multiplicative Transformations of Supplementary Rhythmic Classes In this section we shall study the effect of multiplication by a rational number, as well as the effect of condensed multiplication applied to one of the classes in a pair...

The "endless round." (Jonathan Bernard on Edgard Varese)
January 1, 1993... The interaction between Jonathan Bernard and me may seem more like two people shouting across a Kuhnian divide, hardly able to hear each other, than like a thoughtful debate of musical issues. That effect might have been mitigated if I had...

1992 Warsaw ISCM. (International Society for Contemporary Music festival)
January 1, 1993... The 1992 edition of the "World Music Days," sponsored by the International Society for Contemporary Music, was held in Warsaw this past May. It is rare for one of these annual events to be hosted by an Eastern European nation. In fact, there...