Perspectives of New Music articles from January 1999

Perspectives of New Music archives from January 1999

TOUCHING UP THE PAINT OR A COMPLETE VINYL RESIDING? REFLECTIONS OVER META- SCIENTIFIC PROBLEMS IN MUSIC THEORY.
January 1, 1999... [...]we are prisoners caught in the Framework of our Theories; our expectations; our past experience; our language. [1] In the realm of architecture, the fictional is always only one aspect of the total whole. A building is not purely a...

IN PRAISE OF WILLIAM ALBRIGHT.(Obituary)
January 1, 1999... PAUL GRIFFITHS, in his New York Times caption to the September, 1998 obituary notice about the death of William Albright, announces "William Albright, 53, Composer of Ragtime Music for the Organ." Indeed! True, of course, but far from...

IN MEMORIAM WILLIAM ALBRIGHT.
January 1, 1999... THE POET THOMAS LYNCH has written that "we bury our dead and then become them." Many composers might well aspire to live up to that line in the case of William Albright--but that makes it all the more imperative not to gloss over his whole self...

REQUIEM FOR BILL ALBRIGHT.
January 1, 1999... BILL ALBRIGHT was a muscular musician. Muscular in his courage to pin-point essentials and to communicate them without apology, muscular in his insistence that I speak the truth with my music, and that without compromise, muscular...

THE DYAD SYSTEM (PART ONE).
January 1, 1999... THE DYAD SYSTEM is a generalization of a way of hearing. It is primarily a vertical way of hearing, where collections of notes, implicitly or explicitly, delineate areas or moments of specific "harmonies": pitch simultaneities that have...

A GEOMETRIC APPROACH TO PCSET SIMILARITY.
January 1, 1999... IN A 1990 ARTICLE, Eric J. Isaacson compared and evaluated a number of efforts by well-known music theorists to construct a meaningful measure of pcset similarity based on interval-class content (Isaacson 1990). Though Isaacson's criteria...

A SEVENTIETH-BIRTHDAY FESTSCHRIFT FOR KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN.
January 1, 1999... (PART THREE) (GUEST EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION) After a period of materialist temptation, to which the soul almost succumbed, and which it was able to shake off, the soul is emerging, refined by struggle and suffering. Cruder emotions, like...

"...How CREATION Is COMPOSED": SPIRITUALITY IN THE MUSIC OF KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN.
January 1, 1999... IN AN INTRODUCTORY LECTURE to his choral composition Litanei 97, Karlheinz Stockhausen outlined the three most important aims and orientations of his work: [1] 1. to form the music in absolute freedom, independent of any exterior rules,...

DONNERSTAG AUS LICHT: A NEW MYTH, OR SIMPLY AN UPDATING OF A KNOWLEDGE?
January 1, 1999... Let us choose for a faith the most useful, since we are free and we become our belief. Villiers de L'Isle-Adam INTRODUCTION CAN WE DEVELOP a hermeneutic of Donnerstag aus Licht (Thursday from Light) if this contemporary opera...

THE COMPOSITION OF MEANING: CONSTRUCTION AND SEMANTICS IN KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN'S LUZIFER -- GRUSS VOM SAMSTAG AUS LICHT.
January 1, 1999... THE SOBER IDEA of coherence is one of the central concepts in the composition of new music in the twentieth century. The linguistic transmission of this central aesthetic conception, which represents a modern relic of unity in diversity as a...

AND DASEIN BECOMES MUSIC: SOME GLIMPSES OF LIGHT.(Karlheinz Stockhausen)
January 1, 1999... That is just the point, of life in general: that something is always coming up that we previously didn't know about. This is the meaning of all existence whatsoever! Existence is built upon the idea of the creative. Stockhausen IN THE...

FOUR RECENT BOOKS ON STOCKHAUSEN.(Review)
January 1, 1999... WHEN AN AMERICAN COLLEAGUE recently asked if I thought that scholarly interest in Stockhausen had diminished in the last decade or so, I was taken aback, for my impression was that the opposite is true. Examining the authoritative Stockhausen...

ERRATUM.
January 1, 1999... The Editors of Volume 36, no. 2 wish to apologize for any inconvenience or confusion regarding the copyright notice on page 146 and the final acknowledgment which appeared on page 254. The credit line was taken from a contract from Penguin...