Transcript Music Since 1950 - HCC Learning Web

Music Since 1950
Electric Music
• Technological advances in the 20th century enabled
composers to use electronic means of producing sound.
• After the Second World War, magnetic tape became
available for the creation of music by recording sounds and
then manipulating them in some way.
• When the source material was acoustical sounds from the
everyday world, the term musique concrète was used;
when the sounds were produced by electronic generators,
it was designated electronic music.
• After the 1950s, the term "electronic music" came to be
used for both types.
– Examples: Sometimes such electronic music was combined with
more conventional instruments, Stockhausen's Hymnen, Edgard
Varèse's Déserts, and Mario Davidovsky's series of Synchronisms
• The term Electroacoustic music was later coined to
include all forms of music involving magnetic tape,
computers, synthesizers, multimedia, and other
electronic devices and techniques.
• Live electronic music uses live electronic sounds within
a performance (as opposed to preprocessed sounds
that are overdubbed during a performance)
– Cage's Cartridge Music being an early example.
• Spectral music (Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail) is a
further development of electroacoustic music that uses
analyses of sound spectra to create music.
• Cage, Berio, Boulez, Milton Babbitt, Luigi Nono and
Edgard Varèse all wrote Electroacoustic music, often
promoted in "happenings".
• From the early 1950s onwards, John Cage introduced
elements of chance into his music.
• This has resulted in various musical techniques such as
indeterminacy, aleatoric music, stochastic music, intuitive
music, and free improvisation.
• Process music (Karlheinz Stockhausen Prozession, Aus den
sieben Tagen; and Steve Reich Piano Phase, Clapping Music)
explores a particular process which is essentially laid bare
in the work.
• The term Experimental music seems to have been coined
by Cage who was interested in writing complete works that
performed an unpredictable action, according to the
definition "an experimental action is one the outcome of
which is not foreseen”. The term is also used to describe
music within specific genres that pushes against their
boundaries or definitions, or else whose approach is a
hybrid of disparate styles, or incorporates unorthodox, new,
distinctly unique ingredients.
John Cage
• A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use
of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the
post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most
influential American composers of the 20th century.
• Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4’33’’, the
three movements of which are performed without a single note
being played. The content of the composition is meant to be
perceived as the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear
while it is performed, rather than merely as four minutes and thirty
three seconds of silence,and the piece became one of the most
controversial compositions of the twentieth century.
• Another famous creation of Cage's is the prepared piano (a piano
with its sound altered by placing various objects in the strings), for
which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert
pieces, the best known of which is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–
48).
Minimalism
• In the later 20th century, composers such as La Monte Young, Philip Glass,
Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and John Adams began to explore what is now
called minimalism, in which the work is stripped down to its most
fundamental features; the music often features repetition and iteration.
– An early example is Terry Riley's In C (1964), an aleatoric work in which short
phrases are chosen by the musicians from a set list and played an arbitrary
number of times, while the note C is repeated in eighth notes (quavers)
behind them.
– Steve Reich's works Piano Phase (1967, for two pianos), and Drumming (1970–
71, for percussion, female voices and piccolo) employ the technique called
phasing in which a phrase played by one player maintaining a constant pace is
played simultaneously by another but at a slightly quicker pace. This causes
the players to go "out of phase" with each other and the performance may
continue until they come back in phase.
– Philip Glass's 1 + 1 (1968) employs the additive process in which short phrases
are slowly expanded.
– La Monte Young's Compositions 1960 employes very long tones, exceptionally
high volumes and extra-musical techniques such as "draw a straight line and
follow it" or "build a fire".