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Musicworks Issue 110 - Summer 2011 musicworks

Issue 110 Summer 2011

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Alt-Experimental: New Music’s Fragmented Future
This issue of Musicworks explores the evolving multi-genre nature of experimental music. As the millennial generation defines what experimental music sounds like to them, the term gets applied to everything from concert music to electronic dance music. Is all new music, experimental music?


FEATURE ARTICLES

Canada’s New Pop Adventurists: Grimes, Doldrums, Braids, page 20, tracks 4-7
by Jonathan Bunce

Article Summary:
DIY experimental music in the twenty-first century has evolved from its roots in punk and lo-fi pop in the 1970s and on through the ’90s, embracing the same rebellious spirit as modernist composers of the twentieth century. The accessibility of audio software and the internet has allowed a whole new generation to create adventurous, high-fidelity recordings at home. Canada is home to many such new pop adventurists who are still in their early twenties. Montreal quartet Braids’ self-produced album Native Speaker is an astonishing work of ambient pop. Grimes is the moniker of Montreal space-pop artist Claire Boucher, while Toronto’s Airick Woodhead is Doldrums, who creates cut-up psychedelic pop. Many artists of this generation release recordings on obscure formats such as cassette or VHS, and such releases are compiled on the blog weirdcanada.com. Though some of these young artists are destined for careers and others will do it for the love only, there is hope that their recordings may stand the test of time.

Gregory Oh: instigates a new music revolution, page 26, track 10
by Matthew Pioro

Article Summary:
Pianist, conductor, and curator Gregory Oh is involved in some novel projects. His trio of two pianos and percussion, Toca Loca, has created virtuosic genre-defying music that moves in the realms of pop and contemporary classical. Oh’s projects have also included a ballet performed within a video game and a hoax that led to the reinterpretation of a twentieth-century classic. All of these quirky projects contain an underlying motive: Oh wants to make new music interesting and relevant, and he wants concert-goers to listen actively.

Christopher Mayo: composing with new systems, page 36, track 2-3
by Julian Cowley

Article Summary:
Toronto-born Christopher Mayo discusses the terms of his development as a composer, undertaking postgraduate academic study in London while cultivating a personal form of critical self-awareness that helps him grasp where his work fits into the broader picture of contemporary music. He talks of his relationship with past musical practices and the referential associations of instrumental sounds, and acknowledges his distaste for hermetic modernism and the affinity he feels with postminimalist and Totalist outlooks. He identifies the centrality to his own compositional approach of systematic procedures that not only enhance his creative efficiency but also encourage critical reflection. He comments upon his work with English drum-and-bass musician Goldie, and explains what attracts him to the poetry of the late Jonathan Williams.

PROFILE

Casa da Música: builds a home for experimental music, page 14, track 8
by Richard Simas

In 2005 Casa da Música opened in Porto, Portugal. More than a concert hall, the Casa houses three resident ensembles, education programs, a music publisher, a restaurant, and artists in residence. Casa presents 170 concerts a years and its eclectic programming embraces jazz, popular, and experimental musics. The building’s avant-garde architecture, designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, uses concrete, glass, and steel in flat surfaces and extroverted geometry, and was commissioned in response to Porto’s nomination for 2001 Cultural Capital of Europe. Although initially controversial, the design and the Casa da Música institution have come to represent Portugal’s cultural rebirth in the twenty-first century.

DIY

Play your veggies! How to make your own vegetable orchestra, page 44, track 9
by Andrea Warren and Rob Cruickshank

In this summer issue of our DIY, Andrea Warren and Rob Cruickshank urge our DIYers to put down their soldering irons and head out to the garden. We give step-by-step instructions on how to make a carrot slide whistle, an ocarina, and how to make an oboe out of a parsnip and lemon grass.

SOUND NOTES

Sound Bite, page 9: Writer Jason van Eyk profiles contemporary recorder player Terri Hron.

Sonic Geography, page 10: Poet and sound artist Millie Chen takes readers on a sonic journey into a hutong in Beijing.

In the Works, page 12: Sound artist Rachel Wadham in conversation with cellist Nick Storring, discusses her work in progress You are a Great Listener, a blog-based collection of personal recording of found sound.

Visions of Sound, page 32: Visual-sound poet Joerg Piringer has designed an iPod/iPad app abcdefghijklimnopqrstuvwxyz that lets the user create soundscapes in which the user controls tiny letter-shaped sound objects that voice timbre, texture, pitch, rhythm, duration, amplitude, and location in the stereo field in reaction to parameters such as gravity, the letter chosen, and proximity to other letter-shaped sound objects. Nominated for the best artistic app in 2010’s Best App Ever Award, it joins the ranks of powerful applications that use iPod/iPad’s multitouch graphical user interface to produce and control sound.

REVIEWS

Festival: Marc Hyland reports on the Montreal New Music International Festival

Recordings:Joane Hétu’s Récits de neige and Constellation Records

Words:Daniel Kernohan’s Music is Rapid Transportation ... From Beatles to Xenakis on Charivari Press