91 Spring 2005
MAGAZINE CONTENTS
Chantal Dumas :: a passion for listening and for audio art
by Victoria Fenner
Article Summary: Chantal Dumas is a Canadian radio artist from Montreal whose works turn the radio airwaves into an art gallery. Dumas thinks of sound in photographic terms, almost like a film. Using music, narrative, and real-world sounds, she constructs stories that encourage listeners to establish their own sense of a narrative and find their own meanings. Her work has been broadcast around the world on radio, distributed on CD, posted on the Internet, and exhibited in galleries as sound installations. Dumas is entering a new phase of her work now, creating works that take her talent in directions she has not previously gone.
(see CD contents, below)
Christian Wolff :: unsettling the score: compositions that leave plenty to the players'
imaginations
by John Sherlock and Gayle Young
Article Summary: Christian Wolff is associated with the 1950s New York School of composers, sharing with them an
interest in innovative and adventurous forms of music. Much of Wolff’s music is not difficult to play in the conventional sense, but requires an intensity of attention and listening that adds an entirely new and often unfamiliar dimension to the experience. A Wolff piece is a transformative process that leads composer, performer, and listener to examine social conventions of music and pose alternatives. The traditional emphasis on the individual musician as virtuoso is replaced by a listening that goes beyond the self. Wolff was invited as guest artist to Arraymusic’s second Scratch! project in January of 2004, when several of his pieces were performed. John Sherlock interviewed him for Musicworks at that time.
click
here to see CD contents
Jesse Stewart :: notes towards a Canadian remix
Exploring a nation’s history and identity within a vinyl-based virtual acoustic environment
Article Summary: In this article, composer-performer Jesse Stewart discusses connections between the drum set and turntables and describes the creation of a solo piece entitled I am a Canadian, which uses both instruments together. He goes on to discuss plans for the creation of a large-scale musical project that will use turntables and vinyl recordings to examine issues of Canadian history and identity. One difficulty with this project is the lack of representation of women’s voices, First Nations voices, and multicultural perspectives on Canadian spoken word recordings. During the period in which LP records were a dominant medium (roughly the 1950s to the mid-1980s), it would seem that the Canadian voices that the recording industry deemed worthy to record belonged almost exclusively to white men. Stewart stresses the important role that Canadian voices from diverse social, cultural, and gender contexts have played—and continue to play—in constructions of Canada, and stresses the importance of documenting those diverse voices.
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here to see CD contents
commentary :: the immeasurable space of tones
by John Luther Adams
Article Summary: Noted composer John Luther Adams writes about his desire to find that timeless place where we listen without memory or expectation, lost in the immeasurable space of tones. The trajectories of sounds articulate the physical, temporal, and tonal spaces of music. We often think and speak of musical time in terms of space. Horizontal time is the linear flow of events from then into now into not-yet-now. Vertical time is the presence of the moment: here and now. Space is the distance we travel between here and there. The space we inhabit is place. Through patience and deep attention to where we are, we transform empty space into living place.
Is there a purely auditory space? We hear sounds in measurable space. But we perceive sounds less like objects and more like forces. This dynamic quality of sound creates its own kind of space and place. Where the eye divides, the ear connects. In audible space, everything is connected and the listener is always at the centre.
Nownotes :: project SYMPHOSIUM: art and politics (part one)
by: Udo Kasemets
Article Summary: Arts and politics are as old as humankind. They represent two diverse elemental human traits. Arts are rooted in the natural human ability to observe, imagine, invent, and communicate in a uniquely personal manner. Politics stem from the desire to bring certain order to communal and social affairs, mostly by establishing hierarchical power structures of some sort. Arts stand for the execution of individual initiatives, politics for dominance over a collection of human and material resources.
The most unique of human characteristics is the ability to communicate by use of spoken (or written or printed) languages. Words and languages have become the tools that have made possible the evolution of the human species to this point. The most frequently sounded words these days—“war on terrorism,” “homeland security,” “spreading of democracy”—are mere slogans. They lack even the imaginary reality of meaningful words. But their incessant repetition by political leaders (and the reporting media) has endowed them with meanings—however vague—which the politicians now subversively use to conduct current national and international affairs. Is there any way out of this morass into which humanity has been led by persistent abuse of the most wonderful of nature’s gifts to humans, the spoken language? Yes, there is, but only when there is a renewed awareness of our special humanness. The road towards the re-energizing of human inner resources is through the arts.
D.I.Y. music :: your computer as instrument, part 2: software programs
by: Barry Prophet
Article Summary: A follow-up to last issue's column, which offered tips on computer hardware for beginners in the area of computer-assisted music, this month's column focuses on software. The different types of software are described, and the novice is offered guidance in determining desirable programs, with an introduction to trying out software at little or no cost by downloading demos, freeware, and software from the Internet.
CD CONTENTS
Bratislava
1995 / 13’30 by Christian Wolff, performed by the VENI ensemble of Bratislava
Improvisation
2004 / 16:00 by Christian Wolff, piano; Martin Arnold, melodica; Stephen Parkison, electric guitar; Allison Cameron, casio sax, amplified objects.
I am a Canadian
1999 / 14:02/ by Jesse Stewart
LE PARFUM DES FEMMES THE PERFUME OF WOMEN: THE ELSEWHERE(excerpt)
1996 / 10’38 by Chantal Dumas (with Shelley Hirsch, Akel Akian, Djelali and Maryam, Nomads)
MONTREAL-SHANGHAI BRIDGE (excerpt)
2004 / 4 :00 by Chantal Dumas
IN THE PALE GREY DAYS : The diagnosis
2002 / 5 :25 by Chantal Dumas
Le petit homme dans l’oreille [The little man in the ear] (excerpts)
2002 by Christian Calon and Chantal Dumas
Spirit sands (1’49)
Stampede (2’14)
Redberry (1’14)
MANY MANY PLACES
2001 / 3 :00 by Chantal Dumas
REVIEWS
Events:
Soundplay, Toronto
Vancouver New Music Festival
New York Sounds Like Now
Haliburton Soundscape Retreat
The Handmaid’s Tale, a new opera
Guelph Jazz Festival
Gobsmacked!
Sound Travels
Newfoundland Sound Symposium
Janet Cardiff’s Forty-Part Motet
Electro-Erotic Cabaret
Christopher Butterfield’s Pavilion of Heavenly Trousers
Deep Wireless Festival of Radio Art
Recordings:
Hiromitsu Agatsuma
Sub Rosa’s Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music
Koji Asano
Alessandro Bosetti, Michel Doneda, Bhob Rainey
Noah Creshevsky
Luc Ferrari
Michael Jon Fink, Jim Fox, Daniel Lentz, Steve Peters
Carlos Giffoni, Lee Ranaldo, Jim O’Rourke
Mike Hansen, Tomasz Krakowiak
Joanne Hétu, Jean Derome
Tomas Korber, Kazuya Ishigama
Brett Larner, Toshimaru Nakamura
Yusef Lateef, Adam Rudolph, Go
Lukas Ligeti
Kaffe Matthews, Mandy McIntosh, Zeena Parkins
Dick Robinson
James Tenney (Postal Pieces and Selected works 1961 – 1969)
Transcendental Modulations
Carol Ann Weaver, Rebecca Campbell, Dorethy Livesay, Di Brandt
Ge-Suk Yeo, Blaise Siwula, John Butcher, Christoph Irmer, Augusti Fernández
John Oswald
Books:
Austin Clarkson’s On the Music of Stefan Wolpe
Ben Watson’s Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation
