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98 summer 2007Musicworks Issue 98 - Summer 2007

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 FEATURE ARTICLES

Mike Kane: Chance and Dissonance
By Adam Khedheri

Article Summary: Composer Mike Kane has been exploring new music forms for over twenty years. He employs compositional processes and procedures, such as chance operations, and often creates music inspired from his study of dissonant counterpoint, which he studied in the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger, Carl Ruggles, Edgard Varèse, and Charles Ives. He is fascinated by juxtaposing disparate elements in music, whether it be writing a melody with dissonant harmonies, or using fragmentation to create an unusual, sometimes disjointed, flow between phrases. He teaches piano and also performs contemporary music with many Toronto groups including Neither/Nor, a collective of composers-performers.
 

John Oswald: A Time To Hear For Here
By Kelvin Browne

Article Summary: John Oswald’s circadian sound installation, a time to hear for here, is a permanent installation in the Spirit House in the new Daniel Libeskind Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum, which opened in June, 2007. The Spirit House is criss-crossed on five levels by bridges that join the galleries on either side traversing an empty harp-shaped void. From these bridges, visitors hear the audio installation. Some sounds can be heard only in a specific location, others are audible from many places. Oswald creates a mobile sculpture of sounds—the timings of sound moments and their combinations are fluid. A sidebar by Anne Bourne discusses Oswald’s artistic process, the contributions of project co-ordinator Laurel McDonald, and the voicing of Qui, a twenty-four part canon that occurs once a day as part of the soundscape. Each of the parts is sung in a different language, representing the diversity of the world cultures existing in Canada.

Micheline Roi: Binaural Soundwalks and the Listener Experience
By Gayle Young

Article Summary: Micheline Roi composes music for ensembles performing on standard instruments, but she has also recently begun to create pre-recorded audio experiences to be heard through headphones as the listener walks in specific locations. Her Unearthed, presented during Toronto Nuit Blanche, an all-night festival of contemporary arts held in the fall of 2006, brought each listener an awareness of the underground waters that run beneath the city streets, waters which had in previous centuries flowed in open streams on the surface. Listeners lined up throughout the night for their turn to play back Roi’s recording while wandering the streets under which the water flows, both the water and the listeners in the dark. In 2005 Roi’s Wandering Sacred provided sound by headphones to accompany listeners as they walked a labyrinth at Toronto Island.

Trevor Wishart: The Voice and its Transformative Potential
By W. Mark Sutherland

Article Summary: Since the early 1970s, Trevor Wishart has been working with live voice, recorded voice, and vocal sounds treated electronically. He has created software and has written two books that encourage other composers to participate in this intriguing area of sound exploration. In this interview with visual artist and sound poet W. Mark Sutherland, Wishart describes his work with techniques of electronically treating voice and his teaching of extended vocal techniques to non-specialists. He describes two of his compositions, Red Bird, composed in the 1970s, and Angel, a new piece that will be premiered by New Adventures in Sound Art in August, 2007.

HPSCHD: John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s Media Spectacle
By Joel Chadabe And David Eisenman

Article Summary:  HPSCHD, by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, is arguably the wildest composition of the twentieth century. Big, brash, exuberant, raucous, a performance is about four hours of ongoing high-level intensity. The sound is a mixture of seven amplified harpsichords playing computer-generated variations of Mozart and other composers along with fifty-one computer-generated tapes. The thousands of swirling images, overlayed and mixed, of abstract shapes and colours and of space imagery from slides and films borrowed from NASA, create a chaotic riot of shifting form and colour. In this article, Joel Chadabe describes the intentions and motivations behind documenting the extravaganza, and David Eisenman recounts his experiences preparing for and performing in the first event with Cage and Hiller.

COMMENTARY

Of Musical Creativity, Royalties, and the Canadian Listener
By Tim Brady

Article Summary: Shocked at the small amount—a mere $3,999.95—that earned him an award as the concert-music composer in Quebec who earned the most royalties for Canadian performances, Tim Brady began to examine the royalty system, concluding that the core problem is largely economic, not artistic. Low royalty rates make investment in the music unprofitable: “There are no publishers, no major record labels, no promotion, nothing. And why should there be? The economic structure of concert music in Canada is such that there is no room for profit. No profit means no promotional budgets. No promotional budgets means no media coverage. No media coverage means no airplay and no long-term, sustained contact with the public, our potential listeners.”

Remembering James Tenney
By John Luther Adams

Article Summary:  James Tenney composed with the intellectual rigour of an experimental scientist and with an insatiable appetite for new sounds. Many of his works seem to originate with a question: What would it sound like if …? Tenney was a brilliant theoretician, but listening to his music is not contingent on understanding any theoretical secrets or complexities. It is an experience available to anyone with an open mind and open ears. Tenney had no use for musical drama or poetics. As John Luther Adams observes, “This music is not about the romantic struggle or personal feelings of the artist. It’s about something larger, something cosmic, something like what we call ‘nature’ … we find ourselves immersed at once in the physical presence of the sound and the miracle of our own perceptions.”

John Weinzweig (1913–2006): A Radical Remembered
By John Beckwith And Elisabeth Bihl

John Weinzweig, one of the first Canadian composers to adopt twelve-tone composition techniques, passed away on August 24, 2006, at the age of ninety-three. This article is based on talks given at the John Weinzweig memorial concert in Toronto, March 23, 2007. Composer John Beckwith knows Weinzweig’s music very well, and recalls that back in the 1960s at the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, he would sometimes eavesdrop on the piano sounds coming from Weinzweig’s studio. Beckwith describes music of simple conviction, precise, often brilliant, and exemplary as craft. Elizabeth Bihl discusses the public advocacy roles undertaken by Weinzweig in helping to found organizations to promote contemporary Canadian music in Canada.

SONIC GEOGRAPHY

Milenko Micanovic In Belgrade
 

CD CONTENTS

1 | HPSCHD (excerpt / extrait) (1969) 6:42
by / par John Cage and Lejaren Hiller
Performed by Robert Conant, harpsichord, with electronics realized by Joel Chadabe.

2 | Lis to birdsong 0:27
by / par Trevor Wishart

3 | Reasonable to water 0:08
by / par Trevor Wishart

4 | Anticredos (1980) 2:35
by / par Trevor Wishart
Performed by / interprété par Singcircle

5 | Vox 2 2:13
by / par Trevor Wishart
Performed by / interprété par Electric Phoenix

6 | Vox 3 (hocket) 0:47
by / par Trevor Wishart
Performed by / interprété par Electric Phoenix

7 | Vox 5 0:26
by / par Trevor Wishart

8 | Voices to Water 1:56
by / par Trevor Wishart

9 | Fireworks 1:19
by / par Trevor Wishart

10 | Globalalia (2003–04) 4:38
by / par Trevor Wishart

11 | A Peacock Retraces Its Steps (2003) 11:18
by / par Mike Kane
Performed by/ interprété par Mike Kane, piano and synthesizer.

12 | Courting the Will
of Dread (excerpt) (2003) 2:00
by / par Micheline Roi
Performed by the / interprété par ERGO

13 | Tengo que decir (excerpt / extrait) (2004) 2:24
by / par Micheline Roi
Premiered by the Windsor Symphony Orchestra and Peter Soave, bandoneon. John Morris Russell director.

14 | Wandering Sacred (excerpt / extrait) (2005) 6:52
by / par Micheline Roi
Premiered by / Créé par New Adventures in Sound Art, Darren Copeland director/direction.

15 | a time to hear for here (excerpts / extrait) (circa 1485–2007)
by / par John Oswald

16 | Qui, eight altos test 2:10
by / par John Oswald

17 | Qui reverb demo 1:53
by / par John Oswald

18 | Extinction Gong 20:11
by / par John Oswald
 

REVIEWS

Events
Anne Bourne on the New Creations Festival in Toronto
Deniel Goode on Robert Ashley’s Concrete in New York City
Emily Hall on the Luigi Nono: Master of Sound and Silence Festival in Montreal
René van Peer on Sonambiente 2006 in Berlin

Recordings
Muhal Richard Abrams, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell on Pi
ASK on Discus
Peter Blamey and Jim Denley on Split Records
Michel Blanc on d’autres cordes recordes
Anthony Braxton Sextet on Victo
Brotherhood of Breath on Cuneiform
Contest of Pleasures on Potlatch
Robert Dick and Ursel Schlicht on Nemu
efzeg on hathut
Paul Flaherty on Family Vineyard
Paul Flaherty, Chris Corsano, and C. Spencer Yeh on Important Records
Satoko Fujii Four on NatSat
Gato Libre on Muzak
Furt on psi
Jon Hassell on Nyen
François Houle on Drip Audio
Iskra on Emanem
Charles Ives and Ivan Wyschnegradsky on HatHut
K-Space on Ad Hoc
Michael Keith, John Oswald, and Roger Turner on Emanem
Joe McPhee and Paul Hession on Slam
David Murray on HatHut
Harry Partch on Innova
Christian Weber on HatHut
Jesse Zubot on Drip Audio

Words
Amy C. Beal. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (University of California Press)
Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum, 2004)
David Lee. The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field (Mercury Press)
Mark Miller. A Certain Respect for Tradition (Mercury Press)
Lloyd Peterson. Music And The Creative Spirit: Innovators In Jazz, Improvisation, and The Avant-Garde (Scarecrow Press)

Visions Of Sound
Resonating-With-Light by Edo Paulus