Avant Garde by Robin Maconie

Author:Robin Maconie
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780810883130
Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Fred Page returned to Wellington loaded with scores and bursting with confidence. In London, fellow New Zealander John Mansfield Thomson was working as an editor at Faber and Faber on the English edition of the Stravinsky-Craft Conversations. Together Page and Thomson hatched a bold plan to invite Stravinsky to New Zealand and he arrived to a hero’s welcome in November 1961. In his first book of conversations the veteran composer is full of praise for the younger generation of Boulez and Stockhausen. To listeners in the sport-loving dominion, Stravinsky’s own late works in which he embraces serialism, such as the ballet Agon and the Movements for piano and orchestra, appear to combine the fluidity of Boulez’s Le marteau with the energy and physicality of the Silver Ferns, a top national netball team.

A major issue of musical continuity emerged in the 1960s. This was aleatoric or mobile form. The term mobile refers to a music composed in modules that can be rearranged in different orders. A fierce debate broke out after publication in the late 1950s of Piano Piece XI by Stockhausen, and Piano Sonata 3 by Boulez, both by Universal Edition. Piano Piece XI, which comes in a cardboard tube with a collapsible wooden stand, created a sensation. The idea of playing segments of a piece in any order, and even changing the tempo and expression of segments from one order to the next, was unheard of. A perplexed Stravinsky wondered why the composer would want to go to such lengths to specify the work in such detail and then leave the order of events to chance. In separate interviews Cage said, on the contrary, the piece left almost nothing to chance, while Boulez considered that changing the order of events would be okay, as in his Constellation-Miroir, just as long as the performer was provided with traffic signs and a road map.

They were all missing the point.

The point is this. It is not about aesthetics. It is about modeling speech in information theory. Such thinking is responsible for what we now know as Google Translate, and the thinking behind it explains why the software is still not perfect. If your goal is to develop machines with language recognition, that can respond intelligently to spoken or (pace Turing) typewritten commands, you need a theory of language that allows for different word orders and degrees of emphasis, because that is how language works in the real world. Musical exercises in variable form from the sixties relate to the larger objective of developing a theory of parsing the same collection of key words in varying orders, like Tristan Tzara creating poems by taking words at random out of a hat. The broader intellectual challenge generated a group of major avant-garde compositions that are modular in structure and rearrangeable in practice, including Pli selon Pli by Boulez, Momente by Stockhausen, and other titles by Berio, Pousseur, Cage, Earle Brown, and Lutoslawski.

Boulez turned to the poet Mallarmé. The French were pioneers in word association.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.