Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 by Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Author:Tim Rutherford-Johnson [Rutherford-Johnson, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century, Music, History & Criticism, Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9780520283145
Google: kO2HDQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0520283147
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2017-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 24. Distribution of performing ensembles (shown as black dots) for Lisa Bielawa’s Tempelhof Broadcast, 2013.

Between sections, the hundreds of musicians brought together to perform Tempelhof Broadcast walked in groups to points in the park according to a carefully preplanned choreography, gradually spreading farther apart and finally leaving Tempelhof and continuing to play in the surrounding streets. As they did so, and as it gradually became impossible to hear everything that was happening at once, the aural and spatial unity of the work gradually dissolved. The composer suggested that one way to listen would be to get on a bike and cycle around the park, like the many day-to-day users of Tempelhof park did, either following a single ensemble or sampling several in sequence.

Events like Maritime Rites and Airfield Broadcasts may draw their language and formal processes from the countercultural forms of Fluxus and the Cageian happening, but their commissioning and performance now (however unintentionally) lend support to the modes of spectacular capitalism. This is clear as much from their aesthetic effect as it is from the specific circumstances of their creation. Their sheer scale renders them “experiences,” in the vernacular of early twenty-first-century arts marketing.11 In both cases, although the works present some challenging ideas in themselves, these are pieces of public art that do not set out to critique but rather to engage and enthrall a large audience. Bielawa’s language is more consonant, rhythmically and tonally, than Curran’s and not as stylistically eclectic; it might therefore be described as more approachable, although that must be counterbalanced by its formal “correctness” as compared to the freeform exuberance that Curran’s style permits.

The experience of Airfield Broadcasts wasn’t even limited to attendance at either site. Both performances were broadcast online, and Internet users could click on an interactive map of each site to listen to the sounds taking place at that point in space. In this respect, the Airfield Broadcasts extended the archipelago idea to the virtual space of the Internet. The Web provides an ideal space for wider audience engagement and participation that can extend beyond ways to listen to or see the work itself—as was the case with Airfield Broadcasts—and into modes of public reception such as sharing photographs, sounds, and verbal responses across social media. In this context, the excess of Maritime Rites Tate is of a more historical type; it is a Dionysian display of resources and sounds, but one that is still contained within a single place and time. Airfield Broadcasts represent a more radical, more contemporary proposition, in which the work—using an engaging, consonant style that draws the listener in—quite simply exceeds the spatiotemporal boundaries of the site and event.

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.