Pub Date : 2021-11-02DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2021.2022893
Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman
To discuss Serbian twenty-first-century avant-garde music means to address two key phenomena: (1) the avant-garde’s position in postmodernism, which—established in its form in the mid-1970s—has persisted over the past two decades of the twenty-first century; and (2) a modification of that position, which has concurrently manifested itself in Serbian music since the late 1980s. The first phenomenon refers to the condition of treating the avant-garde in postmodernism, like any other style from the musical past, as devoid of its internal hierarchy and authentic being. More precisely, it has been treated as a ‘collection’ of artefacts, i.e. constitutive components, into which the avant-garde has been ‘disassembled’ or ‘dismantled’. The second phenomenon concerns a certain tendency to transcend that de-hierarchising impulse precisely by using postmodernist tools. Namely, it concerns the postmodernist ‘validation’ of indicators associated with various creative tendencies from the past, among them also some modernist concepts, including those that once qualified as avant-garde. In other words, in neither of those two instances does the avant-garde in Serbian twenty-first-century music exist the way it did before the advent of postmodernism, but instead becomes part of a phenomenon that I regard as postmodernist modernism.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-02DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2021.2022897
Srđan Teparić
The three string quartets by eminent Serbian composer Ivana Stefanović (b. 1948) were composed during three distinct periods of her oeuvre: modernism, avant-garde, and postmodernism. As such, they are paradigmatic for the development of Serbian modernist and avant-garde tendencies in the second half of the twentieth century. The First Quartet (1969–70) is a student work influenced by Enriko Josif, her professor of composition who was a member of the first modernist wave that appeared in Serbian music in the 1950s. The Second Quartet, Harmonies (1976), indicates Serbian avant-garde features with arched forms and music that ‘emerges’ from silence before ‘drowning’ in it. The Third Quartet, Play Strindberg (1993), is a departure from the previous two—it is a tonal piece with a clear form, written for a theatrical play. The dramatised musical story carries with it an emphasized need for the literarisation of musical form and a typically postmodernist attitude towards styles such as romanticism and modernism.
{"title":"Three String Quartets by Ivana Stefanović—Three Aspects of Serbian Music in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century","authors":"Srđan Teparić","doi":"10.1080/07494467.2021.2022897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2021.2022897","url":null,"abstract":"The three string quartets by eminent Serbian composer Ivana Stefanović (b. 1948) were composed during three distinct periods of her oeuvre: modernism, avant-garde, and postmodernism. As such, they are paradigmatic for the development of Serbian modernist and avant-garde tendencies in the second half of the twentieth century. The First Quartet (1969–70) is a student work influenced by Enriko Josif, her professor of composition who was a member of the first modernist wave that appeared in Serbian music in the 1950s. The Second Quartet, Harmonies (1976), indicates Serbian avant-garde features with arched forms and music that ‘emerges’ from silence before ‘drowning’ in it. The Third Quartet, Play Strindberg (1993), is a departure from the previous two—it is a tonal piece with a clear form, written for a theatrical play. The dramatised musical story carries with it an emphasized need for the literarisation of musical form and a typically postmodernist attitude towards styles such as romanticism and modernism.","PeriodicalId":44746,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Music Review","volume":"40 1","pages":"699 - 719"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48105004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-02DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2021.2022894
Dragana Stojanović-Novičić
In his orchestral composition, Musique de devenir [Music of Becoming, 1965], Serbian composer Rajko Maksimović (b. 1935) established a musical style he formed after hearing the works of Witold Lutosławski and other Polish composers at the first Music Biennale Zagreb (Yugoslavia, 1961). Maksimović believed that the novelties of the Polish school were much more interesting than (m)any of the achievements of the avant-garde Darmstadt circle or American experimental music. Thus, he structured Music of Becoming on clusters and applied aleatory principles to rhythm and pitch. As a support to this avant-garde ‘announcement’, Maksimović used selected lines from The Gospel According to St. John; just as the Gospel accounts for the genesis of the wor(l)d, Maksimović’s improvisation on Bach’s name (B–A–C–H) suggests the procreation of new music that is based on aleatoric principles and clusters.
塞尔维亚作曲家Rajko Maksimović（生于1935年）在其管弦乐作品《成为的音乐》（Musique de devenir，1965年）中确立了他在第一届萨格勒布音乐双年展（南斯拉夫，1961年）上聆听了Witold Lutosławski和其他波兰作曲家的作品后形成的音乐风格。Maksimović认为波兰学派的新颖性比达姆施塔特先锋派或美国实验音乐的任何成就都有趣得多。因此，他将《成为的音乐》构建在集群上，并将语法原则应用于节奏和音高。为了支持这一前卫的“公告”，Maksimović使用了《圣约翰福音》中的精选台词；正如福音书解释了世界的起源一样，Maksimović对巴赫名字（B-A-C-H）的即兴创作表明了基于任意原则和簇的新音乐的诞生。
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Pub Date : 2021-11-02DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2021.2022886
Laura Emmery
Vladan Radovanović (b. 1932) is the most prominent Serbian avant-garde composer and a pioneer of electronic music in Yugoslavia. Coining the term ‘Art Synthesis’ to describe his polymedia works––a type of polymedia art in which relations between the individual media components occupy various degrees of interdependence and determinacy––Radovanović aims to explore the outermost limits of every art. In 1984, Radovanović synthesized the textual descriptions of his dreams, his drawings of selected dreams, and electro-acoustic music to create a radiophonic work, Small Eternal Lake [Malo večno jezero]. Thus, Radovanović synthesizes the verbal, visual, and musical elements into a polymedia art project, allowing for an interpretation of the transformation from the Dreamer’s subconsciousness into the composer’s consciousness. This article examines Radovanović’s innovations in the domain of art synthesis through an analysis of his pivotal work, Small Eternal Lake (1984), created at the Electronic Studio Radio Belgrade.
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Pub Date : 2021-11-02DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2021.2022890
I. Ilic
Since 2008, Jasna Veličković has been experimenting with and researching within the sound world of the magnetic field—the omnipresent, yet usually completely silent elements in human life. Her journey into the unknown started with an exploration of the sound produced by manipulating coils as parts of complex sound systems, including classical instruments as sound sources. A purely serendipitous event in 2013 led her to the discovery that magnets can also produce sounds when applied to coils in certain ways. This discovery ultimately resulted in the invention of the Velicon, the instrument which she has been composing for and performing on ever since. The investigations of the musical force of the magnetic field also led to the introduction of other seemingly silent objects as sound sources. In this article, I aim to investigate these works both from the diachronic and the synchronic perspective. The key questions will include: (1) mapping Jasna Veličković’s referential worlds—an intricate encounter between music and science/technology, (artistic) experimentation, and electronic music—viewed from the composer’s personal, Serbian, and ‘global’ perspective; (2) the nature of Veličković’s creative process with regard to the reconfiguration of the relationship between composing, experimenting, and improvising; (3) the ramifications of Veličković’s way of breaking loose from the conventional composer-performer-listener chain; and (4) analytical remarks on the prospects of musical structure within the magnetic sound.
自2008年以来，Jasna veli koviki一直在磁场的声音世界中进行实验和研究，磁场是人类生活中无处不在，但通常完全沉默的元素。她的未知之旅始于探索通过操纵线圈作为复杂声音系统的一部分而产生的声音，包括作为声源的古典乐器。2013年的一个纯粹偶然的事件让她发现，磁铁以某种方式应用于线圈时也可以产生声音。这一发现最终导致了Velicon的发明，从那以后，她一直在为它作曲和表演。对磁场音乐力量的研究也导致了其他看似无声的物体作为声源的引入。本文将从历时性和共时性两个角度对这些作品进行考察。关键问题将包括:(1)从作曲家个人、塞尔维亚和“全球”的角度，映射Jasna veli kovivic的参考世界——音乐与科学/技术、(艺术)实验和电子音乐之间的复杂相遇;(2)在重新配置作曲、实验和即兴之间的关系方面，韦利·科维奇创作过程的本质;(3)维利科维奇打破传统的作曲家-表演者-听众链条的方式所带来的后果;(4)对磁音内部音乐结构发展前景的分析评述。
{"title":"The Musical Force of the Magnetic Field: On the Latest Creative Phase in the Works of Jasna Veličković","authors":"I. Ilic","doi":"10.1080/07494467.2021.2022890","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2021.2022890","url":null,"abstract":"Since 2008, Jasna Veličković has been experimenting with and researching within the sound world of the magnetic field—the omnipresent, yet usually completely silent elements in human life. Her journey into the unknown started with an exploration of the sound produced by manipulating coils as parts of complex sound systems, including classical instruments as sound sources. A purely serendipitous event in 2013 led her to the discovery that magnets can also produce sounds when applied to coils in certain ways. This discovery ultimately resulted in the invention of the Velicon, the instrument which she has been composing for and performing on ever since. The investigations of the musical force of the magnetic field also led to the introduction of other seemingly silent objects as sound sources. In this article, I aim to investigate these works both from the diachronic and the synchronic perspective. The key questions will include: (1) mapping Jasna Veličković’s referential worlds—an intricate encounter between music and science/technology, (artistic) experimentation, and electronic music—viewed from the composer’s personal, Serbian, and ‘global’ perspective; (2) the nature of Veličković’s creative process with regard to the reconfiguration of the relationship between composing, experimenting, and improvising; (3) the ramifications of Veličković’s way of breaking loose from the conventional composer-performer-listener chain; and (4) analytical remarks on the prospects of musical structure within the magnetic sound.","PeriodicalId":44746,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Music Review","volume":"40 1","pages":"570 - 594"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46567919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-02DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2021.2022892
M. Masnikosa
This article examines selected minimalist compositions by Vladimir Tošić and Miroslav Miša Savić, two members of the neo-avant-garde composers group, Opus 4, whose activities created a unique artistic paradigm on the Serbian art music scene. While the group's work clearly referred to experimental trends in the United States (minimalism, Fluxus, multimedia, and conceptual art), it also retained a significant ‘trace’ of European post-war modernism, embodied in the group's commitment to serialist modes of organising musical material. Thus, the ‘integral minimalism’ of Savić and Tošić (within the unique aesthetics of Opus 4) unites both European and American post-war neo-avant-garde concepts. This study situates Tošić's and Savić's minimalist works within the Serbian late twentieth-century ‘new music’ context and is dedicated to the neo-avant-garde minimalist oeuvres of the two composers.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2021.2001935
Christopher A. Williams
Visionary landscape architect Lawrence Halprin’s The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (1969, New York: George Braziller) is an interdisciplinary model for collaborating through and with notation. In this article, I outline RSVP’s potential to articulate undertheorised connections between notation, collectivity, and improvisation in the work of a number of present-day composer-performers through the case study of British composer-improviser Richard Barrett’s fOKT series (2005). At the same time, I show this music can help redress a number of blind spots in Halprin’s own ideas about scores—especially the inclusive, participatory political vision that grounded them.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2021.2001947
Clare Lesser
An interwoven reading of Hans Joachim Hespos’ Weiβschatten and Jacques Derrida’s ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ (Writing and Difference, 1967). I examine the impact that improvisation has on performance and consider how an information overload creates shifting layers of reference. I explore the ways in which Hespos combines information systems, and infinite, or ‘overabundant’, chains of signifiers, which allow the space for collaboration and performer agency, thereby keeping the performer/composer/audience interface in constant movement.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2021.2001939
Theodor P. Gordon
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pauline Oliveros developed new techniques for improvising with new electronic instruments, which she described using language and metaphors from cybernetics and information theory. First using just a tape recorder, and later using a series of tape recorders connected to an unstable pair of oscillators, Oliveros created what she later called a ‘very unstable nonlinear musicmaking system’ (Oliveros, Pauline. 2016a. “Improvising Composition: How to Listen to the Time Between.” In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian H. Siddall, and Ellen Waterman, 75–90. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). By positioning herself as only one member of an instrumental system that facilitated the self-regulating flow of sound as signal—operating as air pressure waves, electrical waves, psychoacoustic phenomena, and even human consciousness—Oliveros began to reconceptualize the role of her body in musical performance. By the early 1970s, Oliveros began to embrace the new kinds of musical performance and musical subjectivities produced by this system as a part of her exploration of gender in music, positing the concept of ‘androgynous music’—defined as music that is simultaneously ‘linear’ and ‘nonlinear’. Oliveros thought of her performance practice as one that could destabilise socially constructed musical identities of composition, performance, and listening, and also integrate different modalities of interacting with musical ‘signal’. This article maps Oliveros’s cybernetic, improvisatory practices with her earliest electronic systems, showing how her performance within these systems laid the groundwork for her later theorisations of technology, gender, and the body.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2021.2001934
Franziska Schroeder, I. Campbell
Improvisation and indeterminacy seem to be aligned terms, both being associated with an acceptance of contingency and an openness to the unexpected. We can find diverse discussions of contingency across improvisation studies. Dan DiPiero, for example, usefully proposes a simple definition of improvisation as a ‘contingent encounter’, where contingency stands as an umbrella term temporally spanning the not-yet-known and the could-have-been-otherwise (2018, 2). Similarly, Gary Peters highlights that improvisation characterises choices ‘within a contingent context, without absolute criteria, where all outcomes are thus intrinsically uncertain’ (2012, 2). Meanwhile, indeterminacy in music is most associated with the work of John Cage and with the development of his understanding of ‘experimental music’. DiPiero’s and Peters’s conceptions of improvisation are at first glance congruent with Cage’s famous definition of the experimental act: ‘not [...] an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown’ (1961, 13). But how the terms of improvisation and indeterminacy have been deployed, and the musical practices they have been associated with, has not always borne this congruence out. The connections and divergences between improvisation and indeterminacy remain an open area of inquiry. This special issue of Contemporary Music Review follows from volume 38, issue 5, on the theme of ‘Improvisation and Social Inclusion’, edited by Franziska Schroeder, Koichi Samuels, and Rebecca Caines. That issue emphasised how, through the field of improvisation studies alongside a wide variety of practical endeavours, improvisation has come to take on a valence far beyond its traditional musical domain, becoming a tool for thinking through notions of exand in-clusion, diversity, and access, as well for engaging with wider social, cultural, and political issues, in diverse performance practices. The essays included in that issue took as their task examining how improvisation can enable us to explore new modes of inclusion and social organisation (Schroeder, Samuels, and Caines 2019, 442). Improvisation was widely understood Contemporary Music Review, 2021 Vol. 40, No. 4, 359–365, https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2021.2001934
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