Pub Date : 2022-07-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2087389
J. Besada
It is not unusual nowadays to attend a concert of contemporary music in which live performers and video projection are juxtaposed or truly interact. Internet video-sharing platforms and social media contribute to shape the way these materials are filmed and presented to the audience. My paper focuses on two composer-performers dealing with these kinds of technologies and audiovisual logics: Brigitta Muntendorf and Óscar Escudero. I pay attention to their respective pieces Public Privacy #1: Flute Cover (2013) and Custom #1 (2016). Beyond the inconsequential coincidence of a hashtag in their titles, some similar aspects of their creative processes are found, from the compositional conception to the interaction with performers for personalising the videos. I particularly consider theoretical elements of memetics for a diachronic observation of several creative choices. Finally, I evaluate the impact of participatory culture in the gestation of these pieces.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2087377
Giulia Accornero
Over the past decade, the viral circulation of the acronym ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) has brought a new sensation and audiovisual genre to the attention of the internet-connected world. This phenomenon has attracted the interest of contemporary music composers, who have begun using the term ASMR as a shorthand for a broader theoretical category that involves the assemblage of a specific sound quality, its aisthesis, and a range of compositional, performance, and recording techniques through which they are manipulated. Based on interviews with eight living composers (Carola Bauckholt, Chaya Czernowin, Andrew Harlan, Ole Hübner, Neo Hülcker, Allan Gravgaard Madsen, Morten Riis, and Charlie Sdraulig), I argue that the term ASMR is used as a shorthand to invoke the ‘intimate zone’. As one of the four zones of human interaction formalised by anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his theory of proxemics, the intimate zone emerges from the ways in which space, the sensorium, and one’s sense of self mould each other. After deconstructing the nature of ASMR as an autonomous galvanic response, and combining the framework of proxemics with that of ‘cultural techniques’, I articulate the ways in which the composers use the term ASMR to speak about features of past contemporary art music as well as their current work. I then describe the strategies employed in their compositions to engage the intimate zone and divide them into two main categories. The first involves calibrating the perceived proximity of the audience to the sound object, while the second involves manipulating the space in which this interaction occurs.
{"title":"What Does ASMR Sound Like? Composing the Proxemic Intimate Zone in Contemporary Music","authors":"Giulia Accornero","doi":"10.1080/07494467.2022.2087377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2022.2087377","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past decade, the viral circulation of the acronym ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) has brought a new sensation and audiovisual genre to the attention of the internet-connected world. This phenomenon has attracted the interest of contemporary music composers, who have begun using the term ASMR as a shorthand for a broader theoretical category that involves the assemblage of a specific sound quality, its aisthesis, and a range of compositional, performance, and recording techniques through which they are manipulated. Based on interviews with eight living composers (Carola Bauckholt, Chaya Czernowin, Andrew Harlan, Ole Hübner, Neo Hülcker, Allan Gravgaard Madsen, Morten Riis, and Charlie Sdraulig), I argue that the term ASMR is used as a shorthand to invoke the ‘intimate zone’. As one of the four zones of human interaction formalised by anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his theory of proxemics, the intimate zone emerges from the ways in which space, the sensorium, and one’s sense of self mould each other. After deconstructing the nature of ASMR as an autonomous galvanic response, and combining the framework of proxemics with that of ‘cultural techniques’, I articulate the ways in which the composers use the term ASMR to speak about features of past contemporary art music as well as their current work. I then describe the strategies employed in their compositions to engage the intimate zone and divide them into two main categories. The first involves calibrating the perceived proximity of the audience to the sound object, while the second involves manipulating the space in which this interaction occurs.","PeriodicalId":44746,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Music Review","volume":"41 1","pages":"337 - 357"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47839166","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 : 2022-07-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2087445
Zubin Kanga
In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had spread internationally, resulting in governments shutting down concert halls, theatres, and other performance spaces. In this environment, the livestreamed performance flourished, with many musicians embracing the medium, performing to online audiences from their own homes via a variety of social media platforms. Whereas many major performing arts organisations created livestreams that attempted to emulate existing paradigms of concert films, many experimental musicians found ways of subverting these conventions, creating new works that could only have been created during these lockdowns. This article gives an overview of these experimental approaches, documenting the major types of ‘lockdown music’ observed across the international experimental music scene, and exploring their play with the relationships between sound and vision, and with the perception of online liveness. The article then examines a particular case study co-created by the author and composer Damian Barbeler. All My Time is an interdisciplinary work that draws on many of these games of diegesis and syncresis. The pianist duets with an unseen pianist in another country, household appliances become chamber partners with synthesisers, gin bottles are transformed into complex percussion instruments: image and sound seem incompatible, but the audience cannot tell which is live. By documenting the important body of work created during 2020–2021, the article explores how these online performances have expanded the possibilities of interdisciplinary music and the experience of liveness online, forming a basis for a continuing examination of the long-term legacy of ‘lockdown music’.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2087390
Anna Schürmer
Social distancing is a central (un)word of the pandemic year 2020. Now, music culture thrives on performative ‘liveness’—even in classical music, where live experience has become the core of the musical artwork in the age of its mechanical reproduction. At the same time, the history of music can be read as a history of the dissolution of boundaries: from the body (voice), to mechanical instruments, to electronic extensions. Accelerated by regulations in response to the COVID-19 crisis, music culture passes another media transformation, entering new virtual stages. In fact, crisis always implies changes and chances too: economists call it ‘creative destruction’, artists call it innovation. And indeed, ‘social distancing’ in interaction with accelerated digitalisation also holds media-aesthetic potential. With the support of new media, and this is the hypothesis of this essay, the contemporary music scene in particular can form new dramatic forms that go far beyond the classical one-way stream: by enabling virtual participation instead of physical co-presence.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-01DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2087392
J. Freitas
While an image may be worth a thousand words, a meme can be worth much more. From politics to videos, games to social media, memes are an integral part of today’s online communication and content production in the paradigm of participation culture that is prevalent on the internet and in society. By looking at memes as a socially constructed and intertextual discourse which represents different voices, perspectives, and creative insights, these cultural units are also a reflection of how cybercommunities think about, circulate, and imbue content with meaning in their everyday lives. Among many varieties of meme categories, music plays an important role in the production and consolidation of this online dimension, especially on YouTube and other social media. From rock to classical music, most music genres are featured either in static or audiovisual memes, except for one (large) period of music that is commonly referred to as ‘modern’ music. Despite niche and specialised meme pages, groups and forums related to contemporary music, this broad category is quite overlooked by YouTube compilations, social media featuring classical music, and other online spaces, thus mixing and confusing repertoires and stereotypes. With recurrent tropes regarding gender, power, and aesthetics that can be found either in pages dedicated to western contemporary art music and on other generalised platforms labelling it as ‘ugly’, ‘male’ or ‘white’, this paper aims to examine how the musical dimension affects the production of music memes and related online content, thus analysing its role in popular culture today and how cybercommunities—with or without audiovisual literacy—relate to and spread this (musical) phenomenon.
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Pub Date : 2022-06-27DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2087391
Caitlin Schmid
In September 2020, Nashville Opera released a new opera by composer Dave Ragland and librettist Mary McCallum that brought together ‘the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the disenfranchisement of modern-day voters’. Set in a parallel present, One Vote Won centres sonic and visual markers of Black sorrow, rage, and joy during a year defined by police brutality and widespread protests in support of #BlackLivesMatter in the United States. This article explores Nashville Opera’s attempt to navigate the possibility of opera at the intersection of youth culture and activism. One Vote Won has been variously positioned by its creators as a nonpartisan vehicle of civic engagement; a model of Black representation in the world of opera; a record of Black history making connections to present-day social movements; and an example of ‘accessible’ opera that aims to curate new audiences through educational outreach efforts targeted at socially-conscious students. Building on Naomi André’s practice of ‘engaged musicology’ to posit an ‘engaged opera performance’ that considers the lived experience of audiences during the creation of the work, I show how the use of social media networks as both content and context for One Vote Won illustrates competing visions of operatic ‘engagement’.
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Pub Date : 2022-06-21DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080469
Martin Iddon, Emily Payne, Philip Thomas
Published in Contemporary Music Review (Vol. 41, No. 2-3, 2022)
发表于《当代音乐评论》(第41卷，第2-3期，2022)
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080453
K. S. Carithers
Building upon research on the performance practices engendered in avant-gardism of the mid-to-late twentieth century, this essay introduces a theoretical framework for the creative work of realising experimental music, here labeled interpretive labour (IL). The Executive model of IL is discussed in detail, bringing together ideas about authorship, representation, and exploitation. Performances of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Plus Minus (1963) provide an ideal case study for this issue, as historical performances highlight the challenges inherent in its realisation. Drawing on these performances’ sketches, archival recordings, and reception history, it becomes apparent that Stockhausen is effectively outsourcing his compositional responsibilities in this work, suggesting the usefulness of radically reframing indeterminate music performance-practice as a mode of production.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080455
James Mooney, Owen Green, Sean Williams
While many previous studies have explored indeterminacy as a compositional technique, in this article we explore the concept of indeterminacy, not only from the perspective of the composer, but also from the perspectives of performer and archival researcher, drawing upon our experiences of researching and performing several live electronic music compositions by British experimental musician Hugh Davies (1943–2005). Our core argument is that beneath the surface level of composed indeterminacy—that is, beyond the notations and instructions that a composer employs to prescribe indeterminate musical results—there exist further ‘nested’ planes of indeterminacy that reveal themselves through the acts of archival research, rehearsal and performance. ‘Instrumental’ indeterminacy has to do with the instruments that are used to perform the music, and specifically to situations where the boundaries of the instruments are experienced (by performers or audience members) as ambiguous, fluid, reconfigurable, or undefinable, or where the behaviour of the instrument(s) is unpredictable or uncontrollable in the moment of performance. ‘Hermeneutic’ indeterminacy concerns the composer’s intentions and the ways in which these are revealed, through the processes of archival and performance research, to be incompletely, ambiguously, contradictorily, and/or diffusely represented in documents (including but not limited to scores) and material configurations (including the instruments and apparatus used to perform the music). ‘Ontological’ indeterminacy is signalled by uncertainty (on the part of the researchers) about the ontological status of the piece to be performed. By sharing these perspectives, we aim to contribute to scholarly understandings of the ‘afterlives’ of indeterminacy, beyond the circumscriptions of a composer.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2022.2080467
Benjamin Piekut
This article explores composer John Cage’s turn to practice in the 1960s, placing it in a history of chance that extends into the nineteenth century, when the speculations of finance capitalism, the measurement of norms and their deviations, the statistical analysis of population and disease, and the assessment and management of risk all produced ways of calculating and mitigating risk. Cage and his primary collaborator, the pianist and electronic musician David Tudor, eschewed discrete, individual works and developed shared techniques and materials that flowed from night to night and problematised the notion of individual authorship. This improvisatory mode of action opened Cage up to complexities of indeterminacy that might have escaped him previously, most notably how one narrows the vast range of unforeseen possible outcomes by working with trusted partners and developing shared expectations and desires in a manner congruent with Michel Foucault’s classic definition of power: an action upon possible future or present actions. The article focuses on Cage’s work with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and especially Cunningham’s important Event format, as well as Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5 (2008), Cage’s Variations IV (1963), and Pauline Oliveros’s In Memoriam: Nikola Tesla, Cosmic Engineer (1969).
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