Tag Archives: Experimental Music

ALVIN LUCIER :: MUSIC ON A LONG THIN WIRE, 1980

In Alvin Lucier’s own words (1992): “Music on a Long Thin Wire is constructed as follows: the wire is extended across a large room, clamped to tables at both ends. The ends of the wire are connected to the loudspeaker terminals of a power amplifier placed under one of the tables. A sine wave oscillator is connected to the amplifier. A magnet straddles the wire at one end. Wooden bridges are inserted under the wire at both ends to which contact microphones are imbedded, routed to a stereo sound system. The microphones pick up the vibrations that the wire imparts to the bridges and are sent through the playback system. By varying the frequency and loudness of the oscillator, a rich variety of slides, frequency shifts, audible beats and other sonic phenomena may be produced.” Continue reading ALVIN LUCIER :: MUSIC ON A LONG THIN WIRE, 1980

HARRY PARTCH:: DELUSION OF THE FURY, original filmed performance, 1969, 72 min.

Delusion of the Fury: A Ritual of Dream and Delusion, A Film by MadelineTourtelot, Recorded at UCLA Playhouse 1969. Conducted by Danlee Mitchell, musician assembly Emil Richards.

Delusion of the Fury is a stage play by the American composer Harry Partch. The first draft for a new theater work for singers, mimes, dancers, and musicians, Cry from Another Darkness, was completed by Partch on December 30, 1964, and the second draft, dated January 17, 1965, was a fuller, longer, re-titled Delusion of the Fury. The work was originally conceived as a play in two acts, with a dramatic first act and a comedic second. Partch completed writing of the music on March 17, 1966. The piece employs Partch’s original system of micro-tonality, and was written for the largest assembly of his custom-made instruments used in any of his works. The instruments were an important part of the stage set.[2] Delusion of the Fury was premiered at the UCLA Playhouse on January 9, 1969, where it was recorded for Columbia Records. This remained the only performance of the piece until it was re-staged in 2007 by the Japan Society in New York. In 2013 the piece was staged for the first time in Europe at Ruhrtriennale by Ensemble MusikFabrik under the direction of Heiner Goebbels.This production toured to the Edinburgh International Festival in 2014. It received another performance in Paris as part of IRCAM’s ManiFeste festival in the Grande Salle of La Villette on June 18, 2016. -wikipedia

Continue reading HARRY PARTCH:: DELUSION OF THE FURY, original filmed performance, 1969, 72 min.

CARL STONE :: SHING KEE, 1986

 

CarlStone (born Carl Joseph Stone, February 10, 1953) is an American composer, primarily working in the field of live electronic music. His works have been performed in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the Near East.

Stone studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. As an undergrad at CalArts, he had a work-study job in the Music Library, which had many thousands of LP records in the circulating collection (this was 1973). The collection included a lot of western classical music of course but also a really comprehensive world music collection, avant-garde, electronic music, jazz and more. Because the librarians were concerned that the LPs, many of which were rare, would soon become unlistenable at the hands of the students and faculty, his job was to take every disc and record it onto cassette, a kind of back-up operation. He soon discovered that he could monitor the output of any of the recordings he was making and even mix them together without disturbing the recordings. So, he began to experiment, making musical collages, and started to develop habits of combining disparate musical materials. In addition to his composition and performance schedule, he is a faculty member in the Department of Information Media, School of Information Science and Technology at Chukyo University in Japan. – wikipedia Continue reading CARL STONE :: SHING KEE, 1986