May 2013
4 posts
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Miles Davis to jazz critics: "Fuck y'all"
Fewer and fewer black musicians were playing jazz and I could see why, because jazz was becoming the music of the museum. A lot of musicians and critics are at fault for letting it happen. No one wants to be dead before their time, you know, when they’re twenty-one, and that’s what was going to happen to someone who went into jazz. At least that’s the way it looked to me. The only way that wasn’t...
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Composer Portraits: The Darmstadt Boys
Luciano Berio
Pierre Boulez
John Cage
Hans Werner Henze
Mauricio Kagel
Gottfried Michael Koenig
György Ligeti
Luigi Nono
Henri Pousseur
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Source: Ulrich Dibelius, Moderne Musik 1945-1965 (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1966)
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Doris Norton: “Machine Language”
From...
April 2013
1 post
The return of Acousmata
Dear akousmatikoi,
I have successfully slain the PhD dragon and will be reanimating Acousmata in the coming weeks. Many other exciting projects are brewing as well. Thank you for your patience and happy listening!
Thomas
February 2013
4 posts
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See you on the other side
Acousmata will be on near-total hiatus for the next two months or so as I focus my attention on finishing my dissertation.
Stay tuned for exciting news about my upcoming projects, including a new vision for this blog.
Thanks for your support!
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Osamu Kitajima: “Tengu (A Long-Nosed Goblin)”
...
January 2013
3 posts
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Sylvano Bussotti: La Passion selon Sade (1966)
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George E. Lewis: “Voyager Duo 8”
From...
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Marcus Schmickler: “New Methodical Limits of...
December 2012
5 posts
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La Tonotechnie ou l’Art de noter les cylindres
La Tonotechnie ou l’Art de noter les cylindres (Marie Dominique-Joseph Engramelle, 1775)
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David Dunn: Excerpt from Gradients (1999)
From the...
November 2012
6 posts
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Images from Bernhard Leitner's "Sound:Space"...
SPATIAL GRID “The spatial grid is a three-dimensional grid of loudspeakers, a neutral frame for creating various spatial statements.”
SOUND SWING “A minimum of four loudspeakers is required for a pendulum-like motion of sound in space. Two speakers mark the upper ends on each side of the pendulum, the other two speakers are placed closely to the left and right of the...
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Farewell, Continuo's Weblog
Continuo’s Weblog, long the gold standard of experimental music blogs, has recently announced that it will be closing its doors after five years of activity.
During this time, Continuo unearthed innumerable musical gems that would otherwise have been consigned to oblivion.
Continuo’s project exerted a formative influence on my work and his words of encouragement were a huge...
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Maximilian Plessner: "Antiphone" (1884)
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Petr Kotik: Explorations in the Geometry of...
October 2012
5 posts
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Present: “Ram ram va faire ‘pif...
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Univers Zero: “Rouages”
From the...
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Pierre Barbaud: “Saturnia Tellus”...
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September 2012
3 posts
"Art must move ahead of life"
When I hear music like this, I begin to hope that tomorrow or in one or two years this new discovery—perhaps through the mediation of cosmonauts—will become reality, and, in so doing, further influence our daily life…and perhaps then the kingdom of humanity and reason will arrive sooner than hoped for. Art must move ahead of life and indicate the direction which life is to take. Music such as...
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Richard Pinhas: “The Western Wall, Part...
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Paul Dolden: L’Ivresse de la Vitesse
From...
August 2012
4 posts
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Susumu Yokota: “Kinoko”
From the...
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Wolfgang Rihm: Excerpt from Jagden und Formen...
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Arcane Device: “Pink Porous Rock”
...
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Yma Sumac: “Chuncho (The Forest Creatures)”
From...
July 2012
3 posts
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Keith Fullerton Whitman: “Generator...
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Electric Music of the Spheres: The Forgotten...
“Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.” –Walter Benjamin
The history of electronic music—whatever that term may mean—is characterized by a deeply rooted teleological bias. Past events are understood in terms of a more or less explicit evolutionary drive toward some inevitable terminus of technological development. Most often, this endpoint is represented by the...
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June 2012
5 posts
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Tokyo Gakuso: “Saibara: Koromogae”
...
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Flying Saucer of Sound: The Omni
Behold the “Omni,” a fantastically futuristic musical instrument conceived by Guy Reibel in 1985 and designed by Patrice Moullet three years later. The gently curved surface of the instrument consists of some 108 colored plates, each with its own MIDI channel, which are connected to an octophonic computer audio interface with 20,000 sampled sounds. If this video of a duo performance...
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Bernard Parmegiani: ”Matières...
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Paul Hindemith: Suite for Mechanical Organ...
May 2012
4 posts
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Pierre Bastien: “Musc exquis”
From...
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Friedrich Kaufmann's Trumpeter-Automaton (1810)
“A visible hand crank controlled two spiral springs, covered by the decorative shirt, powering two bellows and the spiral, wooden cylinder containing two sets of pegs. Four levers and two toothed segments transferred the motion of one of the sets of pegs to two rotating brass trumpets containing six pulsating reeds. The turning of the cylinder resulted in the movement of both sets of...
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Jean Tinguely: “Sculpture IV” /...
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17th-Century Music Machines
In anticipation of returning to my dissertation chapter on the “mechanical music” phenomenon in 1920s Germany, I decided it would be fun to do a series of posts on musical machines through the ages.
I use the word “machine” here to denote musical instruments that create sound without the “real-time” involvement of human agents. Machines are distinguished from...
April 2012
5 posts
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Portrait of Ferruccio Busoni (Max Oppenheimer,...
“At times, and in rare cases, a mortal is by listening made aware of something immortal in the essence of music that melts in the hands as soon as one tries to grasp it, is frozen as soon as one wishes to transplant it to the earth, is extinguished as soon as it is drawn through the darkness of our mentality. Yet enough still remains recognizable of its heavenly origin, and of all that is...
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Tom Johnson: VI3
From the album Rational...