Fifty Years After the Way: James Tenney’s Meta+Hodos

Composer James Tenney’s Meta+Hodos was an early formulation of what he described as a “conceptual framework for musical description and analysis.” Tellingly, Tenney chose as his title an etymological breakdown of the word “method,”...

Beyond the Machine with Gonçalo Gato

The focus of much of the music of Lisbon-born, London-based composer Gonçalo Gato (b. 1979) is on the incorporation of computer algorithms into the compositional process. To judge from the work included in NowState,...

Timothy McCormack’s Geological Soundscapes

Pull up an image of a karst and you’re likely to see a distressed, often vertiginous landscape of water-carved rock faces pitted with crevices and caves. Under the surface may be running water, but...

Open String Minimalism or, What Is the Sound of One String Vibrating?

  Il contrabbasso è stato in prima linea nello sviluppo delle risorse timbriche della musica d'arte contemporanea, messe a disposizione dei compositori ed esecutori in egual modo. Paradossalmente l'espansione dei mezzi per l'esplorazione timbrica del...

Italian reviews/Inserto recensioni improv Italia, part 1

The antinomy between composition and improvisation is often a false one; much contemporary improvised music, even when eschewing any pre-existing formal strictures or explicit structures, shows a predisposition toward a sensibility deeply molded by...

Notes on the music of sound: Material, Medium & Manner (first part)

Daniel Barbiero (These notes aren’t intended to be a systematic consideration of timbral music; instead, they record some suggestions and impressions.) The music of timbre considered qua sound imagines timbre as something in itself, as a...

Un simposio per il contrabbasso: le basi di una nuova era (parte seconda)

  Alisei & Stefano Scodanibbio’s Poetics of the Double Bass 1 In a recent piece I suggested that the contemporary equivalent or near-equivalent of the old Common Practice of functional harmony just might be found in the...

Notizie

Addio a Peter Eötvös

La morte non ci dà tregua. Un addio a Peter Eötvös, che in un mio articolo del 2015 ho definito compositore dei 'movimenti cosmici'....

Maurizio Pollini