“To Play Is Both a Sign and a Symptom of Existence”: David Toop’s Into...
The usual caveats warning against generalizations aside, it’s safe to say that in the arts as in other fields of life, the second half of the twentieth century was an era of improvisation. Encouraged...
Håkon Thelin’s Folk Music for Double Bass
Any musical instrument represents a certain set of possibilities. Constrained by the instrument’s particular characteristics—both as a unique individual and as a member of a class of instruments—these possibilities offer a range of potential...
Marcio Mattos: “Cello Is the Bit of the Bass That Was Missing”
The relationship between the cello and double bass isn’t quite as straightforward as it might seem. More first cousins than siblings—the double bass is thought to derive from the old viols, while the cello...
Renewing Modernism: The Music of Ross Feller
Through its innovations in technique, technology and formal structures, the Western art music of the second half of the last century continues to exert influence on and offer possibilities to contemporary composers and performers....
Music as Sound as Music: On Making Nostos
Nostos, a collaboration between bassist/electronics artist Cristiano Bocci (Follonica GR) and myself, represents a melding of the organic, acoustic sounds of the double bass with after-the-fact timbres and supplementary compositional structures afforded by the...
Irving Fine’s Twelve-tone Neoclassicism
Mid-20thcentury art music in America was largely dominated by twelve-tone composition. Other types of music were being composed, neoclassicism among them, but in the postwar years it was serial and other forms of composition...
The Nabatov String Trio & Z-Country Paradise
Within various streams of contemporary music the notion of genre seems to be something that exists in a state of suspension between persistence and nothingness--as an inheritance to be confounded or a perverse ideal...
Creative Sources Records
Daniel Barbiero
Creative Sources Records, based in Portugal, was conceived in 1999 by violist/composer Ernesto Rodrigues as an outlet not only for his own work but for the kind of challenging, non-commercial music that appealed...
Anthony Cheung: Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions
It’s just as the title would have it. Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions, the fifth monograph album from composer Anthony Cheung, contains three works written for, or inspired by, film, sculpture, and closed...
a conversation with cristiano bocci
It’s been said that music is really just applied mathematics. For Cristiano Bocci, an instrumentalist/composer/sound artist from Follonica, Italy, that statement is true in ways that go beyond the obvious. For in addition to...