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Totalism
Totalism is a style of art music that arose in the 1980s and 1990s as a response to minimalism. It paralleled postminimalism but involved a younger generation of creators, born in the 1950s. This term, invented by writer and composer Kyle Gann, has not been adopted by contemporary musicology and generally still refers only to Gann’s use of it in his writings. Early 1980s In the early 1980s, many young composers began writing music within the static confines of minimalism, but using greater rhythmic complexity, often with two or more simultaneous tempos (or implied tempos) audible at once. The style acquired a name around 1990, when it became evident to composers working in New York City that a number of them, including John Luther Adams, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Kyle Gann, Michael Gordon, Arthur Jarvinen, Bernadette Speach, Ben Neill, Larry Polansky, Mikel Rouse, Evan Ziporyn, were employing similar types of global tempo structures in their music. Others include Eve Beg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kyle Gann
Kyle Eugene Gann (born November 21, 1955, in Dallas, Texas) is an American professor of music, critic, analyst, and composer who has worked primarily in the New York City area. As a music critic for ''The Village Voice'' (from 1986 to 2005) and other publications, he has supported progressive music, including such " downtown" movements as postminimalism and totalism. Biography Gann was born in 1955 and raised in a musical family. He began composing at the age of 13. After graduating in 1973 from Dallas's Skyline High School, he attended Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he obtained a B.Mus. in 1977, and Northwestern University, where he received his M.Mus. and D.Mus. in 1981 and 1983, respectively. As well as studying composition with Randolph Coleman at Oberlin, he also studied Renaissance counterpoint with Greg Proctor at the University of Texas at Austin. He studied composition primarily with Ben Johnston (1984–86) and Peter Gena (1977–81), and briefly with Mort ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mikel Rouse
Mikel Rouse (born Michael Rouse; January 26, 1957 in Saint Louis, Missouri, United States) is an American composer. He has been associated with a Downtown New York City movement known as totalism, and is best known for his operas, including '' Dennis Cleveland'', about a television talk show host, which Rouse wrote and starred in. Music Rouse writes music that is idiomatically and stylistically indebted to popular music, yet he uses complex rhythmic techniques derived from world music, the avant-garde and minimalism, including a technique he calls " counterpoetry" in which separate lines of a song sung by separate characters or groups are set to phrases of differing lengths (such as 9 and 10 beats) and often played over a background time signature of 4/4. Metric sleight of hand, simple in concept but often complex in perception, is common. One of the basic rhythms of Rouse's opera '' Failing Kansas'' is a five-beat isorhythm (rhythmic ostinato) against which either the harmon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Larry Polansky
Larry Polansky (born 1954) is a composer, guitarist, mandolinist, and professor emeritus at Dartmouth College and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a founding member and co-director of Frog Peak Music (a composers' collective) He co-wrote HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language) with Phil Burk and David Rosenboom. There are several recordings of his work, including an album of mensuration canons, ''Four-Voice Canons''. He also served as co-producer of ''Asmat Dream: New Music Indonesia, Vol. I''. He is the brother of novelist Steven Polansky. Discography * freeHorn (2017, Cold Blue Music) * Three Pieces for Two Pianos (2016, New World Records) * The World's Longest Melody (2010, New World Records, featuring Zwerm guitar quartet) * The Theory of Impossible Melody (1990, Artifact Recordings; 2008 Reissue on New World Records) * Trios (2004, Pogus CDs, with Douglas Repetto, Tom Erbe, Chris Mann, Christian Wolff) * Four Voice Canons (2002, Cold Bl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Postminimalism
Postminimalism is an art term coined (as post-minimalism) by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971Chilvers, Ian and Glaves-Smith, John, ''A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art'', second edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 569. . and used in various artistic fields for work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism. The expression is used specifically in relation to music and the visual arts, but can refer to any field using minimalism as a critical reference point. In music, "postminimalism" refers to music following minimal music. Visual art In visual art, postminimalist art uses minimalism either as an aesthetic or conceptual reference point. Postminimalism is more an artistic tendency than a particular movement. Postminimalist artworks are usually everyday objects, use simple materials, and sometimes take on a "pure", formalist aesthetic. However, since postminimalism includes such a diverse and dispa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Luther Adams
John Luther Adams (born January 23, 1953) is an American composer whose music is inspired by nature, especially the landscapes of Alaska, where he lived from 1978 to 2014. His orchestral work '' Become Ocean'' was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music. Early life Born in Meridian, Mississippi, Adams began playing music as a teenager as a drummer in rock bands. He attended the California Institute of the Arts as an undergraduate in the early 1970s, studying with James Tenney and Leonard Stein, and graduated in 1973. After graduating, Adams began work in environmental protection, and through this work Adams first travelled to Alaska in 1975. Adams moved to Alaska in 1978 and lived there until 2014. He now splits his time between New York and the Sonoran desert in Mexico, though his time in Alaska continues to be a prominent influence in his music. From 1982 to 1989, he performed as timpanist and principal percussionist with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and the Arctic Chamb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rhys Chatham
Rhys Chatham (born September 19, 1952) is an American composer, guitarist, trumpet player, multi-instrumentalist (flutes in C, alto and bass, keyboard), primarily active in avant-garde and minimalism, minimalist music. He is best known for his "guitar orchestra" compositions. He has lived in France since 1987. Early years Chatham began his musical career as a piano tuner for avant-garde pioneer La Monte Young as well as harpsichord tuner for Gustav Leonhardt, Rosalyn Tureck and Glenn Gould. He studied flute under Sue Ann Kahn, with whom he first encountered contemporary music, and studied soon afterwards under electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick and minimalist icon La Monte Young and was a member of Young's group, ''The Theater of Eternal Music'', during the early seventies; Chatham also played with Tony Conrad in an early version of Conrad's group, ''The Dream Syndicate''. In 1971, while still in his teens, Chatham became the first music director at the experimental art ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Gordon (composer)
Michael Gordon (born July 20, 1956) is an American composer and co-founder of the "Bang on a Can" music collective and festival. He grew up in Nicaragua. Life and career Michael Gordon was born in Florida on July 20, 1956. He grew up in Nicaragua and on the outskirts of Managua in an Eastern European Jewish community before moving to Miami Beach at age of eight. Gordon's music is an outgrowth of his experience with underground rock bands in New York City and his formal training in composition at Yale University, Yale where he studied with Martin Bresnick. He is based in New York City. Bang on a Can Gordon is one of the founders and artistic directors of New York's Bang on a Can Festival, alongside fellow composers Julia Wolfe—his wife—and David Lang (composer), David Lang. He has collaborated with them on several projects. The opera ''The Carbon Copy Building'', a collaboration with comic book artist Ben Katchor, received the 2000 Village Voice Obie Award for Best New Amer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ben Neill
Ben Neill (b. November 14, 1957) is an American composer, trumpeter, producer, and educator. He is the inventor of the "Mutantrumpet", a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument. Early life, family and education Neill was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His early studies included the North Carolina School of the Arts and Eastern Music Festival. He attended the Dana School of Music at Youngstown State University, where he earned Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees. In 1983 he moved to New York City, and earned a Doctorate of Musical Arts degree from Manhattan School of Music. He also studied privately with La Monte Young and was mentored by Jon Hassell. Since 2008 he has been a music professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Career Neill invented the Mutantrumpet, a trumpet equipped with extra bells and valves as well as electrical modifications that allow him to control computer variables with his playing. The first Mutantrumpet (1981) had three bells, six valves, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minimalism Music
Minimal music (also called minimalism)"Minimalism in music has been defined as an aesthetic, a style, and a technique, each of which has been a suitable description of the term at certain points in the development of minimal music. However, two of these definitions of minimalism—aesthetic and style—no longer accurately represent the music that is often given that label." Johnson 1994, 742. is a form of art music or other compositional practice that employs limited or minimal musical materials. Prominent features of minimalist music include repetitive patterns or pulses, steady drones, consonant harmony, and reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units. It may include features such as phase shifting, resulting in what is termed phase music, or process techniques that follow strict rules, usually described as process music. The approach is marked by a non-narrative, non-teleological, and non- representational approach, and calls attention to the activity of listening by focu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evan Ziporyn
Evan Ziporyn (b. Chicago, Illinois, December 14, 1959) is an American composer of post-minimalist music with a cross-cultural orientation, drawing equally from classical music, avant-garde, various world music traditions, and jazz. Ziporyn has composed for a wide range of ensembles, including symphony orchestras, wind ensembles, many types of chamber groups, and solo works, sometimes involving electronics. Balinese gamelan, for which he has composed numerous works, has compositions. He is known for his solo performances on clarinet and bass clarinet; additionally, Ziporyn plays gender wayang and other Balinese instruments, saxophones, piano & keyboards, EWI, and Shona mbira. Ziporyn is the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as director of MIT's Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). At MIT he directs GamelaGalak Tika an ensemble he founded in 1993, a group of 30 MIT students, staff and community members, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David First
David First (born August 20, 1953) is an American composer. His music most often deals with drones and interference beats, the latter aligning his music with that of Alvin Lucier. He usually plays computer or guitar and has led the World Casio Quartet, Joy Buzzers and The Notekillers which originally existed from 1977–81 and reformed in 2004. He is also a member of Matter Waves, which includes Kid Millions on drums and Bernard Gann on bass, and the music collective New Party Systems. His albums include 1991's ''Resolver'', instrumental pieces influenced by minimalism and 2002's relatively pop-oriented ''Universary'', which consists of "songs and drones". More recent releases include 2010's ''We're Here to Help'' (Prophase Records) by The Notekillers and ''Privacy Issues'', a 3-CD set of droneworks on the XI label. In 1995 First, along with visual artist Patricia Smith created an opera, ''The Manhattan Book of the Dead'', which was presented at La MaMa Experimental Theatr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Cowell
Henry Dixon Cowell (; March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher and teacher. Marchioni, Tonimarie (2012)"Henry Cowell: A Life Stranger Than Fiction" ''The Juilliard Journal''. Retrieved 19 June 2022.Campbell, Brett (2014)"Liberating Henry Cowell's Music at San Quentin" ''San Francisco Classical Voice''. Retrieved 19 June 2022. Earning a reputation as an extremely controversial performer and eccentric composer, Cowell became a leading figure of American avant-garde music for the first half of the 20th century — his writings and music serving as a great influence to similar artists at the time, including Lou Harrison, George Antheil, and John Cage, among others.Swed, Mark (2010)"Critic's notebook: Revelatory Henry Cowell revival at Lincoln Center" ''The Los Angeles Times''. Retrieved 19 June 2022. He is considered one of America's most important and influential composers. Cowell was mostly self-taught and developed a unique music ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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