Sweet Thunder
Sweet Thunder

Author: Vivienne Suvini-Hand

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-12-02

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 1351196219

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"Italian music of the 1960s is one of the most unjustly neglected areas in the arena of twentieth-century classical music. This volume pays tribute to the astounding complexity of the music and libretti of five vocal compositions by leading experimental composers of the decade: Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Giacomo Manzoni, and Armando Gentilucci. It highlights how the 'difficult' and unconventional methods of composition employed by these artists - dodecaphony, total serialism, Webernian minimalist techniques, aleatory and electronic music - displayed a refusal to compete with the market-place values of Italy's new capitalist society. At the same time, the libretti's collage arrangement of a plethora of European and Oriental literary sources dating from the sixteenth century BC onwards, reflected the contemporary Neo-avant-garde rejection of conventional literary practice, and their preference for 'organised disorder', in Umberto Eco's phrase."

Beyond Notation
Beyond Notation

Author: Rebecca Y. Kim

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2017-09-28

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0472123327

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Earle Brown (1926–2002) was a crucial part of a group of experimental composers known as the New York School, and his music intersects in fascinating ways with that of his colleagues John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff. This book seeks to expand our view of Brown’s work by exploring his practices as a composer and draughtsman through a selection of works composed in the United States and Europe, which included a seminal collaboration with sculptor Alexander Calder. These essays detail Brown’s compositional methods in historical context: not only his influential experiments with open form composition and graphic notation, but his interest in performance, mixed media, jazz, the Schillinger system, and his engagement with the European avant-garde. The volume also includes never before published essays by Brown that shed new light on his relationships with colleagues and the ideas that shaped his work, in addition to several color photographs of Brown’s paintings.