Music

Point A to Point A – Interview Part Two: Universal Structures

June 25, 2011 | by Aram Yardumian | Category: Music | Leave a Comment

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti A four part serial conversation between TQ's Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti’s composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts. Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview Introduction Part One: Prolegomenon Part Three: Authorship Part Four: il sé interiore Aram Yardumian - Throughout your entire career, there seems to be a search for common or fundamental dynamics in the human psyche. More recently you come to this as pre-cultural habitus. But to trace this to the source, surely there must be some recourse to symbols as C.G. Jung describes them. Giancarlo Toniutti ... [Read more]

Tagged: Anthropology, Aram Yardumian, Émile Benveniste, Giancarlo Toniutti, Italian electronic music, Rene thom, Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Topology

Point A to Point A – Interview Part One: Prolegomenon

June 24, 2011 | by Aram Yardumian | Category: Music | Leave a Comment

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti A four part serial conversation between TQ's Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti’s composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts. Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview Introduction Part Two: Universal Structures Part Three: Authorship Part Four: il sé interiore The following interview with Giancarlo Toniutti was conducted in June 2011 in hopes of providing some context through which his sound art may be introduced and appreciated. As with all permanent works of art, continued engagement yields continued reward. Aram Yardumian - First, regardless of how I may have ... [Read more]

Tagged: Anthropology, Aram Yardumian, Epigenetics, Giancarlo Toniutti, Italian electronic music, La Mutazione, Metánárkosis, Rene thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, The Tree

Point A to Point A – Introduction

June 21, 2011 | by Aram Yardumian | Category: Music | Leave a Comment

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti A four part serial conversation with TQ's Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti's composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts. Serial Four-Part Interview Part One: Prolegomenon Part Two: Universal Structures Part Three: Authorship Part Four: il sé interiore Introduction Essay by Aram Yardumian Giancarlo Toniutti began conducting sonic experiments in late 1977 with his friend Tiziano Dominighini in a glassworks owned by Dominighini’s father. With the various tools, machines, surfaces, and sheets of glass, as well as a few traditional instruments, they began making “not ... [Read more]

Tagged: andrew chalk, Anthropology, Aram Yardumian, Broken Flag, Field Recording, Giancarlo Toniutti, Italian electronic music, La Mutazione, Maurizio Bianchi, Nekrose, Topology

Steve Earle and the Blood Knot of Social Control

June 9, 2011 | by Guy Zimmerman | Category: Music | 5 Comments

Goodbye I have not always been a big Country-Western fan, but someone posted a clip of Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris performing Earle’s Goodbye on Facebook a few months back, and it's been haunting me ever since. Goodbye is hill people music, a Scots-Irish ballad that aims for an ideal economy of expression in which hard-won truths and lessons learned are delivered without adornment. Earle is singing about the ravages of heroin addiction, how a woman left him and he didn’t even notice. “I can’t remember/if we said goodbye,” is the simple refrain. It’s a line that reverberates endlessly against itself in ways that convey us to the heart of our own vulnerability. The reason Earle didn’t notice is that he was too high at the ... [Read more]

Tagged: Addiction, Guy Zimmerman, recovery, Scotch-Irish, Scots_Irish in America, Steve Earle

Art Passing Through Itself

May 2, 2011 | by Alan Berman | Category: Music | 2 Comments

Schnee (Snow), 2008, Composer Hans Abrahamsen Cave Creek. Winter canon. 2011., Filmmaker Rick Bahto Monday Evening Concerts, Zipper Auditorium The closing event of the Monday Evening Concerts series this year featured an ideal pairing of experimental film and Danish post-“New Simplicity” music, both incorporating canonic techniques in their conveyance of an altered sense of the passage of time. Los Angeles filmmaker and performer Rick Bahto presented the world premiere of his most recent film Cave Creek. Winter canon. 2011. and Hans Abrahamsen’s Schnee, completed in 2008, was given its west coast premiere. Schnee (Snow) is a roughly hour-long chamber work for double ensemble. Each group includes a piano and ... [Read more]

Tagged: 2008, Alan Berman, Cave Creek. Winter canon. 2011, Hans Abrahamsen, Michel Galante, Rick Bahto, Schnee (Snow)

The Six Realms, A Requiem for Lieberson

April 28, 2011 | by Nancy Cantwell | Category: Music | Leave a Comment

The Six Realms, Peter Lieberson (25 October 1946 – 23 April 2011) In an interview last March with David Weininger, American composer Peter Leiberson stated “What makes the human life so poignant is the recognition of its profound impermanence.’’ As I casually turned the pages of the paper and read of Lieberson’s passing I was stunned. He died last Saturday in Tel Aviv where he was undergoing medical treatment for lymphoma, a diagnosis he received shortly after his beloved second wife mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson succumbed to breast cancer in 2006. He was 64. The Composer and Impermanence had not been strangers. Lieberson drew great inspiration from his Tibetan Buddhist beliefs and his connection with its ... [Read more]

Tagged: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Nancy Cantwell, Peter Lieberson, The Six Realms, Tibetan Buddhism

Armenian Suite

March 24, 2011 | by Aram Yardumian | Category: Music | Leave a Comment

Radiant Summit, Jacaranda, March 12-13th, 2011 On the occasion of the Alan Hovhaness’ centenary, Patrick Scott, Artistic Director of Jacaranda, wanted to include another great Armenian American composer Richard Yardumian (1917-1985) in all-Armenian program. After much Googling, and efforts just short of the Library of Congress, Patrick, who had recently been introduced to me and the writings of Times Quotidian asked for an introduction to Aram Yardumian, whose musical musings, insights and historical research can be found regularly on TQ. Upon finally discovering a living link to the Yardumian family, a fruitful collaboration began with the composer’s daughter Miryam. Jacaranda needed permission to commission a chamber ensemble ... [Read more]

Tagged: Aram Yardumian, Armenian Suite, Jacaranda, Los Angeles Music, Patrick Scott, Richard Yardumian, Vache Sharafyan

Reprise

March 7, 2011 | by Michelle Plochere | Category: Music | 1 Comment

Swans, El Rey Theatre, Los Angeles, March 2, 2011 In the 1980’s and 90’s, Swans as a live experience was nothing less than a baptism by sound – cleansing, cathartic, obliterative – a relentless and perpetual immolation by pure noise and power. It was quite satisfying for those of us who sought to both transcend and fully inhabit this material world and corporeal self through a violent surrender to a literally deafening present. It sounds over the top and that was exactly the point. The music was lyrically and sonically potent, but its power was harnessed and channeled by M. Gira, whose very name suggested a severing of identity and its iconic reformation. I don’t know if I took myself as seriously as Michael Gira took ... [Read more]

Tagged: Beatific Annihilation, Michael Gira, Michelle Plochere, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky, No Wave, No Words/No Thoughts, Post-Rock, Swans

Time Within Space

March 1, 2011 | by Aram Yardumian | Category: Music | Leave a Comment

Remembering Milton Babbitt, The Path Least Taken At age 76, Milton Babbitt received his PhD from Princeton University for his thesis on 12-tone theory—an event in and of itself unremarkable, and one the composer himself hardly noticed. That it came forty-six years after the thesis’s submission makes it somewhat more intriguing. By way of explaining the delay, the university claimed its readers in the music department at the time had simply not understood it. Impossible to understand, unplayable, unimpeachably academic—such are the stigmas notching the years gone and criticisms leveled against Babbitt’s far-ranging oeuvre. Yet there are also listeners who, without comprehending the high math architecture of Babbitt’s music, have ... [Read more]

Tagged: 12 Tone, Aram Yardumian, Arnold Schoenberg, Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, Contemporary Classical Music, electronic music, Milton Babbitt, RCA Mark II Electronic Music Synthesizer, Twelve-tone

Modern Commitment to the Present and Past

February 22, 2011 | by Alan Berman | Category: Music | Leave a Comment

JACK Quartet, SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) Chamber Music in Historic Sites, 13 February 2011 In this uncommonly vibrant and relevant program of contrasts and collisions, the New York-based JACK Quartet demonstrated thrilling engagement with music from the medieval, Renaissance, and 20th century periods. When one considers the extensive list of string quartet composers, including Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Bartók, and Schoenberg, it is even more impressive that the JACK Quartet began the concert with three arrangements of songs originally written for unaccompanied voices by 14th-century master Guillaume de Machaut. These settings, by quartet member Ari Streisfeld, gave the intricate polyphony of Machaut ... [Read more]

Tagged: Alan Berman, Chamber Music in Historic Sites, Iannis Xenakis, Jack Quartet, SCI-Arc