After All, Saxophone is a Metal Instrument: Ulrich Krieger’s “Acoustic Electronics”
By most accounts, one of the most perplexing rock albums ever released was Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. Was it a taunting prank directed at Reed’s fans, the grudging fulfillment of a contractual obligation...
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...
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...
The Timbre of Neither/Nor: Morton Feldman’s Clarinet & String Quartet
In the 1972 essay “A Compositional Problem,” Morton Feldman mentioned a contradiction he felt faced him as a composer: The contradiction between instrumental color and the immediacy of sound. For a composer with a...
The 2015 Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music, 18-20 September 2015
The 2015 Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music, the DC area’s fourteenth annual weekend-long program of experimental music and multimedia works, was held at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Silver Spring, MD, the...
Uwe Oberg: Twice, at least
"Twice, At least" is a further test of Uwe Oberg's intelligent formula, who confirms the stylistic line of the German musician, a whirlwind of 70 years of jazz pianism: starting from Monk, he forges...
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...
An Alternative Modernism: David Diamond’s String Quartets Nos. 2, 9 & 10
The American composer David Diamond would seem to have been something of a master of unfortunate timing. Holding to the indispensability of melody and traditional compositional techniques when both were thought to be in...
Notizie
Lo Spontaneous Music Festival a Poznań
Nelle tante ricerche che ho svolto per conoscere meglio le realtà musicali nelle varie nazioni europee, devo riconoscere che per la Polonia ho avuto...
