Modern Music

Michael Price is a composer of television and film music and the chair of the  New Media Executive Committee  of the British Academy of Songwriters .  He is unhappy about the changes made by media companies in the way that composers are being paid for their music. (The Independent) Price said he was a supporter of licensed streaming services, but called for a new era of “transparency” in which tech giants and record companies disclose explicit details of the deals which set the rates on how much artists and songwriters receive. His comments follow the recent launches of the Amazon Prime Music and Apple Music streaming services, and come in the wake of claims by US musician David Byrne that record companies are siphoning off revenues from streaming and not paying royalties to artists and writers. Price claimed that many of their employees didn’t recognise the value of music. “People working in these tech companies are often of a generation that h...

Female-composers-new-complexity This is a controversial one.   I am reposting a discussion that  Tim Rutherford-Johnson had with some of twitter followers about the lack of Female New Complexity composers. As far as I am concerned, there are two major issues here: One is the lack of published female composers. The other is the terminology "New Complexity" - what does it refer to and what does it mean?

H elmut Lachen mann is relatively unknown outside of Germany.  Nevertheless , h e is a figure wh o is growing in significan ce in modern music circles.  Despite his wide experience, h is lack of broad appeal is, in my opinion, largely d ue to the individuality o f his music.  He is  not easy to categori se in an era which is   dominated by trends and cliches. A simple way of describing his music is... *"musique concrète instrumentale". The notion is the creation of a subtlety of transformation of timbre, a manipulation of a continuum from sound to noise, from pitched notes to pitchless textural exploration, and all that in the sphere of (mostly) purely instrumental music. That means that in Lachenmann's music, there's a world of sound that rivals and even surpasses what electronic and electro-acoustic composers can achieve.  -Guardian. Essentially ,  he is a acoustic composer writing electronic sounding music.  He is somewhere...

Karlheinz Stockhausen is one of the most important composers of the post war era. He is partially responsible for the creation of the post war modernist music.   But what is his true legacy? Was he the leading composer in his field? Did he invent the 'timbralist' idea of generating music from a single sound? Well, he did accomplish that concept with  "Stimmung'' (Voice) which is completely designed around the single chord of a B flat ninth . But he wasn't the first.  Giacinto Scelsi wrote "Quatro pezzi per orchestre" which is based a single note per movement and that work was written in 1959. Quatro pezzi per orchestre - Scelsi I seriously doubt whether Stockhausen knew about Scelsi's achievement when he wrote Stimmung in 1977. Perhaps one of his greatest works  is " Gruppen'' (Groups) composed for three orchestras. Did it change the way we use the orchestra?  He was a pioneer, especially in the early stages of hi...

La Mort Des Artistes - Ian Moore This work is the centre piece of a trilogy which is yet to be completed.  Written at a time when I was heavily influenced by the music of Pierre Boulez,  the titles of three compositions are reminiscent of 'Le Marteau sans Maitre'; the centre piece is a solo song based on the surrealist poem by Charles Baudelaire and it is framed by a prelude "Avant..." for solo clarinet and pre-recorded material and a postlude "Apres..." for mixed ensemble.  Unfortunately, "A vant  La Mort Des Artistes" has yet to be completed.  The technology and the opportunity in terms of orchestral resources are only now available to me. I believe that I will finish the piece soon. Out of all of my music as a young composer, I would say this work is one of the most important. This is because it closely defines the method of working for the following years and it even influences the way that I work today. The poem is at the heart o...

A newspaper report(Guardian) has revealed startling information about arts funding.  It says that spending public money on the arts was crucial, “not just for the good of society, but to nurture some of the best talent for our creative industries”.  “There is nothing ‘nice to have’ about the arts and the creative industries, there is nothing tangential, nothing ‘soft’. They are central to our economy, our public life and our nation’s health.” -  John Kampfner, the chief executive of the Creative Industries Federation It reveals a surprising figure; For every pound invested in arts and culture, an additional £1.06 is generated in the economy The reports also include some striking statistics. For example: •  Arts and culture is worth £7.7bn in gross value added to the British economy – an increase of 35.8% between 2010 and 2013. •  More than one in 12 UK jobs are in the creative economy, with employment increasing 5% between 2013 and 201...

I am writing this post to address the comments made in this article: "Why dissonant music strikes the wrong chord in the brain." The article reminds me of an investigation conducted by Plomp and Levelt on Tonal Consonance and the 'Critical Band Width Theory'. It explored the possibility that there is a natural human dislike of dissonance. Unfortunately, the experiment used 'sine' wave tones instead of real musical sounds which made the whole investigation 'void' in my eyes. Overtones experienced in 'real' music are rather different than those encountered in a science lab. The term "dissonant" presents another stumbling block as well. People from different cultures have a different concept about what is "dissonant" or what is "tonal". Confusingly, Plomp and Levelt use the same terms to indicate a completely different concept; in their case, it refers to a kind of tonal disturbance and not to ...