tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post5024736077974019776..comments2024-03-27T23:06:03.736-05:00Comments on The Music Salon: Tom Service on LutosławskiBryan Townsendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09482696991279345516noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post-26175320221424237872014-06-12T09:35:36.665-05:002014-06-12T09:35:36.665-05:00Welcome to the Music Salon. I see you are from Dow...Welcome to the Music Salon. I see you are from Down Under! That is an excellent point. John Cage, famous for his indeterminism, actually allowed his performers no freedom: the notes were sometimes chosen with chance procedures, but then were to be played as written. Other composers use graphic notation to leave the window open. In other cases, all the notes were chosen, but how they combined in performance was left open. This was my approach and that of quite a few other composers.<br /><br />So, even during the wild and wooly 60s and 70s, there was a conflict between the composer's role and the performer's. Composers usually like to specify what happens as that is bound up with authority (the quality of being an author). On the other hand, the impulse to freedom, is one that some performers liked to exercise. In jazz the performers have prevailed, but in classical music, it has usually been the other way around.Bryan Townsendhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09482696991279345516noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post-6774635422846968662014-06-12T06:28:53.391-05:002014-06-12T06:28:53.391-05:00I am very new to The Music Salon and am fascinated...I am very new to The Music Salon and am fascinated by the site. I am a painter and would like to add one thought regarding aleatoric or improvised elements in music/visual art. I believe that the use of impulse/s in writing music or painting or free poetry has to come from elements of chance and can not be altogether predetermined. <br />John Howleyhttp://johnhowley.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post-56204581161313031962014-06-11T08:54:37.989-05:002014-06-11T08:54:37.989-05:00During the 1960s I was playing rock music, but dur...During the 1960s I was playing rock music, but during the 1970s I was both playing and composing (modernist) classical music. A whole host of composers were doing a variety of different things from the completely open improvisation on a concept of people like LaMont Young, to the notes selected by chance procedures of John Cage, to the somewhat different methods of Morton Feldman and Earle Brown. There was often a movement from more open, graphic scores, to more notated scores. I wrote a piece in 1978 that combined some graphic notations with other precisely written ones. There are a host of examples by people like Leo Brouwer. In fact, thinking back, just about every composer I knew during the 1970s was writing at least some music that was partly indeterminate or aleatoric! I remember when I attended Lutoslawski's talk in the latter 1970s thinking that the whole dispute over aleatoric music was rather passé already.Bryan Townsendhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09482696991279345516noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8827040061563065922.post-60640383100251251472014-06-10T13:53:58.111-05:002014-06-10T13:53:58.111-05:00I believe that Lutoslawski's aleatorism is fai...I believe that Lutoslawski's aleatorism <i>is</i> fairly individual within the 1960s and 1970s modernist scene because he precisely notates all pitches, and these pitches are from carefully chosen 12-tone chords. While other composers used aleatoric writing to generate a new kind of form or unexpected harmonies, Lutoslawski was chiefly concerned with producing a certain kind of texture. The result is that in spite of the freedom one might expect <i>ad libitum</i> passages to provide, recordings of pieces from Lutoslawski's middle period do not noticeably differ from each otherChristopher Culverhttp://www.christopherculver.comnoreply@blogger.com