Incontri Institut für neue Musik

Between the Lines of Steven Kazuo Takasugi's recent work »Jargon of Nothingness«

Steven Kazuo Takasugi's recent work Jargon of Nothingness for sampled sounds critiques the notion of »line« or »distance« as a means to explore contradictory perspectives while searching for a »void«. A critique of »distance« occurs in his piece through the use of magnified/focused sounds and shattered/infected reverberations. This critique provides ways to thwart one's assumptions regarding normative musical spaces. By turning sounds and the spaces they inhabit »inside-out« (i.e. through a depth perspective interchange) one is removed from the usual modes of assimilating sound object and placed into perpetual state of uncertainty. This uncertainty - manifested through contradictory perspectives - supports the »belief that the physicality of experience could (and must) be affirmed through the destabilization of logical faculties«. Takasugi's search for a »void« emerges from the interstices caused by this destabilization: a search that counters narrative trance and awakens one to reclaim a subjective footing so that music can possess a more critical humanist nature.

Lachenmann's description of --sound types-- was first presented in his 1966 essay, Klangtypen der neuen Musik (Sound types of the new music). This concept is discussed and developed through an analysis of his string quartet, Gran Torso: Musik für Streichquartett (1971–72).

This book is an introduction to GIS (Generalized Interval Systems) theory that includes the major results of pitch-class theory. It provides mathematicians with applications of group theory to music and music theorists with the essential connections between GIS theory and pitch-class theory. Many of the results in pitch-class theory are not addressed by David Lewin (such as power functions or the Common Tone Theorem for inversions). The book states those results and generalizes them to conform with GIS theory. Finally, it addresses recent criticisms leveled at pitch-class theory and suggests how they can be addressed in GIS theory.

Die Geisterinsel, a chamber opera based on Shakespeare’s Tempest, reworks an opera with the same title by Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg, a contemporary of Mozart. Ming Tsao transcribes Zumsteeg’s music in such a way that ‘noise’ infiltrates the original music that continually moves between the refined Classical style of Zumsteeg and the noises of the island where The Tempest is set. Tsao’s intention is to use noise to create a compact musical space in which irregular rhythmic forces twist and deform the Classical phrasing of progression so that a new kind of lyricism can surface.

Der Aufsatz behandelt Tsaos Ästhetik eines dialektischen Komponierens, das
v.a. im Rekurs auf Lachenmann und Ferneyhough entwickelt wird. Dabei geht es, anhand
zahlreicher eigener Musikbeispiele illustriert, um die kompositorische Wiederentdeckung
von Subjektivitat, musikalischem Ausdruck und der Kategorie des Lyrischen angesichts
einer Diskreditierung, die diese Begriffe historisch erfuhren. Dialektisches Komponieren
zeichnet sich primär durch musikalische Materialarbeit aus, wobei Vergangenheit und Gegenwart durch solche Praxis in neue musikalische Verhältnisse treten, die die Artikulation einer kulturell und politisch engagierten Position durch Komponieren ermöglichen.

Tsao's music renews the idea of the lyric in contemporary music that becomes fractured, damaged, multi-perspective, complex and problematized in order to negotiate the complexities of the surrounding world. His music constitutes an example of the “speculative turn” in music composition that posits possible worlds as a counterpoint to our contemporary understanding of place, where musical lyricism is sensitive to relations between human impact and presence in the more-than-human world.

One of the challenges of contemporary music composition is to speculate upon "possible worlds" as a counterpoint to our contemporary understanding of place, where the lyrical impulse in music is sensitive to relations between human impact and presence in the more-than-human world. Such sensitivity arises from a compositional superfluity where subjectivity is " dislocated presence " for new modes of perception to appear that resist representation, conceptualisation, enframing, quantification and instrumentalisation. Music composition today should ask listeners to listen beyond anthropocentric terms, including the ways in which the resistance of the world—its conflicting and dynamic materiality—exceeds both conceptual thought and technological control. This " speculative turn " in music composition is indeed not to excise music's resemblance to language, and by extension music's capacity for expression, but to decentre music's humanised expression from its privileged position for the possibility of a music independent of from language, thought and intentions, where music's materiality can exceed human agency. Such music would suggest a critical materialist sound—a sound world outside of consciousness rather than a sound world fully endowed with consciousness, thus placing the listener in a space where they are required to rethink their personhood within a larger domain of life.

This Side and the Other Side of the Garden: The Music Theater of Ming Tsao.

Ming Tsao’s music theatre work Prosperos Garten is based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest and deals with colonial power relations as created and consolidated through language, and through associated elements of abstraction. Tsao realizes this language-critical interpretation of The Tempest with an aesthetic that, through reverse transcriptions of pre-existing historical material and complex structural sounds, integrates dissociated musical fragments, and thus also fragments of music-cultural perceptions, into the composition, interweaving them and bringing them into contact through layers of different sonic contexts. In this manner, he strives to open up possibilities for polyphonic musical subjectivity and expressivity beyond dichotomous representations.

Der Aufsatz behandelt Tsaos Ästhetik eines dialektischen Komponierens, das
v.a. im Rekurs auf Lachenmann und Ferneyhough entwickelt wird. Dabei geht es, anhand
zahlreicher eigener Musikbeispiele illustriert, um die kompositorische Wiederentdeckung
von Subjektivitat, musikalischem Ausdruck und der Kategorie des Lyrischen angesichts
einer Diskreditierung, die diese Begriffe historisch erfuhren. Dialektisches Komponieren
zeichnet sich primär durch musikalische Materialarbeit aus, wobei Vergangenheit und Gegenwart durch solche Praxis in neue musikalische Verhältnisse treten, die die Artikulation einer kulturell und politisch engagierten Position durch Komponieren ermöglichen.