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In C is a musical piece composed by Terry Riley in 1964. It consists of series of 53 short melodic fragments that can be repeated at the discretion of the musicians. It is often cited as the first minimalist composition to make a significant impact on the public consciousness and inspire a new movement. The number of performers is unspecified. Riley suggests "a group of about 35 is desired if possible but smaller or larger groups will work".
William Duckworth was an American composer, author, educator, and Internet pioneer. He wrote more than 200 pieces of music and is credited with the composition of the first postminimal piece of music, The Time Curve Preludes (1977–78), for piano. Duckworth was a Professor of Music at Bucknell University. Together with Nora Farrell, his wife, he ran Monroe Street Music, the publisher of many Duckworth's pieces.
Process music is music that arises from a process. It may make that process audible to the listener, or the process may be concealed.
Kyle Eugene Gann is an American composer, professor of music, critic, analyst, and musicologist who has worked primarily in the New York City area. As a music critic for The Village Voice and other publications, he has supported progressive music, including such "downtown" movements as postminimalism and totalism.
Thomas Floyd Johnson was an American composer and music critic associated with minimalism. After a religious upbringing in Colorado, he studied at Yale with Allen Forte and in New York City with Morton Feldman. There he covered the work of several noted composers, bringing them to wider attention in The Village Voice. He found inspiration in the ideas of ancient and early modern mathematicians and philosophers, and collaborated with contemporary mathematicians, while incorporating theatrical and visual elements in his work. Johnson often sought to engage audiences by explaining or narrating the processes of his music in or as part of the musical experience. He relocated to Paris in 1983, where he remarried in 1986 and lived until his death. Among his noted works are An Hour for Piano, The Four-Note Opera, Riemannoper, and the Bonhoeffer Oratorio.
4′33″ is a modernist composition by American experimental composer John Cage. It was composed in 1952 for any instrument or combination of instruments; the score instructs performers not to play their instruments throughout the three movements. It is divided into three movements, lasting 30 seconds, two minutes and 23 seconds, and one minute and 40 seconds, respectively, although Cage later stated that the movements' durations can be determined by the musician. As suggested by the title, the composition lasts four minutes and 33 seconds. It is marked by silence except for ambient sound, which is intended to contribute to the performance.
Downtown music is a subdivision of American music, closely related to experimental music, which developed in downtown Manhattan in the 1960s.
Minimal music is a form of art music or other compositional practice that employs limited or minimal musical materials. Prominent features of minimalist music include repetitive patterns or pulses, steady drones, consonant harmony, and reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units. It may include features such as phase shifting, resulting in what is termed phase music, or process techniques that follow strict rules, usually described as process music. The approach is marked by a non-narrative, non-teleological, and non-representational approach, and calls attention to the activity of listening by focusing on the internal processes of the music.
Totalism is a style of art music that arose in the 1980s and 1990s as a response to minimalism. It paralleled postminimalism but involved a younger generation of creators, born in the 1950s. This term, invented by writer and composer Kyle Gann, has not been adopted by contemporary musicology and generally still refers only to Gann's use of it in his writings.
Connotations is a classical music composition for symphony orchestra written by American composer Aaron Copland. Commissioned by Leonard Bernstein in 1962 to commemorate the opening of Philharmonic Hall in New York City, United States, this piece marks a departure from Copland's populist period, which began with El Salón México in 1936 and includes the works he is most famous for such as Appalachian Spring, Lincoln Portrait and Rodeo. It represents a return to a more dissonant style of composition in which Copland wrote from the end of his studies with French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and return from Europe in 1924 until the Great Depression. It was also Copland's first dodecaphonic work for orchestra, a style he had disparaged until he heard the music of French composer Pierre Boulez and adapted the method for himself in his Piano Quartet of 1950. While the composer had produced other orchestral works contemporary to Connotations, it was his first purely symphonic work since his Third Symphony, written in 1947.
Sarah Cahill is an American pianist based in the Bay Area. She has also worked as a writer on music and as a radio show host.
Afternoon of a Georgia Faun is an album by American jazz saxophonist Marion Brown recorded on August 10, 1970 and released on ECM later that year. The sextet features fellow saxophonists Anthony Braxton and Bennie Maupin, pianist Chick Corea, and vocalists Jeanne Lee and Gayle Palmore, backed by two percussionists on one side and five on the other.
The Well-Tuned Piano is an ongoing improvisatory solo piano work begun in 1964 by La Monte Young. Young has never considered the composition or performance of this piece finished, and he has performed it differently several times since its debut in 1974. The composition requires a piano tuned in just intonation. A 1987 performance of the piece was released on DVD in 2000.
Phase music is a form of music that uses phasing as a primary compositional process. It is an approach to musical composition that is often associated with minimal music, as it shares similar characteristics, but some commentators prefer to treat phase music as a separate category. Phasing is a compositional technique in which the same part is played on two musical instruments, in steady but not identical tempo. Thus, the two instruments gradually shift out of unison, creating first a slight echo as one instrument plays a little behind the other, then a doubling effect with each note heard twice, then a complex ringing effect, and eventually coming back through doubling and echo into unison.
Irritable Hedgehog Music is a Kansas City-based record label, focused primarily on minimalist and electroacoustic music.
R. Andrew Lee is an American pianist of contemporary classical music, with a particular emphasis on Minimal music and music of the Wandelweiser collective. He has recorded ten albums for Irritable Hedgehog Music.
The Time Curve Preludes is a minimalist composition for piano solo by William Duckworth written between 1977 and 1978. This piece is credited as the first postminimal piece of music, and is his most frequently heard work. The Time Curve Preludes were composed between 1977 and 1978 on a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. They were premiered at Wesleyan University in 1979 by pianist Neely Bruce. Duckworth used elements of Minimalism, including repetition and accessible harmonies, yet also embraced more quickly changing structures; wide-ranging, complex melodies; and colorful dissonances.
Dennis Lee Johnson was a mathematician and minimal composer. He is the namesake of the Johnson homomorphism in the study of mapping class groups of surfaces.
à r., which usually includes the affix (Hommage à Ravel) for clarity, is a short composition for piano by Greek/French composer Iannis Xenakis. Composed in 1987, it is the last composition for solo piano by the composer.
References
- ↑ Editions75
- ↑ An Hour for Piano streamed online, performed by R. Andrew Lee.
- ↑ Sixty Minutes to Change Your Life, by Kyle Gann.
- ↑ Tom Johnson's Program Notes
- ↑ The Voice of New Music, available free as a PDF
- ↑ S. Andrew Granade's Liner Notes [ permanent dead link ]
