As always, Tim Rutherford-Johnson of The Rambler comes through with the goods. Another example of his perceptive and brilliant writing on music is up at NewMusicBox: an essay on the continuing influence of Cage’s 4’33″, including discussion of Ekmeles favorites Aaron Cassidy and Peter Ablinger. He also touches on the Catskills setting of the seminal work’s premiere, critical—I think—to understanding what the piece is all about.
Read the full post over at NewMusicBox.
One of my absolute favorite new music blogs is Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s “The Rambler”. Truly intelligent writing about contemporary music and the community surrounding it. The comments on his posts are a real goldmine, as his readership includes many eminent composers and performers; Ian Pace and Liza Lim both made recent appearances in discussions of complex music and the publishing business respectively.
Of especial interest to Americans – now that the service is available to us – might be his Spotify playlist of contemporary music, which are a great way of discovering new things!
Anyone interested at all in serious inquiry into the state of new music should be reading the Search Journal for New Music. At the moment I am especially taken with Stuart Paul Duncan’s essay “To Infinity and Beyond: A Reflection on Notation, 1980s Darmstadt, and Interpretational Approaches to the Music of New Complexity” which deals with similar topics as his essay “Re-Complexifying the Function(s) of Notation in the Music of Brian Ferneyhough and the ‘New Complexity,’” referenced in my previous post on complexity and failure.
Where else is one to find such treasures as in-depth analysis of Ferneyhough’s Carceri d’Invenzione III, or an article by Colin Holter, the description of which is best left to its title: “The Spiritual Construction of Tuning in American Experimental Music“ ? If you have any other favorites, be sure to share them in the comments.