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Musicworks Issue 111 - Winter 2011 musicworks

Issue 112, Spring 2012

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FEATURE ARTICLES

Philip Glass—tours Einstein on the Beach, page 24
by John Terauds

The landmark Toronto premiere of Einstein on the Beach at the 2012 Luminato festival in June is an ideal opportunity to take a look at a work that helped make American composer Philip Glass practically into a household name. His particular style of minimalism has permeated our social soundscape in a way no other form of new music has over the past five or six decades. Glass’s vocabulary uses the simplest possible tonal elements, repeated with occasional variations. It is an aesthetic inspired by classical Indian traditions and built on the foundations of live theatre and dance. This is not a music of the intellect, but one that connects on a visceral level.

Olivia Block—electroacoustic improv, page 18, tracks 2, 8, and 9
by Chris Kennedy

This article looks at the musical trajectory of Olivia Block, which has moved from meticulously crafted soundscapes to collaborations with other electroacoustic musicians and with filmmakers Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder. The author explores the aesthetics that drive Block’s compositions, provides an overview of some of her noteworthy works, and discusses some of her future musical plans.

THOMAS, Farah, and d’Eon—the birth of neo-sincerity, page 36, tracks 1, 4–7
by Nick Storring

Even a few years ago it was still commonplace to see musicians revelling in the novelty of ironically slapping together various musical references for the sake of various forms of commentary -- on fragmentation, on hybridity, on the disintegration of high and low culture. However, more recently artists, such as the aforementioned three, are wrestling guilty pleasures and/ or outlandish stylistic diversity free from the stranglehold of postmodern irony and putting these sounds to work in sincere and sometimes very serious contexts. This article discusses their relationship with their raw stylistic materials, as well as the uniqueness of their approaches.

PROFILE

Jocelyn Morlock—composes moments of magic, page 12, tracks 10–11
by Elissa Poole

Vancouver composer Jocelyn Morlock creates moments of magic from ordinary material. Her music can be romantic, whimsical, funny, or dark, her long melodic lines expressive and often intertwined with countermelodies of extraordinary integrity. Her meticulous orchestrations, interlocking rhythms, and multilayered textures are part of her distinctive voice, but so is her love for the open harmonies of medieval music and for forms that unfold like improvisations—forms that alternately drift, focus, and encourage the almost imperceptible transformation of the mundane into the numinous.

DIY

Build a glitchy, square-wave sequencer: 1-bit music mayhem, page 46
by Rob Cruickshank

The sound of a square-wave sequencer instantly brings to mind the sounds of some of the earliest video games, as well as—for some—the earliest computer music. In this iteration of our DIY, resident tech Rob Cruickshank builds an 8-oscillator square-wave sequencer. It’s possible to get it to sound a bit like Space Invaders or Pong, but more sophisticated tunes—or even playing more than one note at a time—are beyond its capabilities. It looks and sounds a bit like the old analog sequencers seen on modular synthesizers!

SOUND NOTES

Sound Bite, page 9: Writer Jesse Ship profiles electroacoustic composer Ian Battenfield Headley, the first place winner of our inaugural electronic music contest.

Sonic Geography, page 7: Writer Richard Simas chronicles the soundscape of Havana.

In the Works, page 10: Composer Nicole Lizée talks to writer Gloria Lipski about the development of her recent commission for New York percussion quartet So Percussion, imagined by the composer as a John Cage rave.

Visions of Sound, page 32: Sculptor and sound artist Stephen Cornford uses sound and noise to uncover the physicality of found objects. In his recent installation Binatone Galaxy the prerecorded tape inside a cassette is replaced with a microphone that amplifies the rhythmic and resonant properties of these once ubiquitous audio shells. Instead of hearing sound recorded on magnetic tape, the listener hears the sound of the two plastic spools rotating, the machine’s motor-hum, and the sound of the crude, sibilant amplifier.

REVIEWS

Recordings: Nightjars’ The Natural Playmate and Vancouver label Drip Audio

Events: W. Mark Sutherland reports on the third edition of the Internationales Minimal Music Festival in Kassel, Germany and alcides lanza reports on CLAEM in Buenos Aires

Words: Brandon Labelle and Claudia Martinho’s Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear, Vol. 2