American Experimental Music

This article discusses Walter Benjamin's theory of temporal mimesis, developed in Doctrine of the Similar, seeking to describe the rhythm with which "similarities erupt from the flow of things." Its goal is to demonstrate how the rhythm of this mimesis, while open to chance, is that of the anticipated future, whose visible presence today is just like the tip of an iceberg. This temporal relationship is discussed in dialogue with approaches by Claudia Caimi and Patricia Lavelle, in addition to the writing theory of Anne-Marie Christin. Finally, temporal mimesis is related to three object poems and an action spectacle by the poet Joan Brossa.

Over the course of a career that began in the late 1950s, Robert Ashley diligently wrote about his life experiences, music and compositions, performances and collaborations. His writings encompass reflections on music, language and the arts, historical and social change in the context of being a composer, musician, performer. He also elaborates on his friendships and relationships with groups, ensembles, institutions and other artists. Ashley's writings range from autobiographical descriptions of the genesis of his ideas and composition of specific works to detailed musicological and technical analysis of his conceptions of sound, language, music, opera and live performance, along with audio and video recording as well as production processes. When writing about his work, Ashley is focused, thorough and precise. Writing in the first person, his essays and articles are invariably a paradigm of a straightforward, genuine American style, using grammatically balanced sentences, language and diction that has a clarity implicit throughout his scores, operas librettos, shorter songs and other artistic works. Ashley is also a remarkable conversationalist and lecturer who was forthright, wise, funny, convincing. This is noticeable in transcriptions of talks and numerous interviews, the more consequential of which he often edits. In 2006, Ashley-with the support and assistance of Mimi Johnson, founder of ArtServices, Inc. and Lovely Music, Ltd.-committed to publishing a collection of his writings. The result is an English and German edition, Outside of Time: Ideas about Music, edited and translated by Ralf Dietrich. Over six hundred pages, the collection has seventy-three writings, many of which directly address speech, language, stories and opera. Notes indicate if texts were previously unpublished, rewritten or revised. The first part of, Towards a New Kind of Opera, begins with Speech as Music. A Musical Autobiography and other parts include: ...and break my heart…The

Sometime in the early 1970s on NOIZE, a radio series produced in Philadelphia, I heard Robert Ashley's extraordinary voice and music. By then, Ashley had been well into his career. I was particularly drawn to his versions of storytelling, ideas, sonic and staged images, and grand operatic. Eventually I saw the visionary television opera, Perfect Lives and, over the years, many of his stunning, revealtory staged productions. His work-deeply American, yet cosmic, real, mystical, intelligent, profound, epic, perfect, smart and celestial-resonates with me, and others, to this day. In addition to attending performances and living with his art over the years, we met and talked from time to time and I wrote articles, gave papers and taught classes on his work. In the 1990s, wrote several chapters of a book on him, titled Perfect Music for American Lives, Foreign Experiences and Celestial Excursions, but put it aside as I knew he was still working. Currently, I am working on is a collection of my writings and reflections on Robert Ashley. I am continuously writing about him and in contact with others and hope to work with someone on an anthology of writing by and about Ashley. The most recent article, noted below, addresses Ashley's language in various works and as he wrote about language, speech and performance in many essays and commentaries.

This conceptual framework of piano etudes is arranged in accordance with the phenomena that occur today, that there are still many students which study piano both in music schools and in international standard music courses in Indonesia, not sensitive to the musical sense of Indonesian traditional music, especially Sundanese. This is due to the lack of piano teaching materials based on Sundanese scale. In addition, the tendency of children, even teenagers and adults, are less interested in learning traditional music. In fact, Sundanese music has its own uniqueness that can be seen in its musical instrument, namely gamelan degung, laras or scales, and structure of degung music which is different from other gamelan. Therefore, this study using piano to introduce the scales of degung and some piece that are designed so the students can understand the tune that resembles degung which is adapted to the Western music approach. It is because students tend to find it easier to learn the piece with media conventional music background, one of them is the piano. This research used a literature review analysis that produces a conceptual framework to develop the piano etudes based on degung scale. From the result of the research, four ideas of piano etudes were produces, each of which has different levels of difficulty.

Camellia received her PhD from the University of Bristol, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Michael Ellison. Camellia's music are inspired by Asian nuance and Western European music combined through transcultural contemporary ideas. Her interest in music composition lies in composing for contemporary acoustic orchestral, chamber and vocal music. Her music have been performed in United Kingdom and Malaysia. Performances of her compositions at major international music festivals and concerts include Bristol New Music Festival, Contemporary Music Venture Concert Series and University of Bristol's New Music Ensemble Concerts. Camellia Mohamed Razali has worked and collaborated with prestigious music ensembles and musicians namely, Ensemble Variances, Quatuor Bozzini, New Music Ensemble, Narden Sonel, and Luis Ingels, to name a few. She has attended composition workshops and masterclasses by renowned composers such as Pierre Boulez,

Harry Partch’s microtonal tuning and just-intonation concepts have not only affected American microtonalists such as Lou Harrison and Ben Johnston, but also European composers interested in experimenting with microtones, including Georg Friedrich Haas and Wolfgang von Schweinitz. Yet no other European figure has absorbed Partch’s ideas more than German composer Manfred Stahnke, who came to the United States in 1979 to study at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with Partch’s friend and supporter Ben Johnston. This essay approaches Partch’s rebellion not as an isolated paradigm, but in relation to Stahnke’s aesthetic and music—who has also sought to expand the intonational and tuning paradigms of Western art music, whom Partch’s microtonal theories have influenced.
As Partch did, Stahnke has rejected the dominance of twelve-tone equal temperament, grappling with just intonation, as well as non-Western and ancient tuning systems. The analysis of the aesthetic decisions, compositional procedures, and microtonal structures in Partch’s and Stahnke’s works articulates the strong link between both composers. In their works, microtonality goes beyond functioning as a mere formative element; it becomes a means to mediate their cultural discourse on the limited scope of the commercialized Western art music. I demonstrate that Partch’s theory of microtonality—especially his concepts of tonality diamond, otonality, and utonality have influenced Stahnke’s opera Der Untergang des Hauses Usher (1981) based on a short novel by Edgar Allen Poe, as well as his instrumental pieces Diamantenpracht (2005) and Partch Zither (2007).

Glundeng is a traditional art originating from Bondowoso Regency, East Java. The local people call it wood Gamelan because at first glance the shape of the instrument is almost like Javanese Gamelan Ageng. Glundeng staging in the totta'an dhereh tradition is held by the local community as a form of gratitude to God Almighty for the abundance of fortune given to the farmers. The purpose of this research is to find out how the form of the Glundeng Gamelan performance in the totta'an dhereh tradition in Bondowoso. The research paradigm uses a qualitative, descriptive analysis method. Data collected through interviews, observations, and documentation. The results showed that Glundeng's performance was a form of folk art performance as a means of entertainment. Glundeng music performances are held routinely once a year in November. In presenting Glundeng music there are no special rituals or readings when going to play Glundeng. The repertoire of songs presented in the Glundeng music performance is Madura regional songs such as Tanduk Majeng, pajjar laggu, olle ollang, gei' bintang and other songs. The rhythm (wirama) pattern used in the glundeng gamelan is sedheng and seseg. While the game techniques in gamelan glundeng are balungan melampah, nyaca rangkep, mbalung, kinthilan, and timpalan.

⎯ Nowadays, mining of the musical ensemble has become very crucial since the information inside a musical ensemble is required by any musical contents services. In this research, we introduce Gamelan as one of the Indonesian traditional music instruments as our research objective. To indicate the changes of Gamelan features (i.e. tempo also the hammer struck styles) the segmentation of Gamelan music instruments is required as the music tagging tools. Adaptive LMS is employed for segmenting identical instruments that are played in the concurrent fashion. The target is to find how many instruments are played at the same time or separated by very short time (≤ 1 ms). The experiment results demonstrate robust detection with 0.02 ms accuracy for segmenting identical and simultaneously played Gamelan instruments. These results are employed for indicating the changes of Gamelan features, such as tempo also the hammer struck styles.

This paper describes a 3-year project that seeks to explore tuning systems and to develop instruments appropriate for the audition and performance of music composed in just intonation tunings. The project is a response to the transformation in computer music that has been enabled through the introduction of wireless technologies and is also motivated by a desire to enable performance by large numbers of non-expert performers playing music based on just intonation using hand-held or wearable instruments. Possible scenarios together with musical algorithms are presented and illustrated with examples from creative works written to clarify the parameters of musical instrument design.

Komposisi Ngemban Rare yang menggunakan Gamelan Gong Suling ini menggambarkan kenangan masa kecil dengan berbagai sikap. Karya ini terinspirasi oleh seseorang yang merawat anak yang sedang menangis. Bahkan, saat ini sebagian besar orang tua mengajarkan hal-hal yang salah kepada anak-anak dengan memfasilitasi mereka sebelum mereka cukup dewasa sehingga membuat karakter anak menjadi tidak baik. Komposisi ini terdiri dari tiga bagian, yaitu menggambarkan suasana fenomena mengasuh anak-anak, mengasuh anak-anak dengan menyanyikan lagu-lagu anak-anak tradisional, mengajar anak-anak dan memperkenalkan budaya sejak usia dini, dan menanamkan disiplin dan karakter yang baik, agar tidak menyesal kemudian. Pembentukan ciptaan karya ini mengacu pada proses penciptaan karya seni yang diklarifikasi menjadi tiga tahap, yaitu tahap eksplorasi, tahap improvisasi, dan tahap pembentukan

Glundeng is a traditional art originating from Bondowoso Regency, East Java. The local people call it wood Gamelan because at first glance the shape of the instrument is almost like Javanese Gamelan Ageng. Glundeng staging in the totta'an dhereh tradition is held by the local community as a form of gratitude to God Almighty for the abundance of fortune given to the farmers. The purpose of this research is to find out how the form of the Glundeng Gamelan performance in the totta'an dhereh tradition in Bondowoso. The research paradigm uses a qualitative, descriptive analysis method. Data collected through interviews, observations, and documentation. The results showed that Glundeng's performance was a form of folk art performance as a means of entertainment. Glundeng music performances are held routinely once a year in November. In presenting Glundeng music there are no special rituals or readings when going to play Glundeng. The repertoire of songs presented in the Glundeng music performance is Madura regional songs such as Tanduk Majeng, pajjar laggu, olle ollang, gei' bintang and other songs. The rhythm (wirama) pattern used in the glundeng gamelan is sedheng and seseg. While the game techniques in gamelan glundeng are balungan melampah, nyaca rangkep, mbalung, kinthilan, and timpalan.

A real music have an unwanted frequencies. If a player strikes the blade stronger or if a hammer position is not consistent, sound will generate an harmonic frequency. Gamelan is a monophonic music instrument, it has only one fundamental frequency, its sound has several non harmonic frequencies. Each instrument has only one octave sound. Another octave, or another hamonic sound is generated by another instrument. So we should play with a lot of instruments, surely a lot of players. Besides the harmonic problem, gamelan music notation is different with western notation, so it is very hard to sinergized between two kind of musics. In this research we propose to create gamelan instruments models to overcome the gamelan construction problem in industry of gamelan. We create two kind of Frequency Balungan Models, the first model is using average value, and the other is using average value in the most dense area. During observation the error is pretty small. Using the first model we achiv...

Glundeng is a traditional art originating from Bondowoso Regency, East Java. The local people call it wood Gamelan because at first glance the shape of the instrument is almost like Javanese Gamelan Ageng. Glundeng staging in the totta'an dhereh tradition is held by the local community as a form of gratitude to God Almighty for the abundance of fortune given to the farmers. The purpose of this research is to find out how the form of the Glundeng Gamelan performance in the totta'an dhereh tradition in Bondowoso. The research paradigm uses a qualitative, descriptive analysis method. Data collected through interviews, observations, and documentation. The results showed that Glundeng's performance was a form of folk art performance as a means of entertainment. Glundeng music performances are held routinely once a year in November. In presenting Glundeng music there are no special rituals or readings when going to play Glundeng. The repertoire of songs presented in the Glundeng music performance is Madura regional songs such as Tanduk Majeng, pajjar laggu, olle ollang, gei' bintang and other songs. The rhythm (wirama) pattern used in the glundeng gamelan is sedheng and seseg. While the game techniques in gamelan glundeng are balungan melampah, nyaca rangkep, mbalung, kinthilan, and timpalan.

Intercultural activity especially through music is widespread and relevant to Malaysian current times. The abundance of music compositions labeled intercultural since the 1900s clearly proves its effectiveness and strength as society continues to embrace them. The emergence of young and new contemporary composers contributes to the advancement of musical ideas and updated knowledge towards contemporary music compositions both locally and internationally. Through them, intercultural resources and tools for composing from various cultures are explored in creative ways. This chapter discusses the composition of two piano works from Marzelan Salleh, a Malaysian composer, and the late John Cage, an American composer. Both explore the possibilities, intentionally or unintentionally, of combining contrasting influences of Asian traditional music idiom with Western traditional and contemporary compositional techniques into personal musical expressions.

Composers who create music always make use of certain ideas as their main points of reference. In other words, the composer works by creating a certain foundation in his mind. Music is an expression of thoughts contained in the composer’s ideas of sound. The composer who thinks about certain topics for his musical composition generally comes up with cognizing certain objects of thought, for example, certain unusual or unique values understood and favored by him, so that he feels the need to express them. The objects of thought targeted by composers are those that suit their personal tastes and interests. Epistemologically the process of creating music departs from verbal discourse and produces musical discourse. The latter occurs in the epistemology of the creation of music in general, and may be perceived in various musical genres, including that of gamelan music. The complexity of the discourse, on which composers’ thinking is oriented, is the paradigm of all music composition. This paradigm is comprised of eight important elements, which include two interesting components, namely, the model and concept. This article makes the attempt to comprehend the elements of models and concepts in music composition. Models can be present in an auditive, visual or conceptual form present in the imagination of the composer. Composers consciously choose to present this element in the form of musical works as an empirical and symbolic reality. The concept is an explanation of the models existing in the composer’s imagination. The explanation is related to the function and meaning of the model. The two elements of the paradigm are the minimum requirements that must be developed in the mind of the composer before he sets down to compose music.

Glundeng is a traditional art originating from Bondowoso Regency, East Java. The local people call it wood Gamelan because at first glance the shape of the instrument is almost like Javanese Gamelan Ageng. Glundeng staging in the totta'an dhereh tradition is held by the local community as a form of gratitude to God Almighty for the abundance of fortune given to the farmers. The purpose of this research is to find out how the form of the Glundeng Gamelan performance in the totta'an dhereh tradition in Bondowoso. The research paradigm uses a qualitative, descriptive analysis method. Data collected through interviews, observations, and documentation. The results showed that Glundeng's performance was a form of folk art performance as a means of entertainment. Glundeng music performances are held routinely once a year in November. In presenting Glundeng music there are no special rituals or readings when going to play Glundeng. The repertoire of songs presented in the Glunde...

Dorothy Attneave Kimberly Bohannon Brett Campbell Hung Yun Chu Daniel Cullen Scott Dakof Kurt Doles Michelle Hakanson Hannah Leah Hall Kumi Hatano Diana Hays Mitsutoshi Inaba David Kosmatka Leif Laaksonen Stephen Lane Mark Levy Nicholas Malone Penny Moblo Chris More Nani Murtaqi Qehn Katie Sloan Matthew Svoboda Murtaqi Syamsuddin Catherine Vandertuin Jamie Webster Joe Weinstein Lili Weldon Frank Williams

This conceptual framework of piano etudes is arranged in accordance with the phenomena that occur today, that there are still many students which study piano both in music schools and in international standard music courses in Indonesia, not sensitive to the musical sense of Indonesian traditional music, especially Sundanese. This is due to the lack of piano teaching materials based on Sundanese scale. In addition, the tendency of children, even teenagers and adults, are less interested in learning traditional music. In fact, Sundanese music has its own uniqueness that can be seen in its musical instrument, namely gamelan degung, laras or scales, and structure of degung music which is different from other gamelan. Therefore, this study using piano to introduce the scales of degung and some piece that are designed so the students can understand the tune that resembles degung which is adapted to the Western music approach. It is because students tend to find it easier to learn the piece with media conventional music background, one of them is the piano. This research used a literature review analysis that produces a conceptual framework to develop the piano etudes based on degung scale. From the result of the research, four ideas of piano etudes were produces, each of which has different levels of difficulty.

Este artigo trata da cancao de câmera Toada P’ra Voce op.56, de Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez, uma das essenciais cancoes de câmera do repertorio brasileiro. Propoe uma analise musical, textual e texto-musica, do pianismo e da vocalidade, metodologia original decalcada de muitas fontes e sintetizada ha muitos anos de pesquisa por este pesquisador, sobre a cancao de câmera nacional. Chega a alguns pontos de reflexao sobre as relacoes texto-musica e realizacao da cancao e sua respectiva interpretacao.

In a 1995 interview, contemporary American composer John Zorn stated: ‘I got involved in music because of film […] There’s a lot of film elements in my music’ (Duckworth, 1995, p. 451). Scholars and critics have since widely noted these cinematic elements, with emphasis being placed on Zorn’s genre of so-called ‘file card compositions’. Whilst these studies have primarily concentrated on how the arrangement of sound blocks – the disjointed segments of Zorn’s compositions – can be compared to cinematic montage, this article instead focusses on how sound blocks suggest the visual aspects of cinema. To delve deeper into the visuo-cinematic qualities of Zorn’s file card compositions, an idealised cinematic listener will be constructed, aided by various psychological, semiotic, philosophical and film theories. I will suggest that a listener occupying a hypnogogic state projects moving images, akin to those of cinema, onto what Bernard Lewin first called a ‘dream screen’. These projection...

Importing tuning systems and temporal structures from both ancient and non-Western music into their compositions, West-Coast American composers Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, and Lou Harrison became known as "ultra-modernists." Mark Morris's choreography to their music reflects not only these audible components but also their external references, displaying a deep understanding of the composers' work. Like these composers, Morris thrived on self-education that went beyond Western subjects in his childhood and youth. At the same time, Morris makes many references in these works to the pioneers of American modern dance, suggesting a self-reflexive process that makes his work less ultra-modern and more postmodern. Throughout his choreographic career to date Mark Morris (b. 1956) has repeatedly returned to the music of American avant-garde composers Henry Cowell (1897-1965), Harry Partch (1901-1974), and Lou Harrison (1917-2003). (See Table 1.) Like Morris, these three composers were born on the West Coast of America and exposed in their youth to a range of cultures, including Samoan, Tahitian, Japanese, Chinese, and Indonesian. For different reasons each man experienced isolation in his childhood and held an ambivalent attitude toward formal education, but-highly intelligent, independently minded, and drawn to an esoteric and eclectic range of subjects-each read widely. Cowell, Partch, and Harrison drew from this eclecticism, which looked backward to the past as well as outward to other cultures, to develop their own experimental compositional techniques and to create what became known as "ultra-modern" music. 1 A close reading of the dances Morris made in response to music compositions of these West Coast avant-garde composers reveals that each choreography reflects not only the aural content and structures of the music, but also its way of incorporating aspects of historical and non-Western techniques of composition to make radical, new work. Of course, looking back to the past and out to other cultures (what David Nicholls terms "retrospection and extraspection") 2 in the last decades of the twentieth century represents a very different * I am grateful to Inger Damsholt for first articulating this idea in her Ph.D. thesis "Choreomusical Discourse: The Relationship between Dance and Music," University of Copenhagen, May 1999. * Cowell's performances at the piano were so visually arresting that silent film clips of them were portrayed in newsreels, and on a few occasions reviews were written as if by a sports writer covering a boxing match. See Joel Sachs, Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 122. * This is similar to the structure of many traditional gamelan pieces in which the balungan (the central "skeleton" melody from which everything else derives) is often made up of four groups of four beats, or sometimes four lines of four groups of four beats. It is also an example of a fractal, found so often in nature, as Cowell would, of course, have recognized.

Combining a new software system with the familiar interface of the MIDI keyboard, bitKlavier is a versatile instrument for exploring the nature of tuning and temperament. We describe a number of approaches it facilitates, including composed tunings, moving fundamental systems, and a novel system for adaptive tuning. All of these are characterized by the overarching design priority for bitKlavier to be a context for musical play and exploration, as opposed to finding singular, “correct” solutions to particular tuning “problems,” as has often been the case historically.

⎯ Nowadays, mining of the musical ensemble has become very crucial since the information inside a musical ensemble is required by any musical contents services. In this research, we introduce Gamelan as one of the Indonesian traditional music instruments as our research objective. To indicate the changes of Gamelan features (i.e. tempo also the hammer struck styles) the segmentation of Gamelan music instruments is required as the music tagging tools. Adaptive LMS is employed for segmenting identical instruments that are played in the concurrent fashion. The target is to find how many instruments are played at the same time or separated by very short time (≤ 1 ms). The experiment results demonstrate robust detection with 0.02 ms accuracy for segmenting identical and simultaneously played Gamelan instruments. These results are employed for indicating the changes of Gamelan features, such as tempo also the hammer struck styles.

Regionalism is a demarcation of a definite area in terms of its topographical, economic, social relationships, government, and organisation. Inevitably, the concept of regionalism also extends into cultural and artistic phenomena, which includes music and music composition. By the 20 th century up until now when global travel and communication is easy, does regionalism in music still exist? There is a misconception that regionalism is thought to have declined by globalisation when in fact, as a reaction, regional identity becomes stronger due to enhanced regional pride. In this article, I discuss the constructive and valuable importance of the emergence of regional pride in contemporary classical music compositions, and justify my approach through a composition for solo piano, Puteri Gunung Ledang, which includes active references towards gamelan musical nuances juxtaposed with Western compositional styles, thus demonstrating two contrasting regional musical influences colliding and collaborating into a single work of art, including an analysis of how my composition corresponds and supports the broader artistic phenomenon.

One of my life's highest lights was the time I got to know and learn from Alvin Lucier as one of his Wesleyan music students back in the '90s. Re-posting this on his birthday, because when I first posted it on his 90th, he let me know it pleased him.

In July 2015, Oxford University Press published a substantial volume titled The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, co-edited by two eminent ethnomusicologists, Svanibor Pettan and Jeff Todd Titon. The book is an impressive collection of different approaches in applied ethnomusicology, developed through a combination of ethnographic research (personal experiences and fieldwork in different parts of the world) and contemporary scholarship.

FULL TEXT: https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/107006

“Improvising New Consonance: The Subterranean Connections Between North American and Italian Avant-Garde, 1963–1976” is grounded in both music history and music analysis and explores the communities created around collective improvisation in the Bay Area, Rome, and Montreal through four case studies: New Music Ensemble, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Musica Elettronica Viva and MuD / Sonde. This research challenges the understanding of collective experimental improvisation as a genre, framing the phenomenon through the contemporary paradigm of “artistic practice as research.” This reading favours a broader understanding of experimentalism as a cross-generic phenomenon.
The work is articulated in two interconnected and equally important parts to sustain my argument: 1. Using Actor-Network Theory, I examine what cultural policies were put in place within a Cold War and post-colonial context to support international exchanges among otherwise extremely localized experiences. This geography challenges dominant narratives about post-war music, normally focussed north of the Alps and on the US East Coast. 2. Building on Steinbeck’s work on the Art Ensemble of Chicago, I analyze the collective practices that allowed the groups to develop unconventional improvisatory responses. I discuss exercises developed to solve peculiar improvisational problems, and assessment strategies used to evaluate recorded sessions, linking this body of knowledge to the recordings we have to build an innovative analytical framework.

Este artigo tem por objetivo examinar os sistemas de afinação de Harry Partch (1901-1974) e de Ben Johnston (1926-) com a finalidade de emergir suas estruturas. Busca-se também investigar uma vertente pouco difundida da música americana, com forte fundamento na matemática e acústica musical. Nesse sentido, é interessante verificar a influência de Partch em Johnston que contribui para o entendimento dos autores na existência de uma tradição americana de música microtonal. Este artigo baseia-se principalmente nos escritos teóricos destes dois compositores, mais especificamente o "Genesis of a Music" de Partch e "Maximum Clarity" de Johnston.

The creative engagement of North American composers with Indonesian music has produced a great diversity of work. Focusing primarily on new music for Javanese gamelan, and drawing largely on my own experience as a composer with a significant involvement in the performance of traditional music, this article examines the variety of approaches taken by composers and ensembles and the different relationships to tradition they imply or embody. Arguing that creative activity cannot be understood apart from the broader presence of Indonesian music, I attempt a realistic assessment of gamelan’s existence in North America on both a philosophical and practical level. I relate the basis of my own interest in the music, and recount some of the history of the group in which I started, a group which managed to avoid the schism which generally persists between composition and traditional performance. In examining different compositional approaches, I point to the interconnectedness of instruments and musical ideas, the problems with simple imitation, and the importance of the situations in which work is created, determined largely by the musicians involved.

Suling sunda or Sundanese flute is a traditional wind instrument which comes from Sundanese tribe located in West Java Indonesia. Nowadays, the enthusiasm of young generation to learn and play the sundanese flute decreases from year to year. Whereas, sundanese flute is one of the unique musical instrument and it can produce touched tones. Conservation of the Sundanese Flute will increase the pride to be Sundanese and it increases the national character. Besides, Sundanese Flute can be a learning media in physics learning when discuss about sound, resonance, standing wave and open pipe. This study was focused to the organology, frequency and the wave form of each note of Sundanese flute and was directed to describe the organology, to measure the frequency and to display the wave form of each note of the Sundanese flute. The data was collected through semi-structured interviews to the lecturer in Music Department whose focuses is traditional instruments; conducting experiment to measure the frequency and analyzing a music software to depict of wave form resulted from each note.

ABSTRAK Komposisi Ngemban Rare yang menggunakan Gamelan Gong Suling ini menggambarkan kenangan masa kecil dengan berbagai sikap. Karya ini terinspirasi oleh seseorang yang merawat anak yang sedang menangis. Bahkan, saat ini sebagian besar orang tua mengajarkan hal-hal yang salah kepada anak-anak dengan memfasilitasi mereka sebelum mereka cukup dewasa sehingga membuat karakter anak menjadi tidak baik. Komposisi ini terdiri dari tiga bagian, yaitu menggambarkan suasana fenomena mengasuh anak-anak, mengasuh anak-anak dengan menyanyikan lagu-lagu anak-anak tradisional, mengajar anak-anak dan memperkenalkan budaya sejak usia dini, dan menanamkan disiplin dan karakter yang baik, agar tidak menyesal kemudian. Pembentukan ciptaan karya ini mengacu pada proses penciptaan karya seni yang diklarifikasi menjadi tiga tahap, yaitu tahap eksplorasi, tahap improvisasi, dan tahap pembentukan. Kata kunci: Ngemban Rare, gong suling, anak-anak, komposisi musik. ABSTRAK The composition of Ngemban Rare that uses Gong Suling Gamelan is about childhood memories with various attitude. This work is inspired by someone whom care for a crying child. In fact, nowadays most of the parents teach wrong things to children by facilitating them before they are mature enough thus making the children character becomes unkind. This composition consists of three parts, namely describing the atmosphere of the phenomenon of caring for young children, caring for children by singing traditional children's songs, teaching children and introducing culture from an early age, and instilling good discipline and character, so as not to regret later. The formation of creation of this work refers to the process of creating works of art that are clarified into three stages, namely the exploration stage, the improvisation stage and the forming stage.

The recent loss of composer Robert Ashley (1930–2014) prompted in some of us a grab-bag of reflections – private but perhaps peculiarly shareable. My first encounter with Ashley's music was when I was working in college radio in Chicago. We used to receive CDs from the label Lovely Music Ltd., among others. I suppose it was my first full-blown exposure to what we now call post-minimalist music, although these CDs did include earlier sound-art minimalism such as Alvin Lucier's. I'm not sure whether I got to hear William Duckworth's, Joan LaBarbara's, David Behrman's, Robert Ashley's, or ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny's music first, but despite some scepticism, I did find all of this music strangely attractive in ways I didn't expect.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S004029821600070X

(Previously published version of the article: 
https://www.academia.edu/12166638/Crash_and_getting_me_started_How_Robert_Ashley_changed_my_mind)

Examining the intoxicating properties of Amacher and Ashley's compositions. Treating the compositions as drugs and understanding these drugs as, through intoxicating and hallucinogenic properties, enhancing our awareness and perceptions. Similarly, Amacher and Ashley themselves can be understood as mobilising this intoxication and thus exhibiting aspects of secular shamanism within their practices and performances. Succumb to their intoxication.

Accompanying CD unavailable due to online format.

⎯ Nowadays, mining of the musical ensemble has become very crucial since the information inside a musical ensemble is required by any musical contents services. In this research, we introduce Gamelan as one of the Indonesian traditional music instruments as our research objective. To indicate the changes of Gamelan features (i.e. tempo also the hammer struck styles) the segmentation of Gamelan music instruments is required as the music tagging tools. Adaptive LMS is employed for segmenting identical instruments that are played in the concurrent fashion. The target is to find how many instruments are played at the same time or separated by very short time (≤ 1 ms). The experiment results demonstrate robust detection with 0.02 ms accuracy for segmenting identical and simultaneously played Gamelan instruments. These results are employed for indicating the changes of Gamelan features, such as tempo also the hammer struck styles.

Povzetek v slovenščini: Ameriške neodvisne glasbene kulture, ki zaobjemajo
glasbene žanre, kot so pank, indie rock, kantavtorstvo in
eksperimentalna glasba, so skozi desetletja svojega obstoja
izoblikovale svojevrstne pristope k družbenim praksam, ki jim
na materialni in ideološki ravni pomagajo pri vzpostavljanju,
vzdrževanju in samorazumevanju intimnih družbenih skupnosti.
Intimnost v tem kontekstu pomeni družbene odnose bližine, ki
temeljijo na tesnih prijateljskih, fizičnih in neposrednih odnosih,
delujočih po načelih enakopravnosti, vključevanja in vzajemnosti.
V članku, ki temelji na etnografskih raziskavah ameriških neodvisnih
glasbenih skupnosti, se posvetim vprašanjem fizičnih
in družbenih prostorov bližine, intimnih družbenih razmerij in intimnih
glasbenih praks ter zvokov ameriških neodvisnih glasbenih
skupnosti. Ob tem me po eni strani zanimajo povezave med
glasbenimi prostori in skupnostmi, po drugi pa družbene razlike
in nasprotja v ameriških neodvisnih glasbenih skupnostih.

English abstract: In the decades of their existence, American DIY
(“do-it-yourself”) music cultures, which encompass music genres
such as punk, indie rock, singer-songwriters, and experimental
music, have created their unique approaches to social
practices that assist them, both on the material and ideological
level, in the construction, maintenance, and self-perception of
intimate social communities. In this context, “intimacy” denotes
social relations of proximity that are based on close friendly,
physical, and direct relations operating under the principles
of equality, inclusion, and reciprocity. The text, which is based
on ethnographic research of American DIY music communities,
addresses issues of physical and social spaces of proximity,
intimate social relations and musical practices, and sounds
of American DIY music communities. It explores connections
between music spaces and communities on the one hand and
social differences and contradictions in American DIY music
communities.

Citation:
Verbuč, David. 2016. "Prostor, družbena bližina in intimna skupnost v ameriških neodvisnih glasbenih kulturah." Glasnik Slovenskega etnološkega društva 56/1-2: 37-52.

The larger research program, of which the present report is a part, involves approaching the analysis of world music from the vantage point of perception. With regard to tuning and scales, there have been three main approaches: via abstract numbers, via empirical measurements, and via perceptual responses.

How to Do Things With Music: The Efficacious Semiosis of Music in Two Pieces by Alvin Lucier  This paper explores the ​pragmatics ​ of musical signs, a concept of musical signs grounded in performative efficacy, or musical semiosis as efficacious action.​ This is an investigation into the speech-act character of musical signs, taking its primary orientation from linguistics, philosophy of language, and linguistic anthropology of recent decades. It is grounded outside of the music semiotic dichotomy of introversive vs. extroversive semiosis and instead within a concept of ​efficacious semiosis.

Linguistic speech-acts, ranging from the matrimonial “I do,” to hate speech and its genuinely injurious force, mean what they mean not primarily through referential and denotative sign function, not from transmitting messages or conveying signified meaning-content. Rather, speech-acts rely on a performative efficacy of signs: the way in which signs create, sustain, transform, or destroy features of reality. I highlight the way signs “do” things to subjects, and how subjects “do” things with them.

To demonstrate a performative semiotics of music ​ qua ​ speech-act, I introduce Alvin Lucier’s 1969 piece for vocalist and tape-delay system, ​The Only Talking Machine of its Kind in the World ​ , scored for:​ “any stutterer, stammerer, lisper, person with faulty or halting speech, regional dialect or foreign accent or any other anxious speaker who believes in the healing power of sound.” Lucier instructs: “Talk, during the building of the tape-delay system, about that which will best reveal the peculiarities of your speech [...] Continue talking after the completion of the tape-delay system until, due to the annihilation of the peculiarities of your speech by the tape-delay system, anxiety about your speech is relieved.” Lucier intends for his piece and the tape delay system it employs to enact a healing through being “uttered.” The crux of Lucier’s ​Talking Machine ​ thus abides in its pragmatic function and speech-act character. Lucier’s musical “utterance” gains its central meaning from the medicinal efficacy it means to wield over the performer’s afflicted speech.

I continue with Lucier’s 2005 piece for orchestra and electronics, ​Exploration of the House ​ , based on Beethoven’s op. 124 ​Consecration of the House ​ . Lucier’s orchestra performs fragments of Beethoven’s overture, which are recorded and subsequently played back into the performance space. This playback is then simultaneously recorded and then projected into the room repeatedly in an iterative process that transforms the original audio signal as the resonant frequencies of the space reinforce themselves and deposit onto the playback. ​Exploration of the House ​ induces a strategic transformation of listening style. Lucier first quotes Beethoven, thereby mobilizing a particular practice of structural, motivic, orchestrational listening that acculturated audiences typically employ when hearing Western common-practice period music. This listening practice is then radically, pragmatically transformed by the playback process into an utterly different manner of listening geared not towards structural hearing but rather towards the audition of resonance. While Lucier’s music is often said to be about the acoustics of sounding spaces, I argue that ​Exploration of the House has a semiotic concern at its heart: it enacts the pragmatic transformation of listening practices through the semiotic efficacy of its technical process.

The study was conducted to evaluate the suitability of acoustic characteristics of electronic demung with original demung.
Demung is one of the important instruments in the gamelan, a traditional music ensemble in Indonesia which involves no
less than 70 instruments. Electronic demung was made in an attempt to miniaturization of gamelan instruments which are
generally large and heavy. Acoustic characteristics studied were waveforms, timbre and spectrogram. Product testing was
also conducted by questionnaire to teachers of music and master of gamelan. The analysis showed that the fundamental
frequency for each key of electronic demung was slightly higher than the key of the original demung. The increase in the
fundamental frequency of the keys in one octave, both have a similar tendency. The numbers of overtones of the original
demung were more than that of electronic demung. ED is considered useful because it can be easier to introduce gamelan
music and easy to carry.

N THIS PAPER WE PROPOSE a mathematical framework for the optimization of tuning systems. We begin with an informal definition of “tuning system.” We then propose five general constraints that seem common to their evolution. The central idea of this paper is the quantification of those constraints in terms of a set of numerical parameters. Given a choice of parameter values we use appropriate optimization methods to produce an optimal tuning for a specific set of values. Finally, we consider some historical and Javanese tunings from ...

In July 2013, Wellington-based gamelan group Gamelan Padhang Moncar embarked on a performance/study tour of Java, Indonesia. The group’s tour repertoire comprised conventional music from the central Javanese gamelan tradition as well as new compositions by five members of the group, all emergent composers in their twenties. These new gamelan compositions were also performed to audiences “at home” in Wellington, and were subsequently recorded and released on Rattle Records’ Naga in 2014. Discussing these works provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on current cross-cultural compositional practice in New Zealand, and the creative processes of the composer-members of the group. Because Padhang Moncar performed upon numerous sets of gamelan instruments whilst on tour, each with its own distinct embat (tuning schema), this study also provides an opportunity to elucidate the composers’ perspectives on the fluid nature of the performances of their works, since melodies and harmonies are subtly transformed by the distinct intervallic structures of each set of gamelan instruments—an exciting aspect of composing for gamelan.

The larger research program, of which the present report is a part, involves approaching the analysis of world music from the vantage point of perception. With regard to tuning and scales, there have been three main approaches: via abstract numbers, via empirical measurements, and via perceptual responses. Since the pioneering work of Alexander Ellis in the 1880s, comparative musicologists, ethnomusicologists, acousticians, and music psychologists have measured fundamental frequencies and other partials in sonic spectra to characterize tunings empirically. Since at least as early as ca. 425 BCE, music theorists have employed abstract numbers to prescribe and describe tunings and scales. And since at least as early as ca. 1850 BCE, tunings have been prescribed and described in terms of perceptual responses. Whereas each of these three main approaches can be helpful in making sense of music, they are quite distinct. Nonetheless, these three distinct approaches have often been conflated and an aim of the present study is to disentangle them with a view to analyzing music perceptually. The present report illustrates this approach by focusing on equipentatonic tunings in general and Central Javanese sléndro in particular.