Documents found
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1301.More information
The author first recalls some of the public expressions of enthusiasm for the work of Lévi-Strauss, from Tristes Tropiques to today, including the unexpected opinions of a mechanic. Taking a strongly critical position toward the structuralist project for which the anthropologist has become the standard bearer, the author tries to explain the success of Lévi-Strauss through the aesthetic properties of his thinking. Drawing on an observation by John Molino to this end, he recalls that the categories of wholeness, harmony and radiance are found as equally among Platonists and Neoplatonists as among a contemporary American aesthetician. This permanence in time may suggest that there are some universal categories that incorporate the requisites of the beautiful. The author then shows that these can explain both levi-straussian thought and the works of Richard Wagner, which helps explain, at the same time, the fascination of Lévi-Strauss for this composer.
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1302.
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1305.More information
In this conversation, Thom Sokolosky, director of Autumn Leaf, a company dedicated to the presentation of contemporary operas, talks about its most recent production, Kopernikus by Claude Vivier. He shares his views on opera, on personal artistic beliefs and on the processes through which he puts together the creative teams best suited to meet the specific needs of each production. Also discussed are the main criteria at play in his choice of collaborators and contributors, as well as those guiding associations on all levels, between artists, organizations, cities, countries, even continents. He also expands on funding bodies, the politics at stake and aesthetic apriorisms, sharing his deepest desire: to transcend limitations that stifle, restrain and deter. In a word, striving for as much open-mindedness as possible, regardless of the scope or specific format involved.
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1306.More information
The series Les Shadoks, directed by Jacques Rouxel and broadcast on French television from 1968 to 1974, stands for the experimental spirit of Pierre Schaeffer, head of the Research Department of the French Television Office (ORTF) at that time. The series makes frequent use of desynchronization between image and sound as a means to promote musique concrète. Beyond the series' nonsensical spirit lay Schaeffer's attempts to synchronize his own teams with contemporaneous technological discoveries by desynchronizing them through anarchic management and resynchronizing the public with a modern spirit, far removed from the audiovisual conformism of the Pompidou era.
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1307.More information
In this interview, the French composer Pascale Criton traces the underlying strands of her musical writing and thinking. Passionate about the sound continuum, her encounters with Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Gérard Grisey—and with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze—in the 1970s, confirmed her interest in micro-intervals and the variability of sound. The composer discusses the preoccupations she was working though in her pieces from the 1980s to the present. The idea of eco-sensitive interaction emerges with the use of scordaturas in 1/4, 1/12th and 1/16th of a tone associated with sound synthesis (Thymes, 1988), or in reference to acoustic behaviours (Artefact, 2001), which bring back gestural writing (Objectiles, 2002). Pascale Criton questions not only instrumental techniques, but also notation and interpretation (Circle Process, 2012). Her use of small differences aims to increase perception and now extends to a sensitive hearing of acoustic and perceptual phenomena (Wander Steps, 2018).
Keywords: Pascale Criton, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, continuum sonore, micro-intervalles, microtonalité, écoute, psychoacoustique, Pascale Criton, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, sound continuum, micro-intervals, microtonality, listening, psychoacoustics
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1308.More information
The author sketches out a project for a historiography of Darmstadt which, now that its most "glorious" and "heroic" chapter (c. 1948-1963) is long since closed, may now be written. The starting point for this study is Borio and Danuser's (1997) groundbreaking work. Perceived as a site of collective memory, of a vast human construction, any history of Darmstadt would have to include, but not be limited to, the legendary stories associated with it, the insignificant anecdotes, the fleeting successes, and the unqualified failures. The Ferienkurse are also the stage for the actors behind what became known as "contemporary music", the heroes and anti-heroes from the Boulez-Nono-Stockhausen trinity to figures like Hermann Heiss, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and Karel Goeyvaerts. The author proposes a view of Darmstadt's history in which plots are shaped by the institution's dominant mythologies, many of which were consciously conceived by its founders as the raison-d'être of the summer courses. These include cosmopolitanism, youth, radicalism, the tendency towards tabula rasa, the quest for a musical Esperanto, and the affinity for strongly prescriptive compositional theories and manifestoes.
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1310.