Subject: Re: fransisco lopez show in Seattle
From: Jose Manuel Berenguer (jmcoclea@intercom.es)
Date: Mon Dec 18 2000 - 20:26:40 EST
hello Yitzchak
>Examples would be appreciated. Of course, it would be useful to include
>the distinction between technique and sensibility, although the latter is
>admittedly more difficult to describe.
In the seventies' and first eighties' electroacoustic music, you have some works of Octavian Nemescu (Rumanian) and the Batucada of Gabriel Brncic (Chilian, now working at Phonos, Barcelona). After this, you have also the sonic fractal textures of Octuor, Schall, Thema and Tar by Horacio Vaggione (Argentina, but working for long time at Paris VIII) ... or Veils and Below the walls of Jerico by Paul Dolden or the sonic granular masses of Barry Truax's wonderful works... I am now remembering Possible Orchestras, a very nice work made by means of frequency modulation by John Celona (Colgate University)... even the electroacoustic (some of them absolutely electronic) works of Luigi Nono sounded similar... Yes, you can tell me that La Selva is made by only natural sound recorded... but the important thing in this discussion is how sound matter is and not how sound matter has been done ... From a perceptual point of view, all this works can be compared with La Selva (The Forest). All are works made by dense sound
masses where you can swim freely in the musical space of consciousness. All are radical and have been done by leading compositional ideas to limit situations.
In the field of people working on sound installation the case of sonic documents published by Bill Fontana seems to be quite similar. A lot of them are done by means of recording only natural sounds.
>David Tudor and John Bischoff is quite different).
Indeed, but what do you think about George Lewis, and Joel Ryan, and Nick Collins? Ake Parmerud and Anders Blomqvist are also working in such a way... but if you search people working on electroacoustic music improvisation the list has no end... Lawrence Casserley is an other important name in improvised electroacosutic music... by the way, do you know that there is a class of musical improvisation at the Conservatoire de Paris? Alain Savouret and Rainer Boesh are the professors. They are very well known as electroacoustic composers.
Anyway, I do not believe that improvisation always means modernity ... it seems to me that you oppose tape music (as academic and old) to live music (as no academic and young -or better, modern-), however there is now a lot of people making tape music that also makes interactive-live music and improvised music. Everybody knows MAX nowadays. By the way, when I invited Francisco López to give a Lecture in Barcelona during the En Red O.1999, devoted to soundscapes, he spoked about acousmatics as he had invented the therm ... Lopez's text is published in Spanish and English at the Sonoscop (http://sonoscop.cccb.org), if you want to have a look of it. Audience, very young people, did not know anything about ... But acousmatics is a very well known therm in this list.
>people employing devices such as turntables as sound sources.
Well, in this list there is a lot of people that knows this much better than me. I'm shure you know that Pierre Schaeffer used turntables (this means pick-up's I guess!). He worked on plastic discs and there is yet a while that Pierre Henry mixed live a group of DJ's.
>Yoshihide, Martin Tetreault) to similar effect, but I'm not aware of any
>in academic electroacoustic who are doing this.
I think the main conflict among us arises in the use of the word academic... Are you thinking on people working at universities and conservatories? I believe 'academic' is not a good word for an aesthetical and methodological production beeing only fifty years old. In my latin logic, 'academic' means 'belonging to Academy', and there is not an Electroacoustic Music Academy telling us what we should do. I know one, it is true, the International EAM Academy of Bourges. However it does not pretend to be a model to be followed. Here you have some reasons because I can not call academic any electroacoustic music. For me there is a big multiplicity of electroacoustic musics that can not yet be classified. And from a very personal point of view, electroacoustic music has meant the end of my relationship with the musical academy.
Perhaps in the US there is a very big distance between university life and world life. There is not such a distance here in EU...
Finally, I would want answer that by 'products' I mean musical and sound works. Whith 'musical firms' I pointed to 'making music entities', individuals and corparations having corporative image and selling its products to some audience.
Sincerely yours
Jose Manuel Berenguer
Departament de Llenguatge Audiovisual
MECAD. Universitat Ramon Llull. Barcelona
Sonoscop. Orquestra del Caos. Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona
PS. I apologize for my low knowledge of English. I am shure, however, that the main meaning of my thoughts is transmited by this poor text.
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