EarCandy

(EarCandy)

More an admirer of the Darmstadt school (the creative wheelhouse responsible for producing such iconic composers as Stockhausen, Brown, Berio, Boulez, and Nono), then an actual participant, André Boucourechliev all the same, pioneered in a similar vein the practices of that renowned school. As to which composer he individually gravitated in style towards, Boucourechliev began to follow in the steps of indeterminacy of Cage while still maintaining a passion for the methods of serialism, ... read more

If I were to spend the rest of my days with the works of one Second Viennese school composer, it would have to be that of Alban Berg. In one oeuvre spanning several decades tragically cut short on account of a bug bite, Berg masterfully progressed and expanded the limits of the opera (the first to do so since Wagner) with the enormously popular Wozzeck and its successor Lulu. As well as the innovation and secrets of infidelity laced within his Lyric Suite. The importance of Berg's work is found ... read more

A very compelling iteration of the free jazz idiom is found in Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity. The work became the defining moment of the young tenor man's ascendancy to jazz stardom as a new voice heralding the unusual jazz offshoot known as free jazz. The sub-genre that was so controversially concerned with expanding the frontiers and testing sonic limits of tried-and-true hard-bop facilities. The term "free" doesn't seem to be a word boasting a universal definition that all free ... read more

We have previously talked about the spectral viola (Intimate Rituals, the viola works by Radulescu), whose high-register wretches and screeches sear the eardrums. Still, we haven't discussed the spectral piano, an unlikely compatriot of the spectralist mode, whose keys resonate in the most glacial and chilling manner. Mind you; this isn’t to be compared with the asymmetric pattern presentation of Feldman, whose compositions gnaw at music's intellectual potential through minute and nearly ... read more