The German-Jewish émigré composer Stefan Wolpe was a vital figure in the history of modernism, with affiliations ranging from the Bauhaus, Berlin agitprop and the kibbutz movement to bebop, Abstract ...Expressionism and Black Mountain College. This is the first full-length study of this often overlooked composer, launched from the standpoint of the mass migrations that have defined recent times. Drawing on over 2000 pages of unpublished documents, Cohen explores how avant-garde communities across three continents adapted to situations of extreme cultural and physical dislocation. A conjurer of unexpected cultural connections, Wolpe serves as an entry-point to the utopian art worlds of Weimar-era Germany, pacifist movements in 1930s Palestine and vibrant art and music scenes in early Cold War America. The book takes advantage of Wolpe's role as a mediator, bringing together perspectives from music scholarship, art history, comparative literature, postcolonial studies and recent theories of cosmopolitanism and diaspora.
The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries Since 1975 brings the series of cultural histories of the avant-garde in the Nordic countries up to the present. It discusses revisions ...and continuations of historical practices since 1975.
What is experimental music today? This book offers an up to date survey of this field for anyone with an interest, from seasoned practitioners to curious readers. This book takes the stance that ...experimental music is not a limited historical event, but is a proliferation of approaches to sound that reveals much about present-day experience. An experimental work is not identifiable by its sound alone, but by the nature of the questions it poses and its openness to the sounding event.Experimentation is a way of working. It pushes past that which is known to discover what lies beyond it, finding new knowledge, forms, and relationships, or accepting a state of uncertainty. For each of these composers and sound artists, craft is developed and transformed in response to the questions they bring to their work. Scientific, perceptual, or social phenomena become catalysts in the operation of the work. These practices are not presented according to a chronology, a set of techniques, or social groupings. Instead, they are organized according to the content areas that are their subjects, including resonance, harmony, objects, shapes, perception, language, interaction, sites, and histories. Musical materials may be subject, among other treatments, to systemization, observation, examination, magnification, fragmentation, translation, or destabilization. These restless and exploratory modes of engagement have continued to develop over recent decades, expanding the scope of both musical practice and listening.
Christian Wolff Hicks, Michael; Asplund, Christian
08/2012
eBook
In this first interpretive narrative of the life and work of Christian Wolff, Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund trace the influences and sensibilities of a contemporary composer's atypical career ...path and restless imagination. Written in full cooperation with Wolff, including access to his papers, this volume is a much-needed introduction to a leading avant-garde composer still living, writing music, and speaking about his own work. _x000B__x000B_Wolff has pioneered various compositional and notational idioms, including overtly political music, indeterminacy, graphic scores, and extreme virtuosity. Trained as a classicist rather than a musician, Wolff has never quite had both feet in the rarefied world of contemporary composition. Yet he's considered a "composer's composer," with a mind ensconced equally in ancient Greek tragedy and experimental music and an eccentric and impulsive compositional approach that eludes a fixed stylistic fingerprint._x000B__x000B_Hicks and Asplund cover Wolff's family life and formative years, his role as a founder of the New York School of composers, and the context of his life and work as part of the John Cage circle, as well as his departures from it. Critically assessing Wolff's place within the experimental musical field, this volume captures both his eloquence and reticence and provides insights into his broad interests and activities within music and beyond._x000B_
Introduces the full range and depth of the early 20th-century European avant- gardes This engaging introduction outlines the cultural and political contexts in which the avant-gardes operated, taking ...readers on a journey throughout the whole of Europe. It discusses the most salient features of the avant-gardes' work in all the arts, succinctly surveys the major avant-garde movements (cubism, futurism, expressionism, Dadaism, constructivism and many other –isms) and demonstrates the ways in which they transformed the face of all modern art forms. Clearly written, this book shows readers and students of modernism how and why the avant-gardes were a major force in modern art and culture. Key Features * An up-to-date and thorough guide to the 'classic' European avant-gardes, from 1905 to 1935 * Covers all the arts practiced by the classic European avant-gardes – from painting and film, literature and sculpture, architecture and photography to theatre, dance and music – focusing on the specificity of each art form as well as on what united them * Includes text-boxes, 100 illustrations, many in colour, and a user-friendly index/glossary
What would it mean to be avant-garde today? Arguing against the notion that the avant-garde is dead or confined to historically "failed" movements, this book offers a more dynamic and inclusive ...theory of avant-gardes that accounts for how they work in our present. Innovative in approach, Provisional Avant- Gardes focuses on the medium of the little magazine—from early Dada experiments to feminist, queer, and digital publishing networks—to understand avant-gardes as provisional and heterogeneous communities. Paying particular attention to neglected women writers, artists, and editors alongside more canonical figures, it shows how the study of little magazines can change our views of literary and art history while shedding new light on individual careers. By focusing on the avant-garde's publishing history and group dynamics, Sophie Seita also demonstrates a new methodology for writing about avant-garde practice across time, one that is applicable to other artistic and non-artistic communities and that speaks to contemporary practitioners as much as scholars. In the process, she addresses fundamental questions about the intersections of aesthetic form and politics and about what we consider to be literature and art.
Focusing on the gestures of giving, touching, showing and handcrafting, this study examines key scenes of tactile interaction between subject and artifact. The readings of this book call for a ...revision of an optically obscured aesthetics and poetics to include haptic experience as an often overlooked but pivotal part of the making as well as the perception of literature and the arts.
This groundbreaking book examines how the notion of "the object"
was transformed in Japanese experimental art during a time of rapid
social, economic, and environmental change.
Reviving the legacies ...of the historical avant-garde, Japanese
artists and intellectuals of the 1960s formulated an aesthetics of
disaffection through which they sought to address the stalemate of
political and aesthetic representation. Ignacio A. Adriasola Muñoz
draws from psychoanalytic theories of melancholia to examine the
implications of such an approach, tracing a genealogy of
disaffection within modernist discourse. By examining the
discursive practices of artists working across a wide range of
media, and through a close analysis of artwork, philosophical
debates, artist theories, and critical accounts, Adriasola Muñoz
shows how negativity became an efficacious means of addressing
politics as a source for the creative act of undoing .
In examining ideas of the object advanced by artists and
intellectuals both in writing and as part of their artwork, this
book brings discussions in critical art history to bear on the
study of art in Japan. It will be of interest to art historians
specializing in modernism, the international avant-garde, Japanese
art, and the history of photography.
The first one, Joaquin Torres Garcia, managed to incorporate European artistic ideas and translate them into his own art, which was alien to schematic classifications. To this end, the paper goes ...through the works of Torres Garcia, the School of the South, and Espinóla across their various artistic expressions: lectures, books, texts, and art associations. The conclusion is that all of them sought to search a balance between global and local art and translate it into a personal and individual expression with great moral impetus. The materialization of La fuga en el espejo plays with the dreamlike quality of the dialogues, the symbology of thescenography, fragmented time, a distance from the audience, andan open ending.
