Sonic Arts / Composition

This article offers a look into how technological advances have changed music in the industry, in society, and in education and seeks to find a solution to the misaligned between the two. People experience music in a dramatically different way than previous generations and the education must evolve alongside this to avoid becoming irrelevant. Barriers to composition are being broken down with new technologies and the development of a participatory culture has changed the way people interact with music and musicians. This article discusses ways that technology is being brought into the classroom and offers solutions to assist music educators and classroom teachers with integrating technology into the music classroom in a way that reflects students out-of-school experiences in order to make music education at primary school more engaging and relevant to the students’ lives.

The acousmatic is typically positioned within the tail of high modernism. Yet, it is better understood as archetypal of postmodernism, within the framework outline by Fredric Jameson (in Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism). That is, as a postindustrial aesthetic practice characterised by a particular condition: that in which cognitive mapping is problematised because the spaces and materialities generated through acousmatic technologies relate only obliquely, as surrogates (Smalley), to the life-world. Thus, the acousmatic is a contemporary instance of the sublime (in Burke¹s terms, a mix of terror and delight), as it threatens to efface the spectator and frustrates their ability to make cognitive sense of the acousmatic experience. The acousmatic is therefore in line with Jameson¹s description of the postmodern work as tapping "the networks of the reproductive process and thereby [affording] us some glimpse into a postmodern or technological sublime." (Jameson)

A talk given in response to Janet Cardiff's The Forty-Part Motet, a work which uses 40 loudspeakers to reframe and thus transform Thomas Tallis' motet Spem in Alium. The talk focuses on the role that (technological) mediation of the original work plays in changing audience reception of it.

The parameters of Western art music remain largely proscribed by the aesthetic of autonomy. To be a composer is to be bound to the wider set of conditions associated with this, admittedly complex, aesthetic. However much the defining boundaries of concert hall music, whether instrumental or electronic, have been strained against, there remain physical, spatiotemporal, musico-material and sociocultural taboos that are rarely, if ever, exceeded and just as rarely discussed. Through analysis of the work of a number of New Zealand's "maverick" artists, this present paper aims to define – loosely – the taboos that the autonomy aesthetic sets in place, the ways in which these taboos have been broken, and inevitably, the consequences such taboo breaking occasions.

Silencing and musicalisation, as defined by Douglas Kahn, are valuable means to call attention to the sonically liminal. They create a frame within which acoustic silence can be attended to, either as a conceptual phenomenon or as the dead silence of sounds and soundmakers subjected to ecological silencing. Through critical discussion of silence in Kahn’s writing on John Cage, as well as in acoustic ecology and soundscape composition, an outline of ecological silencing is developed and applied through examination of environmentally engaged sound works by Sally McIntyre (NZ) and Katie Paterson (GB).

This essay is a critique of the dominant hermeneutic approach to sound-based music — formalism — followed by an argument for the potential of such music to foster engagement with the so-called “extramusical’, which will be posited as a vital regression in the evolution of new music. This is an agenda that requires some preparatory work and thus the bulk of the essay is concerned with examining a particular genealogy in the ideological lineage of sound-based music, one that as far as I can ascertain has never been traced. I conclude by outlining my core point and this comes in a form that could easily be co-opted into a manifesto; as such it reflects my interest in establishing a conceptual position that might underwrite my own creative practice. It should also be said that the essay began life as a talk given to an audience largely unfamiliar with the arcane cultures of new music, hence the initial recounting of a history and its associated concepts which will most likely be very familiar to readers of eContact!.

The acousmatic is typically positioned within the tail of high modernism. Yet, it is better understood as archetypal of postmodernism, within the framework outline by Fredric Jameson (in Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism). That is, as a postindustrial aesthetic practice characterised by a particular condition: that in which cognitive mapping is problematised because the spaces and materialities generated through acousmatic technologies relate only obliquely, as surrogates (Smalley), to the life-world. Thus, the acousmatic is a contemporary instance of the sublime (in Burke¹s terms, a mix of terror and delight), as it threatens to efface the spectator and frustrates their ability to make cognitive sense of the acousmatic experience. The acousmatic is therefore in line with Jameson's description of the postmodern work as tapping the networks of the reproductive process and thereby [affording] us some glimpse into a postmodern or technological sublime.