Download Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism by Thomas Patteson PDF

By Thomas Patteson

“Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone files, and optical sound film—these have been the state of the art acoustic applied sciences of the early 20th century, and for lots of musicians and artists of the time, those units have been additionally the implements of a musical revolution. tools for brand spanking new song lines a diffuse community of cultural brokers who shared the idea actually glossy track may be attained in simple terms via a thorough problem to the technological foundations of the artwork. founded in Germany throughout the Twenties and Thirties, the stream to create new tools encompassed a large spectrum of experiments, from the exploration of microtonal tunings and unique tone shades to the power to compose without delay for computerized musical machines. This circulation comprised composers, inventors, and visible artists, together with Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, Jörg Mager, Friedrich Trautwein, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttmann, and Oskar Fischinger. Patteson’s attention-grabbing research combines an artifact-oriented background of latest track within the early 20th century with an astute revisiting of still-relevant debates in regards to the courting among expertise and the arts.”

Show description

Read Online or Download Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism PDF

Best modernism books

The Weary Blues

Approximately 90 years after its first booklet, this celebratory variation of The Weary Blues reminds us of the beautiful fulfillment of Langston Hughes, who used to be simply twenty-four at its first visual appeal. starting with the hole "Proem" (prologue poem)--"I am a Negro: / Black because the evening is black, / Black just like the depths of my Africa"--Hughes spoke without delay, in detail, and powerfully of the reviews of African americans at a time whilst their voices have been newly being heard in our literature.

Libertinage in Russian Culture and Literature (Russian History and Culture)

A lot of the former scholarship on Russia's literary discourses of sexuality and eroticism within the Silver Age was once outfitted on utilising eu theoretical versions (from psychoanalysis to feminist conception) to Russia's modernization. This publication argues that, on the become the 20th century, Russian pop culture for the 1st time came upon itself in direct war of words with the normal excessive cultures of the higher periods and intelligentsia, generating modernized representations of sexuality.

Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media

Whereas most crucial stories of born-digital literature have a good time it as a postmodern paintings shape with roots in modern applied sciences and social interactions, electronic Modernism presents another family tree. Grounding her argument in literary background, media experiences, and the perform of close-reading, Jessica Pressman pairs modernist works through Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Bob Brown, with significant electronic works like William Poundstone's undertaking for the Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit}, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries's Dakota, and Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter to illustrate how the modernist circulate of the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties laid the basis for the concepts of digital literature.

Impossible Modernism: T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the Critique of Historical Reason

Most unlikely Modernism reads the writings of German thinker and critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Anglo-American poet and critic T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) to envision the connection among literary and ancient shape throughout the modernist interval. It focuses really on how they either resisted the types of narration demonstrated by way of nineteenth-century educational historians and grew to become as a substitute to standard literary devices—lyric, satire, anecdote, and allegory—to reimagine the varieties that ancient illustration may well take.

Additional info for Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism

Example text

30 As the Aeolian was a player piano, not a reproducing piano, these pieces were not fully automated and required a player-pianist to apply the necessary adjustments of tempo and dynamics according to directions supplied by the composers. The works were premiered in a concert at Aeolian Hall in London on October 13, 1921, following an introductory lecture by Evans. But that was the last most people heard of the music. 31 THE STUCKENSCHMIDT CONTROVERSY Whereas in England the appearance of original music for the player piano took place without much fanfare and was quickly done with, in Germany it became a sensation.

35 Stuckenschmidt’s position represented the leading edge of a new emphasis on fidelity and the supposedly inalterable form embodied in the score, a view that would become second nature over the course of the twentieth century. But the idea that mechanical instruments would replace musicians as performers of existing music was the less provocative of Stuckenschmidt’s assertions. His more radical notion was that new compositions could be written for mechanical instruments, conceived specifically for their performative capabilities and free from the conventions and limitations of human musicianship.

For you,” he admonished his critics, “the human being is the primary factor of music. For us the tones are all that matter. ’ ”44 The mechanical piano was the technological proof of Stuckenschmidt’s musical materialism. Every note the pianist plays is reducible to three factors: the instant of attack (its temporal relation to other notes), the duration, and the speed with which the hammer hits the string (loudness). Each of these can be captured on the piano roll and mechanically reproduced, or even created by hand without any performance.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.12 of 5 – based on 17 votes