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Since the late eighteenth century and the flowering of Romanticism, western classical or 'art' music has adopted aesthetics which aim to express 'the great and sublime in nature' (Burke, Edmund. 1757. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. New York: P. F. Collier and Son Company). However, though improvisation was a source of inspiration and motivation for creative expression, the rise of romantic aesthetics sacralised composers' creative processes and their works, ultimately producing the more restricted concept of Werktreue, or fidelity to the score (Goehr, Lydia. 1994. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press.). In this article, I turn to the writing of Louis Althusser (1971. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press) to illustrate how implicit values and beliefs within the cultural institutions of classical music form an ideology which dominates the individual in a way described as 'hegemonic'. As a result, classically-trained musicians are excluded from improvisational practices, because: (i) they must act within a culture in which improvisation itself is misunderstood, misrepresented and suppressed, and (ii) the act of 'interpellation', in which ideology is interpreted by the individual, encourages musicians themselves to identify and seek fulfilment through non-creative, non-improvisatory practices. Lastly, I explore a way out from the determining tendency of ideology, explaining how the act of improvisation offers an alternative musical role which is genuinely creative and indeterminate; allowing the musician to become ideologically aware, and thus free to choose their own musical identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusess topics within the issue including musical aesthetics; asymmetrical position of tone colour between empirical data, the phenomenology of touch-in-sound; and musical affordances of timbre.

The composition of new string quartets in Spain from the end of the 1950s undertook a path of renewal that strove toward modernity through the use of serial and aleatory techniques or new conceptions of timbre. This was in spite of the relatively scarce experience for Spanish composers of international examples of the genre. This essay offers a brief insight into the aesthetic diversity to be found in string quartets composed in Spain from 1950 up to the present, and stresses their openness toward newer hybrid perspectives of intertextuality and narrativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A psychogeographic reading of the music theatre works of composers Bernhard Lang and Chico Mello can aid an understanding of the more subtle approaches to ‘quotation’, borrowing, and intertextuality in their works. These aspects are signalled by competing cultural geographies which also indicate the composers' differing experiences of place. This analysis will allow for a greater understanding of competing cultural geographies and concepts of ‘postminimalism’ and ‘postmodernism’ in the two composers' works and borrowing practices. It will also explore the link between the composers' biographies, quotation, and repetition, by introducing concepts of psychogeography, radicant aesthetics, and Nicholas Bourriaud's ‘journey form’ to an aesthetic approach to their forms. It will conclude by examining how the ‘journey form’ might itself be considered a cultural borrowing practice within a psychogeographic framework. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the recent explosion of affordable software has placed powerful electronic music production tools within reach of anyone with a smart phone or a tablet, there are important aspects of music composition that technology has failed to address. In fact, much audio software subtly encourages prefabricated aesthetic solutions via the user interface, resulting in a cookie-cutter approach to music creation. As a result, much of the electronic music we hear today rarely ventures into new territory by exploring new structures. One solution could be to employ a compositional tool that enables a composer to generate new and unusual structures derived from mathematical relationships such as the Fibonacci series, the Golden Ratio or other mathematical patterns found in nature. Luckily, such a tool exists and is part of a vast system of music composition created in the twentieth century by the visionary music theoretician and composer Joseph Schillinger. In this article the author explores a Schillinger technique called ‘composing with density groups’ which can be used to create unique musical structures on paper or in any digital audio workstation (DAW). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Notation can be seen to sit conformably between theory and practice as it symbolizes practice, generates and implements theory, and produces practice. Historically, its presence changes in significance across the development of activities such as music or architecture. From design tool to canonic text, notational artefacts both solidify and formalize practice, as will be expanded below. How, then, does the role and function of notation change with specific contemporary practices, which are by definition ill-defined and feed off fluidity and change? What is the nature of notation in distributed and collaborative practices such as improvised music or network music performance? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper explores the fundamental aesthetic importance of algorithms in musical practice. It focuses upon areas of potentially far-reaching aesthetic consequence that currently seem to pose some problems/misunderstandings/misconceptions or an awkwardness of interface between the disciplines of computer science and music composition—including approaches to symbolic manipulation systems, and concepts such as optimization, population, fitness and search space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the ideology of new music. Two theses concerning the ideology of new music are cited. These include the fact that new music is underestimated and has been scarcely recognized and that the dominant culture bearer comes up with innovations which resemble and stand in the way of new music. New music is described as a type of music that suspends or disables the syntactical and language-like systems, and in which the relation of the parts to the whole is reconsidered from the ground up.

This paper employs a Wittgensteinian framework to describe the experience of listening to the music of Mathias Spahlinger. First, a 'skeptical puzzle' is introduced, based on a reading of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The puzzle problematizes the security of ascriptions of meaning to material practices. Then, Spahlinger's ephemere is used as a test case: it is described from a first-person perspective, compared with an account of the work given by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, and given as an example of an audible presentation of the 'skeptical puzzle'. Such a presentation is marked by a phenomenon that Wittgenstein described as 'the dawning of an aspect'. By focusing on the role of aspect perception and the problems of ascription in Spahlinger's music, it is possible to argue against Mahnkopf's criticism of Spahlinger's work, as well as understand an underlying affinity between extreme forms of repetition and perpetual transition within Spahlinger's compositional habitus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critiques of formalist modes of musical analysis resemble critiques of certain types of minimal music. One ironic, if not downright paradoxical aspect of this parallel is that the sharpest attacks on minimal music have come from writers sympathetic to formalism. A reconciliation of sorts has been reached by formalist admirers of minimalism, for whom the music is a staging ground for reflexive methodological critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Horacio Vaggione's music is a true challenge for the musical analyst, both for its technical complexity and its artistic depth. This article aims to suggest some promising analytic approaches to his piano and tape piece Till —arguably a turning point in the composer's evolution—classifying characteristic material and creating typologies of them. After an initial consideration of the context of composition, the analysis proceeds in three parts. In the first part, the tape is investigated between the meso- (middle) and the microscopic temporal levels and a typology of the sound objects is established. In the second part, the piano's complementary temporal field is examined and a corresponding typology of the musical figures constructed. Finally, the modalities of interaction between the tape and the piano, their complementary temporal levels and their ‘common vectorisation’ are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with Varèse's compelling need to break away from things European, and the challenges, ideas, new aesthetic ideals that were presented to him by the 'new' world--it was for him a look into the future. It will also explore Varèse's relationships with other artists--not only musicians--his predilection for scientific notions as core ideas for some of his compositions, and his consistent use of Spanish (translated or not) for almost all of his compositions that use text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The arrival of so-called laptop music in the late 1990s also created a distinctively new aesthetic, which utilized the errors and disturbances taking place in digital sound processing. This focus on the glitch became an emblematic sound and signaled a new approach to the relation between the sound artist and the tools of music production by focusing on the production process itself. There has been a steady increase in the quantity of music produced under the concept of glitch, and its "aesthetics of failure" has lost much of its avant-garde status by becoming a part of an established musical vocabulary. I wish to consider the laptop producer's role, which overlaps academia and popular culture, by offering further analysis on the concept of glitch and the production process and will conclude that the laptop artist inhabits a paradoxical position, both culturally (academia/pop) and aesthetically (artistry/machinic production). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The celebrated tabletop guitarist Keith Rowe has provocatively aligned the new electro-acoustic improvised music with the aesthetics of Duchamp rather than its musical forebears in electro-acoustic music or improvised music in general. However, on examination, this association does not hold. Rowe's reading of Duchamp is rather partial and overlooks the latter's radical intervention into the field of painting. Rowe's version of Duchamp is of an artist who widened the parameters of what might be used to produce an artistic object. Rowe, therefore, attends much more closely to Duchamp's recuperation of the objet trouvé rather than the critique of art that Duchamp supplied. Instead, the innovation of electro-acoustic music lies in its privileging of "glitch" aesthetics, the "pariahs of sound," sonic attributes that had been historically purged from musical language and that in a different manner can be seen to exemplify Duchamp's concept of the infra-thin -- not one of "nomination" but rather aural toleration and acceptability. In the end, in looking at the work of Duchamp scholar Thierry de Duve and recent examples in electro-acoustic improv, we can see that Rowe's ambitious statement is inadequate and a "post-Artaudian" description is more appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the orchestral composition of Bernard Rand entitled 'Body and Shadow,' which exhibits qualities of aesthetic attitudes. Types of aesthetic attitudes in music; Information on modernnist and antimodernist composers; Characteristics of postmodernism; Aspects of tonality.