Making New Waves 2007

Alvin LUCIER
előadása a Zeneakadémián

Helyszín: Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti Egyetem XXVI.terem
Budapest, Liszt Ferenc tér 8.

Időpont: 2007. február 16. péntek 14.00

Perhaps I should tell you a little bit of where I came from, because you all, in some way or another, are going through the same thing. No matter where you come from, you're on a quest or a journey to find out who you are in terms of what kind of music you will make. Aren't you going through that, discovering your style, if you want to call it that?

When I was in college, the masterpieces of music came from France, Germany and Italy. American music had no identity. We had jazz, but jazz was not part of the school system at all. Jazz was music that we played outside of school. I went to Yale, the same school that Charles Ives had attended, but we studied Ives's music very little. It seems strange, but in 1954, the school orchestra played one of Ives's symphonies, and that was a big event. My composition teacher said that Ives composed with one eye shut - meaning he didn't take care with his scores very well. They were messy and he didn't know what he wanted. His accidentals weren't consistent. Ives was interesting, but he was put aside. Most of my teachers had gone to France to study with Nadia Boulanger. I graduated from college and went to Rome to study with Goffredo Petrassi. (Actually, I ended up studying with an assistant of his, Boris Porena.) I thought that's where I should go. At the same time, however, composers like John Cage, Henry Partch and Henry Cowell were aimed away from Europe, more to the East. But we didn't know much about them. They weren't a part of our consciousness. I remember Cage came to give a concert in one of the residential colleges at Yale but I didn't bother to go. I thought it was a joke. Someone reported that he played music on a typewriter. So anyway, I went to Europe and went to all these music festivals, and was very impressed by what I heard and saw. But at a certain moment it dawned on me that this wasn't my music; it was someone else's. It had nothing to do with me. It was a cultural thing. I couldn't pretend I was interested in serialism. It was wonderful and frightening to find that out. I was pretty good at imitating this music. It sounded like that music, but it wasn't that music. So I came home, and got a job as choral conductor at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. But before I left Europe I went to a concert in Venice presented by David Tudor, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Brown.

Yannis KYRIAKIDES
előadása a Zeneakadémián

Helyszín: Liszt Ferenc Zeneművészeti Egyetem XXVI.terem
Budapest, Liszt Ferenc tér 8.

Időpont: 2007. február 17. szombat 14.00

interview for Margen magazine (Spain) (Q: JCP Davila / A:Y Kyriakides)

- How would you introduce your music to a Spanish audience? Would it be a key for it Louis Andriessen's aesthetics or the frequent presence of a high rhythmic energy (which includes rhythm machines)?

When someone asks me what kind of music I write I always answer by saying that I'm concerned with dealing with three aspects of musical experience, the sensual or physical, language and idiom, and time perception. That doesn't clarify much about how the music sounds, one can label it "classical underground" which I sometimes like because it's like burrowing a path underneath the mainstream, or I could describe the form which it usually takes, which in recent years has been longer works where the form slowly evolves either in fragments or as an organic flow. I love playing with scale - going between very fine detail (articulated in fast tempi) to the slow shifts of the macroscopic structure.
I guess the connection with Louis Andriessen's work is there in some way still. I came to live in Holland because of his music, attracted by the bold forms, the clarity, and the emotional impact of his music. It's not so much the rhythmic writing which used to be one of our arguing points (we have a different conception of rhythm) but rather the conceptual rigour and the non-dialectic approach.
(To clarify this point on rhythm: The difference lies in the fact that Andriessen rhythmic structures are like clocks, articulating the clear harmonic structure which is the main engine of the music. Sometimes the rhythmic drive in his work is an image of pure energy, sometimes just measuring time. He used to tell me all the time in my work that the rhythmic complexity is at odds with the simple harmonic structure I usually go for. Though in my view, it is the fact that the harmonic architecture is pushed to the background that the refined rhythmic complexity can be perceived. Space is created in the foreground for small detail to come through).
In this sense rhythmicity, tempo and scale play an expressive role in my music to the extent that I like to think that musical matter is solely defined by speed and rate of change.