Music to Hear on Here: Georg Friedrich Haas "IN Vain"--Spectral Music

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Georg Friedrich Haas "IN Vain"--Spectral Music

During Haas's "In Vain," the listener experiences a heightened state of awareness, becoming acutely attuned to the intricacies of a psychedelically beautiful soundscape that unfolds in total darkness...Mr. Haas is an Austrian composer associated with the French spectral school, which evolved in the 1970s as a rebellion against the strictures of serialist music. Timbre and resonance are central in the spectral aesthetic, initially influenced by French composers, like Messiaen, Debussy, Ravel....Spectral composers use computer analysis of the acoustic properties of sound as compositional building blocks, with the overtones created by a note used to produce shimmering sonorities...."The spectral composers wanted to create beautiful, lush, physical, sensuous sounds...." Vivien Schweitzer, "Unearthly Harmonies, Best Heard in the Dark," New York Time, 2/16/11

No comments:

Post a Comment

Course Description

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Martin Mull (or Elvis Costello)

Thinking about the meaning and value, intellectual, affective and neurological experiences, and aesthetics of music has occupied an important position in modern and contemporary philosophical writings. Central to the philosophy of music is a questioning of what music is insofar as it is an art form and practice, akin to but different from other arts, such as drama, literature, painting, sculpture, to name but a few examples. Claims have been made, in fact, that music’s effect, when performed and listened to, surpasses those of the other arts because of its abstact purity, of its universality, and of its singular capacity to express, represent and incite emotions. This course will explore such issues in 19th-20th century philosophy. We will begin with introductory readings of what composes the field and discipline of the philosophy of music. We will read—among other philosophers, novelists, critics and musicologists—Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Barthes and Adorno’s writings on music. Finally, we will have the occasion to read about and listen to specific musicians, both high and low, and explore the contexts of their work, concentrating on the historical and political dimensions of the practice, performance and art of making music.