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Dimitri Rastoropov

Solicitude: the composition process

Finally. Solicitude is a piece music for piano I’ve been working for ages – it seems, but I think it’s a timely release – the music sounds like Spring, and the everyone around is blooming, the weather is getting warmer, and it seems like life has a chance over death, again.

Here’s a link for wherever you listen to music to, don’t forget to click love/like, follow me there, and share with your friends:

I’ve probably overdone the music though. For future releases I will probably be doing singles with multiple versions of the same tracks because I literally can not stop myself from adding more odd moves and gestures in my music. So in the future – there will be the basic version, and the version that I like more myself. Let’s call that a compromise.

The piece itself is very plastic and physical. My lifelong infatuation with Stravinsky very plastic music has probably taken its toll and this really felt like it’s very much based on the movement of the human body. Which is why I’m working with a dancer to create a short ballet video that will go with this music. Can’t say when it will be released, but probably by the end of 2021.

The composition

The music itself is quite simple, and in line with my piano works in the last few years. This isn’t the ‘contemporary music’ I’ve been writing in my student years, but part of my desire to write more traditional music, perhaps of the neo-classical type. Doesn’t mean that I’m done with ‘contemporary music’.

But this piece in particular is a bit ‘french’ – in the sense of the love for the sounds themselves rather than any specific harmony, melody or technical stuff. Although there is a section that sounds more like a traditional development – which also sounds quite old-fashioned and would’ve been removed from a more striped-down version in future releases.

Again, the main theme isn’t really a melody, it also isn’t a harmony – it’s the arpeggiation and the suspended tones that give it its character. There are is some harmonic work which is the type of thing that I like to do – very confined and incremental, more to do with the changing colours of the same thing rather than any actual development.

That’s the main theme – the developmental section has a bit more actual harmonic work in the traditional sense, it is coincidentally also the most technically challenging part, it is also the part that I like least.

The part that I do like the most is the middle section – it’s very simple, but it has one thing that makes it stand out – a cluster, which I’m quite fond of, because it sounds so well integrated into the very commons melody/harmony. Also, because it alters the clearly major harmony into something a bit more haunting.

The reprise is mostly the same thing with a few changes – so very little exact repetition. Also, lots of use of the lower piano register.

I’ll write a bit more about the production/performance process in the coming posts.

Meanwhile, here’s the sheet music: https://www.rastoropov.co.uk/shop/sheet-music/piano-music/solicitude/

Published on March 25, 2021

Sepia Hearts

I haven’t written for piano for ages before this piece. Last time I’ve written a solo piano piece was way back in 2006(?), I think. Sepia Hearts was finished in 2019.

Let’s get the name out of the way first – as with most of my titles it’s mostly word play, but there are also some allusions to hearts (and minds) that are always out of place, perhaps looking to the past or sideways. I also like the playing cards reference. Stravinsky’s Game of Cards anyone?

I’ve largely avoided the piano, like many composers, because of the enormous amount of baggage that comes with the instrument. It is kind of hard to avoid sounding cliche and relying on overused phrases and harmonies if you write tonal music, and equally hard to avoid sounding cliche and relying on overused techniques if you write music that doesn’t have a conventional tonality.

This is one of the my first piece that I’ve actually written as I would usually write one of my ‘contemporary classical’ pieces i.e. every note, rhythm, and dynamic actually written out as you would do when writing for music to be performed (as opposed to the electronic and more popular stuff that I’ve mostly been doing since 2013).

This is also my first ‘contemporary classical’ tonal piece that I’ve written in more than a decade (back then I was still in school). I’m not sure this is return to tonality for me, but it’s an admission that there’s lots of things to be explored between the absolute and silly dichotomy of tonal/atonal, which still dominates contemporary music despite everyone making it seem as if that’s a long forgotten ‘debate’.

This really isn’t a complicated piece, it’s mostly quite simple melodic writing, some of which I’m fond of (mainly the second melody, although oddly enough it was the first melody that the piece started with). I quite liked the also quite basic, but somewhat exciting polyphonic writing and adding more complicated rhythms and time signatures in the development section.

Overall, I am ok with the result, and I look forward to writing a few more of these, hopefully diluting that awful sea of twinkly, ambient, ’emotional’, ‘melancholy’, ‘sad’, piano music that dominates the modern musical landscape. Seriously, the world needs a lot less Tiersen and Einaudi, and a lot more, well – me.

Download the sheet music here: Sepia Hearts – Modern Piano. Use the code ‘performer’ to get it for free. If you’re a performer. 😀

Published on May 21, 2020

A Brief Comparison of Albanian Iso-Polyphony and Lithuanian Sutartines

It may seem far fetched to compare such different cultures as Albanian and Lithuanian from most perspectives—including a musical one—but perhaps it is a needed step towards finding further connections between Balkan and Baltic regions, or to show that they have formed independently of each other. The catalyst for this study is the fact that dissonant folk polyphony exists in both Albanian and Lithuanian folk music, and the Indo-European unity of the two cultures.

Albanian folk music has had very little attention from scholars up until the middle of the 20th century, and this largely complicates its study. The first compilation of Albanian folk music was made by Pjeter Dunguin the 1940’s, but only in 1950, an Albanian musicologist Ramadan Sokoli started full academic research of the music. Since that date it was studied extensively, first mostly from inside Albania, and after the deconstruction of the communist state, foreign studies of Albanian music increased.

Lithuanian music had more focus on it from musicologists, beginning from the middle of the 19th century, through Soviet times, and up until today, and most of the Sutartines have been transcribed in the 19-20th centuries. What complicates the study of the Sutartines today is the fact that they are no longer a living tradition – they are only being performed by professional and amateur folk ensembles. With time, the area of outspread of Sutartines has been diminishing, and it also has been penetrated by influences of homophonic music with a major-minor harmonic structure, eventually this type of singing ceased to exist in villages. The latter is contrary to the situation with Albanian folk music, which even though it is also being performed by folk ensembles, and the fact that the phenomenon of the iso seems to be declining, the singing still continues to evolve – new polyphonic songs and texts with modern themes and problems continue to emerge, and there is also a rapidly growing tendency for performing iso-polyphonic songs with instruments (Ahmedaja, 2005: 225). This may not be good considering the preservation of folk music, but it is definitely a sign of life.

Albania, music wise, may be divided into two regions – northern (Ghegëri) and southern (Toskëri) which are separated by the Shkumbini river. The north is mostly an area of monodic song, and polyphonic singing is predominantly found in the southern parts of Albania. (Tole, 2004) Generally, it could be said that Albanian music, as it was first met by scholars, is like most Eastern European ethnic music, is by an extent, a result of different influences – Greek, Serbian, Macedonian, Turkish etc. Consequently, it is impossible to draw specific borders and, for example say that iso-polyphonic singing is entirely Albanian, because in the Epirus region of northern Greece, very similar iso-polyphonic singing is also exists. The same can be said about northern Albania, and perhaps even in a bigger degree.

Music in Lithuania is not as rigidly divided as Albanian, due to a few reasons. Geographically Lithuania is comprised mostly of plainlands, contrasting to Albanian highlands and mountains, and this suggests more connections and mutual influences between populated areas, and a more monolithic culture in general, than where each village is disconnected from other villages by mountains and other harsh terrains. Religion could be a force of unity in Albania, but according to some opinions, (Noli, 1947: 21) religion is not something Albanians are historically consistent with – multiple conversions from and to major religions according to the political situation is somewhat characteristic of Albanians and for example, a conversion from Orthodox Christianity to Islam of a major part of Albanians has not changed the core of iso-polyphonic singing even with time (Koço, Vocal Ison: Chapter 9). Nevertheless, Lithuanians today are predominantly Roman Catholic, and this may have also provided cultural unity. The Sutartines were located only in one of the five regions of Lithuania – the northeastern Aukštaitija, which is translated as “highlands” (the «highlands» do not go above 200-300 hundred meters, so a comparison with Albania is impossible). Other types of singing are spread more or less evenly on the territory of Lithuania. Sutartines, compared to Albanian iso-polyphony does not have any neighbours with somewhat similar singing, although Slavjunas (Славюнас, 1972: 8) mentions an earlier existence of two-voiced polyphonic singing with a drone in the bordering region of Latvia, but this singing ceased to exist in the 19th century. There is also a recent discovery by Raèiunaitë-Vyèinienë, of what she calls “Collaborative Sutartines” (Raèiunaitë-Vyèinienë, 2005: 1) – they are similar to the ‘normal’ Sutartines but have a drone, and present a more consonant style influenced by professional polyphony. Perhaps a more convincing reason for this difference of Albanian and Lithuanian music is much more simple: polyphonic traditions of Europe seem to belong to the indigenous population of Europe which have migrated to more remote and arduous regions like mountain ranges, big forests, etc. (Jordania, 2006: 216) This way, when state borders were formed, the people living in the mountains would be separated by the borders, and eventually would be influenced by the culture of the country they were attached to. Lithuania was in a better situation than Albania, because the formation of its borders did not divide the region where Sutartines singing was spread so drastically as it did to Albanian music in general.

Iso-polyphony is something south Albanian music is most known for, it is spread in four regions – Toskëri, Myzeqe, Labëri, and Çamëri each of which have their own traditions of performance of these songs. The prefix “iso” relates to a drone tone that is sung at least by three people (Stockmann, 1964: 94 in Ahmedaja, 2008). The term is derived from the Greek word ison, which is used in Byzantine liturgical singing, where it is a name for a neume. This held tone is performed in a similar fashion in the three regions of the south – in all except Labëri, there the venkorë (an Albanian analog of the Greek isokraton – one who holds the tone) holds the note with the vowel e (as in ‘rest’) with heavy aspirations. Labë usually recite a text with the ison, or give it some sort of rhythmical pattern; the vowel they use is ë, and they seem to be very fond of this and often stress this difference from other regions (Sokoli, 1959: 118 in Ahmedaja, 2008). Iso-polyphonic singing is performed by two, three, or four voices (only in Labëri) mostly by men, but also by women, separately or together. A typical texture of three- and four-part songs is when one group performs solo parts and the other group performs the ison. The inceptive singer is often called marrës, i.e. the one who “takes it up”, he is also called “ia beq” – the one who “pulls it”. The singer that steps in after the first one is called kthyes i.e. the one who “gives it back” or këmbore – a “bell”, and the reason for the latter is the repetition of rhythmically bell-like motives.Four-part polyphony is only found in Labëri and there obviously a third singer is present, at times he is called bedhës, i.e. “the thrower” – his role is to support the first singer, and to give him a chance to rest. At other times he can be called mbushës – “the one who fills it”, and his role is “filling” up the texture, more exactly – giving a second layer of the ison between the main tone and the third above it, but more rhythmically and melodically (glissandos, portamentos) elaborated (Ahmedaja, 2008, 217).

Instrumental music of Albania is spread mostly in the north. All types of instruments are used – strings, winds and percussion. They are used either solo, or as to accompany epic songs, which are most often recited to the sounds of the lahuta, which could be called a one-string violin. There are alternatives like the cifteli, a two-string instrument tuned by a fourth, on which one string is used for the melody the other for a drone, which is perhaps either a reason, or a result for why it is used more to the south than the lahuta. The more sophisticated string instrument is the llaute, a four-string instrument also tuned in fourths, on which like the lute, the strings are doubled – it is often used in ensemble playing. Wind instruments like the zumare (an instrument similar to a clarinet) are mostly played by shepherds along with a shepherd’s flute. Percussion instruments are mostly used for dance music and sometimes for the songs of the shepherds – def (a type of tambourine) is one of the most popular percussion instruments.

The Sutartines are an exceptional type of Lithuanian multi-voiced music. They stand out not only from inside the Lithuanian culture, but also from an international perspective, compared with the ethnic music of other cultures. This type of singing is in no way a primitive from of polyphony i.e. the Organum, where intervals are sung in parallel motion. Even though all Sutartines melodies are formed with thirds, have similar rhythmical structure, still, each voice has its own logic that does not depend on what the second voice is singing i.e. the melodic logic of this type of singing is purely horizontal. It seems that the reason for such dissonant sonority is not purely musical, and is based largely on psychoacoustical factors (Ambrazevičius, Wiśniewska, 2009: 54). The word sutartines comes from the verb sutarti, which means “to agree”. The particularity of the Sutartines is in their two-voice polyphony, built on the its most ancient types. The most characteristic sonority is the nearly constant sound of seconds, sometimes parallel and sometimes not. The themes and functions of the Sutartines spread unequally throughout nearly all known genres (work, ritual, calendar, family, historical and recited songs) and from this, is it is possible to conclude that the Sutartines are not at all accidental in the Lithuanian culture – they began forming a very long time ago, and once had taken a big part, equal with the part of monodic singing in the life of the Lithuanian people. In Sutartines, the one who begins singing, or the one who sings the main text is called the rinkėja, “the collector,” other variants include “the leader”, “the originator”, while the one repeating the refrain is called the pritarėja, “the accompanist” and at other times he can be called the “harmonist”. Considering that the Sutartines are very often women’s work (mostly weaving) songs, an interesting parallel is marked by Raèiunaitë-Vyèinienë – rinkinys,(a patterned or multicoloured cloth) could be the origin of the name for one of the Sutartines singers (Raèiunaitë-Vyèinienë, 2006), and in fact, sometimes the word rinktinė can be a substitute for sutartine.

Melodically, Sutartines are quite simple – they usually consist of two to five different tones, and the melodic line is built of unfilled major and minor thirds. There also exists a number of tunes with passing tones, with a lower fourth or a higher fifth. The basis tones are the prime and third tones. A typical feature is a syncopated and a hammered rhythm, performed in a moderate tempo very most often in 2/4 time or its variations. The rhythm consists of quarter and eight notes, with rare occasions of dotted rhythms. The structure of a typical Sutartines melody is symmetrical – it usually consists of two equally sized parts. In the most interesting examples, the second part is melodically either an answer, a contrast, or a variant of the first part, and is often performed a second higher or lower. The words of the Sutartines are sung in the first part, and the text of the refrain, which mostly consists of meaningless words and interjections – in the second.

Usually, the songs are categorized by the way of performance, they are sung either in two, three, or four parts (voices), which are respectively named dveijnes, trejines, keturines. Dvejines and keturines form the first group of Sutartines, which by analogy with Western polyphony could be called contrapuntal – singers start and end singing together. The top voice usually is singing the main text, and the second one sings the refrain. The main difference between dvejines and keturines is that in the latter, groups of two singers perform “antiphonally”. In the type of Sutartines that is performed by four singers, nothing changes in the voices that actually sound together – the difference is in the way each singer sings the same melody with different people. Usually, one group performs the song fully, after which, the same thing is repeated by the second group. The combinationsvary vastly, and according to the situations they are sung in. Four part singing is most often found in dance, joke songs and in other non-work situations (weddings, baptism, etc.), three and two part singing is spread throughout all types of occasions. The second group of Sutartines is trejines, and they by analogy could be called canonical – the first singer performs the first part of the melody, the second one joins after the first part has been sung, with the same first part, and the same text of the first part, then the third singer enters in the same fashion. When the Sutartines are being performed in three parts, the difference is only in the way of performance, as the resulting sound also does not exceed two voices as in all vocal Sutartines. The result of this singing is not only a dissonant polyphony, which consists of mostly seconds rarely moving into unison or other intervals (not bigger than a fifth), but also a dissonance of texts, in which the performers never sing the same text at one time (with rare exceptions, mostly indvejines).

The Sutartines described above could be called “standard”, the variations from them can go both ways, either into more a complex musical language, or into a simplification of it. In the first case it happens through various expansions, variations, or insertions. Sutartines that have a tendency for simplification usually have more consonances – thirds and fifths. Most of latest singing of Sutartines in villages belonged to this category, with a gradual tendency for not only the consonance, but for a simplification of voice leading, up to a stage when heterophonic Sutartines took place of the dying Schwebungsdiaphonie. Although this process is not exactly clear because there are songs of the heterophonic Sutartines, that actually belong to a more primitive layer, and apparently this problem is yet to be studied.

Singing in seconds is a hard task, as it was admitted by old singers, and it required constant practice. Often groups of people who sang the Sutartines formed a friendship forlife, and practiced this singing rigorously, inventing new types of voice leading, and perfecting the old ones.

Sutartines were always connected to instrumental music – usually it was performed on different types of wind instruments, and the amount of voices that sound simultaneously could reach up to five, in comparison to the two voices of vocal Sutartines. This perhaps leads to a conclusion that even though the singers themselves say that the pauses in voices were required for rest, because the Sutartines were often sung during work, itseems more possible that it is just the complexity of singing such dissonant music that stopped the singers from adding more voices. On the other side, in instrumental music, it is much more simple to play three or more voices without losing the intonation. 19th century sources often say that during work, rest and return from work in the fields women used to sing the Sutartines, while men accompanied their singing on instruments. Other examples also show this natural connection between vocal and instrumental Sutartines.

Even considering some of the existing non-musical theories (most importantly the mutual Indo-European heritage) on connections between the Balts and predecessors of Albanians, after examining the musical characteristics of the most archaic polyphonic styles in both ethnicities, I have come to a conclusion that from this perspective, the amount of similarities is close to none. Perhaps the only similarities that exist between the chosen types of singing is the fact that they are polyphonic, and that their vertical structure includes a big amount of dissonances. Everything else is different apart from maybe some accidental coincidences. The lack of a drone in the Sutartines is the first thing that anyone comparing it with Albanian iso-polyphony will see. Albanian drone is most probably of Byzantine origin and could be dated around the 11th century (Koço, Vocal Iso(n): Chapter 4), while the drone of the Collective Sutartines is of very late genesis and lacks nearly all characteristics of the ‘usual’ Sutartines – independence of voices, dissonant vertical structure, etc. and it is more reminiscent of Western polyphony because of very strong influences of the major-minor harmonic structure.

Even though the vertical coordination of Albanian iso-polyphony and Lithuanian Sutartines seems to be similar (a big amount of dissonances etc.), I do not consider this very important, because the sonority of the Sutartines is almost a constant pulsation of minor and major seconds, while iso-polyphony, apart from often sounding seconds (intervals), also give us all other intervals much more often that the Sutartines do. Although it is typical of all performers of dissonant polyphonic music (both Lithuanian and Albanian) to perceive the sonority as “sounding like bells” (Šeškauskaite, 2004: 87). Also, the role of the parts vary greatly in iso-polyphony with each of the singers having his own individual task, in the Sutartines we see only two functions, since only two voices sound simultaneously, and even in the instrumental Sutartines in which the number of voices can grow, we still do not see new functions.

Gender wise, we see both types of singing performed both by men and women. But we still have a wide tendency of iso-polyphony being performed predominantly by men, and the Sutartines predominantly by women, although exceptions do exist, especially considering Albanian singing. But, perhaps a uniting thread could be the fact that two-part polyphonic songs in Albania are mostly performed by women, and these songs are by some considered to be the starting point of other polyphonic songs with more voices (Mahony, 2011: 40). The most ancient Sutartines are known for being to a big extent work songs, and the repetitive style of singing suits the monotonous work of a weaver very much. Contrary to that, polyphonic singing in Albania happens on social events – weddings, funerals, harvest feasts etc. or any other types of events when the singers can “take their time”. With time, the Sutartines encompassed a big amount of dance and wedding songs, and these are more elaborate than the primitive Sutartines melodically and structurally.

The basic building block of all Sutartines melodies is a third (major or minor), the primitive Sutartines melodies consist only of one third interval moving back and forth. In Albania we see such melodies only in children’s songs, and the main scales used in the south Albanian iso-polyphony are the anhemitonic pentatonic scales. Even though pentatonic scales are considered to be one of the most ancient type of scales, it is thought that the intervals like thirds have a pre-musical past, because of their use in children’s and even adult’s cries (Reinhard, 1958: 15). Perhaps it is possible to speculate from this that Sutartines could belong to a more primitive layer of music, but what is more relevant is that the evolution of the Sutartines brought the them to a more developed system that includes whole and half steps, the basis of the system remained on singing of the thirds, each of the notes of which presented stability.

Rhythmically the Sutartines and iso-polyphony also present a big difference – even from the first look. Albanian polyphony presents a very free and expressive type of singing with a wide breath, while the Sutartines are rhythmically very straightforward – each syllable uses one note, and this is the main reason for a declamatory character of this type of singing. Both styles use a big amount of repeated motives, but while in Sutartines they are strictly locked in the symmetry of the structure which shows itself everywhere – from the building of motives, to the overall structure of the melody, in Albanian iso-polyphony these motives repeat themselves with a bigger amount of rhythmic variation inside the motives and inside their location of the rhythmic texture. But nevertheless, iso-polyphony has a tendency for simplification of rhythm in general (compared with monophonic singing) each performer has less space for variation, and the common rhythm signature becomes 2/4 or 2/8 instead of the 5/8 and 7/8 that is used in singing with less voices (1-2).

Overall, considering that drone based polyphonic singing seems to be of pre-Indo-European genesis, and that more ornamented and rhythmically free monophony came with the Indo-Europeans, (Jordania, 2006: 223) we could include the Tosk region of south Albania in this ‘mix’, and the Laberi region would go to the category of dissonant polyphonic singing with a drone, that has not taken influence from West Asian melismatic singing. Lithuanian Sutartines do not seem to fit in any group, although Jordania (2006: 233) suggests that Sutartines and Collective Sutartines belong to the same group, of which the the first lost the drone and embraced the use of the canon, while the other lost its dissonant character, taking up a more consonant style influenced by the sacred polyphonic music of the Catholic Church. This is somewhat doubtful because the Lithuanians were the latest nation to officially take up Christianity – the 14th seems somewhat late for a singing style to lose all traces of a drone and start using canonic and contrapuntal devices.

It seems more fruitful to compare the Lithuanian Sutartines to the singing of Ainu people that live in the north of Japan, not in search of any connections, but only to examine the evolution of isolated polyphonic traditions, both of which are based on canonic and contrapuntal singing and on the abundance of harsh dissonances.

List of references

Ahmedaja, Adrian. “Chapter 5 On the Questions of Methods of Studying Ethnic Minorities’ in the Case of Greece’s Arvanites and Alvanoi.” Manifold Identities: Studies on Music and Minorities. Ed. Ursula Hemetek. Amersham: Cambridge Scholars, 2004. 54-62. Print.

Ahmedaja, Ardian. “Changes within Tradition: Parts and Their Number in Multipart Songs among Albanians.” Schriften Zur Volksmusik: European Voices I1.22 (2008): 209-66. Print.

Ambrazevičius, Rytis, and Irena Wiśniewska. “Tonal Hierarchies in Sutartinės.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies 3.1, 2 (2009): 45-55. Print.

Šeškauskaitė, Daiva. “Sutartinės and Balkan Diaphonic Songs.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music35.1 (2004): 71-92. Print.

Jordania, Joseph. Who Asked the First Question: The Origins of Human Choral Singing, Intelligence, Language and Speech. Tbilisi: Logos, 2006. Print.

Koço, Eno. Vocal Iso(n). University of Leeds. Web. Nov. 2011. <http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/eno_koco/vocal4_09.html>.

Mahony, Marinela. “An Investigation of the Polyphonic Folk Music of Albania.” Diss. University of Pretoria, 2011. University of Pretoria: Electronic Theses and Dissertations. University of Pretoria, 13 Apr. 2011. Web. Nov. 2011. <http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-08172011-150502/>.

Noli, Fan S. George Castrioti Scanderbeg. New York, 1947. Print.

Prifti, Peter R. “Albania – The Arts.” Britannica Online Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 11 Jan. 2012. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/12472/Albania/276851/The-arts>.

Raèiunaitë-Vyèinienë, Daiva. “Manifestations of Drone in the Tradition of Lithuanian Polyphonic Singing.” The Second International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony(2005): 106-14. The International Research Center for Traditional Polyphony. Web. Dec. 2011. <http://www.polyphony.ge/index.php?m=623>.

Raèiunaitë-Vyèinienë, Daiva. “The Archaic Lithuanian Polyphonic Chant Sutartinė.” Lituanus52.2 (2006). Lituanus. Web. Dec. 2011. <http://www.lituanus.org/2006/06_2_03%20Vyciniene.htm#foots>.

Reinhard, Kurt. “On the Problem of Pre-Pentatonic Scales: Particularly the Third-Second Nucleus.” Journal of the International Folk Music Council10 (1958): 15-17. JSTOR. Web. Dec. 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/835966>.

Sokoli, Ramadan. Folklori Muzikor Shqiptar (morfologjia). Tiranë: Instituti I Folklorit, 1963. Print.

Tole, Vasil S. The Albanian Intangible Heritage in CD. Tirana: Tole, Vasil S., 2004. Print.

Десницкая, А В. “Палеобалканистика и албанский язык.” Славянское и балканское языкознание(1983): 5. Славянское и балканское языкознание (1975–2003). Web. 3 Oct. 2011. <http://www.inslav.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=323:-1989&catid=29:2010-03-24-13-39-59&Itemid=62>.

Славюнас, Зенон Ионович. Сутартинес, Многоголосные песни Литовского народв. Ленинград: Музыка, 1972. Print.

Чюрлионите, Ядвига Константиновна. Литовские народные песни. Вильнюс: Государственное издательство художественной литературы Литовской ССР, 1955. Print.

Чюрлионите, Ядвига Константиновна. Литовское народное песенное творчество. Москва: Музыка, 1966. Print.


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Published on January 31, 2015

My Top 10 Playlist of Contemporary Classical Music

contemporary music playlist

So there was this thing going around (yes, a thing) where people wrote up their 10 favourite post-war contemporary classical music pieces (just like it says in the title). This is where I hop (a month later) on the bandwagon and do the same thing. Here it is, in chronological order:

  1. Pierre Henry & Pierre Schaeffer – ‘Orphee 53’ | 1953
  2. Igor Stravisnky – ‘Epitaphium’ | 1959
  3. Morton Feldman – ‘Crippled Symmetry’ | 1983
  4. Horatio Radulescu – ‘Clepsydra’ | 1983
  5. Iannis Xenakis – ‘Thallein’ | 1984
  6. Beat Furrer – ‘Voicelessness. The Snow Has No Voice’ | 1986
  7. Bernard Parmegiani – ‘Rouge-Mort: Thanatos’ | 1987
  8. Johannes Maria-Staud – ‘Violent Incidents’ (Hommage à Bruce Nauman) | 2005/2006
  9. John Luther Adams – ‘Dark Waves’ | 2007
  10. Bernhard Gander – dirty angel | 2010

It’s funny that I entirely missed out the ‘main’ period of contemporary music – the 60’s, 70’s, (well and the 90’s, but there was nothing but Nirvana in the 90’s). Pierre Henry and Igor Stravinsky are the only composers who’s piece are featured here that wrote in the 50’s, all the other ones starting from Morton Feldman and ending with Bernhard Gander have pieces featured starting from the 80’s ending in 2010.

The playlist is based entirely on personal preferences and

Here are two playlist (one on Spotify and one on Youtube) that have most of the pieces in them, some pieces are excluded because they just were not on Spotify, Youtube, or both:

Published on January 20, 2015

Time and Space in Sound Installations

sound installation

A quote from LaBelle (2006, p. 162) accurately summarises the aim of this text: “Overlapping and at times drawing from musical culture, the practice of sound art pursues more active relations to spatial presentations, durational structures beyond the concert experience, and within more general public environments that often engage other media, inciting the auditory imagination.”

Time in sound installations: calendars instead of clocks

jem finer longplayer sound art

The duration of musical works can be counted in time units that clocks operate with – seconds, minutes, and hours at most. It is rare for musical works to extend this into time periods even larger than a few hours, although during the XX century there have been a growing number of examples, like the music of Morton Feldman, some of whose works last over 4 hours; during the World Expo in Osaka, Stockhausen’s compositions were played for 183 days, for five and a half hours each day, and before the 2nd World War. Piet Mondrian could be said to have foreseen this: “people could come and go freely without missing anything because the compositions would be repeated just like in movie theatres” (quoted in Kahn, 1999, p. 43). With the emergence of sound art we can clearly observe this change – with sound installations operating without interruption for days, weeks, and years. However, what can be said about most of these works is that they are usually based on repetition, if only they are not interactive. For the purposes of this text—and my practice—these types of works are of secondary interest, the primary being works that are unique at any given moment.

One of the first people to explicitly work with extended durations was La Monte Young, who specifically created works that were meant to be played for long periods of time—The Theatre of Eternal Music—an ensemble under the direction of Young that played from 1962 to 1965, and was the vehicle used by Young to perform many of his compositions.

The world of music composition, especially in the USA in the 1960’s has deep connections with spirituality, many composers were influenced and inspired by music and spirituality of the East (primarily India, China, Japan). The use of drones and extended durations is perhaps the most obvious result of this interaction – “The Theatre of Eternal Music delved fully into the acoustical universe of single sustained tones, compounding their deeply droning sound with extended duration, bringing each performer into a unified state” (LaBelle, 2006, p.71), also, about Young – “His music, in a sense, strives for the actualisation of the very perceptual tones, loud volumes, extended durations, harmonic frequencies, all encompass and overarching sonic commitment that seeks to make sound an experiential event beyond the human limits of time and space, exploiting the ear as a physiological device and the mind in its moment of perception of sound stimuli.”, and “Duration for Young is not a question of minutes and hours, but days and years. As Philip Glass proposes – “This music is not characterised by argument and development. It has disposed of traditional concepts that were closely linked to real time, clock-time…” (p. 73)

An interesting specificity of sound is noted by Kahn, (1999, p. 232) talking about Young’s Composition 1960 #7 and X for Henry Flynt, he says – “By subjecting the sounds completely to time, both pieces attempt to pull sounds out of time, to hold them still within time, so that the acoustical intricacies might be perceived”. Composition 1960 #7 is the last out of his text scores, after which he focused on playing microtones in the Theatre of Eternal Music project. This has in turn resulted into the Dream House – an ongoing installation in lower Manhattan. “The Dream House’s exceedingly long, ideally never-ending drones continue regardless of the presence or absence of listeners… Dispensing with the need for listeners, it posits sound as an organism with its own reason for being.” (Kim-Cohen, 2009, p. 137), “Dream Houses will allow music which, after a year, ten years, a hundred years or more of constant sound, would not only be a real living organism with a life and tradition all its own but one with a capacity to propel itself by its own momentum.” (Young, 1971).

There are a number of compositions that are meant to be performed over extended periods of time. One example is the Sound Box that was a project presented in the Swiss Pavilion at the Expo 2000. Its music was composed by Daniel Ott, he writes about this work in Ott, 2003 – “Music is a non-stop feature of the Sound Box, involving some three hundred fifty musicians from all around the world. All cultural regions of Switzerland are represented. Twelve musicians work in three-hour shifts from 9:30am to 9:30pm… Through the use of infinitely variable elements, the basic sound responds to the principle of variation that underlies the architecture of the Sound Box”. Also – “Daniel Ott wanted to find a method that would allow him to prolong the actual composing of the music over a long period of time – permitting frequent interruptions in order to manage the sounds and contact musicians to discuss this amazing project… The resulting Sound Box music consists of heterogeneous building blocks that can be reconfigured daily during the 153-day performance.” Daniel Ott’s composition consists of 153 sounds and 23 “eruptions” which appear alternately in a shifting pattern, based on a different schedule every day, all other parts are improvised by the visiting musicians. The Sound Box is an example of a work that is meant to be performed over a long period of time by people, and this involvement of people (performers) for playing such long works (with interruptions) puts this project alongside with the performances of the Theater of the Eternal Music in the Dream House.

The other type of forms that are used to create sounds of extended duration are sound installations. There are a range of sources used for the sounds in the installations, from natural and computer generated, mixed, etc. An example of the use of natural phenomena to structure the installation and generate sounds for it is Rodney Verry’s I heard YOUR FOOTSTEPS (1994), he explains his installation in Bandt (2001): “I view it as a kind of ‘qualitative clock’, relating to the ways we perceive the qualities of the world from moment to moment. The sun’s energy is translated into vibrating columns of air in slow dialogue with the shifting of light and shadows of the space.” This is also an example of sound installations working with calendar time – in this case, day cycles. Tide (or wave) organs are also a good example of calendar based installations (or sound sculptures). The tide organ in Morecambe does not explicitly work with time, but the time it sounds depends on the coming and going of the tide, which depends on moon cycles. The same can be said about the identical Wave Organ in San Francisco, or in fact any other tidal organ.

A recent example of a permanent installation working with purely natural phenomena is Jem Finer’s Score for a Hole in the Ground, described in Dewar (2011, p. 77) as “an indeterminate musical composition of unknown duration set in a permanent installation” and, “In the heart of a forest in Kent, water dripping into a deep underground chamber strikes both tuned percussion and a pool at its bottom, the sounds rising up through a giant horn, standing 7 m above the ground.” The fact that Dewar considers this work a composition that is set in a permanent installation questions what is a composition. In this case, the composer’s input is limited to providing and placing a set of tuned instruments for water drops to play on. There have been a number of indeterminate musical compositions before, but they have mostly used people as performers, leaving the composer as someone who commands other people. But this is a different topic on its own, which is beyond the limits of this text. Dewar compares the Score for a Hole in the Ground to Finer’s earlier work, (or composition, as he says) – the Longplayer, and does note that their differences are so, that while they both ‘engage with time over long durations’, the Longplayer relies on a computer program for its existence, contrary to the Score for a Hole in the Ground. Dewar attractively describes the work: “In the forest, among the trees, the horn’s shape resembles the trumpet of an old gramophone or a giant lily, oxidised autumnal orange brown. The upright pipe is indistinguishable, from a distance, from the trunks of the surrounding beech trees. The sounds too blend with the forest, until the ear discerns something out of place and the eye resolves the horn as the sonic source. Weather changes the music. In a torrential downpour it reaches a crescendo, while drought renders it silent, save for the effects of the breeze gently brushing the instruments as it eddies around the chamber. It becomes one with the climatic forces of the forest. The chaotic nature of dripping water gives rise to complex variations in the composition, ranging from near silence to intricate shifting patterns running in and out of phase.”. Mentioning the Longplayer bring us to the previously talked about category of works where computers are used for the organisation and production of sound in installations. “Jem Finer’s Longplayer project aimed to be a ‘global entity’. Started in January 2000, Longplayer is essentially a musical composition to run for 1,000 years without repetition, echoing Brian Eno’s ‘generative music’ concepts by “simultaneously playing 6 sections [of the composition] each at a slightly different position and each at a different pitch…” (LaBelle, 2006, p.296).

Les Gilbert’s Half Measured Hallelujahs, 1981, was performed at the Sculpture Triennial 1981 at LaTrobe University, Melbourne. It created a virtual environment, through the use of 24-hidden speakers and several audience triggered sensors. What is relevant to this review is that “the event was designed to last the average time it took a person to walk from the first sensor-eye on the walkway to the inside of the building through the automatic doors. Within its planned duration cycle, the units changed relationships. Six audio cassette tapes, six of which were used at any one time, created a field of intermittent sound.”

Arne Nordheim’s permanent installation, Gilde at NTNU Gløshaugen “creates and alteration of the public environment while fully operating within its given functionality. The work is essentially a 24-channel audio system mounted throughout the open hallways and atriums of the building, amplifying a database of composed sounds according to different live parameters, such as the amount of people in the building, or weather and light conditions outside. Through digital sensing and computerised systems, the installation generates a continual sonic atmosphere, blending with the existing soundscape and environment.” (LaBelle, 2010, p. 198).

LaBelle (2010, p. 198) coins the main attractiveness of ‘long music’ in the context of what he is writing about – generative and algorithmic music. Writing about Eno’s Music for the Airports and Nordheim’s Gilde, he says that these works “push the listener… away from listening to something and toward reverie, fantasy, and distraction, as a listening that remains open and prone to wandering.” and offers “momentary distraction while functioning within the found structures and parameters of the educational institute… this poetics of distraction seems to suggest alternative itineraries for inhabiting space in which feedbacking of self and surrounding becomes concrete.”

 

Space in sound installations: influence of architecture and space on creation and Perception

Sound of Hallgrímskirkja church

This section will explore how space and architecture influence the perception of a sound installation, and how they shape the experience of a sound installation. It is first important to define what is a sound installation in relation to space. I feel that LaBelle’s perhaps lengthy definition gives us at least a partial answer to this question: “To encounter sound installation, one spends time within space, immersed in a listening that brings one to space through an acoustical unfolding wedded to movement and duration… The activation of perception through sound may draw attention to space, its material presence, and any perceptual phenomena, and it does so by activating our memory of spatial experience, of the event-space happening there, for sound installation is distinct by offering up information that is simultaneous and yet durational, present and passing: I glimpse the given installation as a set of information that is there all at once and yet that only comes to the fore through my movements, through my listening to, my attending to its evolution, as embedded within and conversant with space.” (2006, p. 163-164).

Sterken (2007, p. 40) says that the relation between architecture and music occurs on two levels: the intellectual and the phenomenological. To back up the latter he also cites Xenakis’ view on architecture’s conditioning capacity, i.e. that the buildings have an influence on the mental and corporeal behavior of the visitor, just as spaces have an impact on the events they host. Here it is important to offer the distinction between space and architecture. Architecture shapes space, but space embodies a broader set of elements including architecture. But the distinction that Xenakis is making, is that architecture is something that influences humans, and space is something that influences events. This comes in line with the previous notion – architecture is something focused and has a direct influence on the visitor, while space is something diffused and intangible and its influence can only be traced on through more general things, i.e. events occurring in that space. This is particularly important for sound installations, because space can be partially shaped by an installation, while architecture influences the visitor with or without the installation in its own significant way. It could also be said that not only architecture and space shape experiences, but that humans interact (live, work, etc.) with architecture and space and in turn shape them. Jean-Paul Thibaud (quoted in LaBelle, 2010, p. 199) says “Each ambience involves a specific mood expressed in the material presence of things and embodied in the way of being of city dwellers. Thus, ambience is both subjective and objective: it involves the lived experience of people as well as the built environment of the place.”

The spaces used for sound installations can also be categorised in a similar fashion to the previous section: from natural and found spaces, to environments built for specific or at least partial purposes of making sounds. The main difference between the two is the cultural obligations that built environments force onto the audience. There is a dichotomy between natural, found, and public places, mostly outdoor places, that leave the listener free to approach works “on their own terms”, and built environments that usually force a set of rules and conventions on to the audience, and on to the way the audience perceives the work. LaBelle, (2006, p. 154) through explaining Max Neuhaus’ transition from being a percussionist to a sound artist coins this difference – “Rather than situate the musical moment within a concert hall, determined by conventions of the proscenium stage and directed by the musical argument, Neuhaus sought to reach for a more public realm in which the experience of sound might surprise reception.”. In the same place he also cites Neuhaus himself – “The impetus for my first sound installation was an interest in working with the public at large. Inserting the works into their daily domain in such a way that people could find them in their own time and on their own terms. Disguising them within their environments in such a way that people discovered them for themselves and took possession of them, led by their curiosity into listening”.

Bringing the concert hall built during the World Expo in Osaka for Stockhausen as an example, (in this case also an example of a built environment) LaBelle (2003, p. 24) states that Stockhausen’s architectural requirements for that concert hall “reveal a sensitivity toward the concert hall as a determining space for musical experience: how sounds are performed and heard within space.” We can see here an example of a space built specifically for inhabiting sounds, and also a heightened perception of the idea that there is a certain way that sounds are “performed and heard” within a specific space. At the same time, along with the expanded view of the concert hall comes the ideas of making sound works and installations more accessible to the open public – “Following Neuhaus, sound installation is founded upon the idea of making a sound work more public, or rather, making the experimental strand of musical practice susceptible to a different set of conditions and questions.” (LaBelle, 2006, p. 155).

Since the topics of this review are mostly derived from my artistic practice, it will also be relevant to focus on built environments, sacred buildings, specifically churches. The reason for this is that the freedom of natural environments usually bring us closer to soundscapes which allow for the wide array of sounds to exist, while sound installations tend to focus on specific elements of sound. Religious architecture has perhaps been the only location sound had a special place in for a long time in Europe. It also could be argued that European architecture has been a shaping force behind the development of European music and changes in context of music brought changes in music. “The music of the cathedral is unseen; it rises vapor-like to fill a large resonant space, restricting harmonic and melodic mobility to produce a hazy wash of sound blending it the mystique of Christianity’s invisible God… Wherever one moves in the cathedral, he is alway in the middle of the sound” (Schafer, 2001, p.60-61). Mavash (2007) speaks of the medieval cathedrals as an example of a multisensory spatial experience which provides a very powerful sense of spirituality through harmonic manipulation of our sensory experiences. Religious and sacred architecture provide a space especially fit for sensory experiences.

 

From theory to practice

Silophone sound installation

To further the aims of this text, I will use this last section to review a number of important pieces of sound art and sound installations that are relevant to the previous parts, and the broader topic of the text in general.

La Monte Young’s Dream House is an ongoing sound and light installation, permanently situated in Young’s loft. “Taking the chordal structure of The Well-Tuned Piano, Young installed tone generators in each of the rooms of the building. Each room presented one set of frequencies, or chordal environment, along with Zazeela’s light installation The Magenta Lights… By moving through the different rooms, a visitor would create the composition: spending time in one room, sleeping in another, avoiding others… Young emphasises the movements of the individual to generate spatiality.” (LaBelle, 2006, p. 73-74). The movements of people in space become a part of how the work sounds. This provides us with an absolutely different way of listening to music, primarily because of what experience the specific space provides and allows. Comparing the Dream House to Stockhausen’s World Expo concert hall, we can say that even though both spaces are meant to bring a heightened experience or awareness of sound, the primary difference is the unregulated nature of the Dream House, and the still codified logic of the concert hall. The Dream House is perhaps one of the most important works in sound installations considering its approach to space, time and the physicality of sound, that defined and shaped sound art for decades to come

Michael Brewster’s exhibition See Hear Now operates with “prepared audio works (consisting of synthesised sound) amplified in a specially constructed room, acoustically specified in material and dimension… His created room specifically prolonged sounds’ propagation and added to their reflection, thereby immersing a listener inside intensified zones of sound that created material presence through the phenomenon of standing waves.” (LaBelle, 2006, p. 169) This is an example of an installation that not only used a specifically constructed room for its existence, but also physically framed the room acting as not just as something being there, but as a part of a room, like walls, or a ceiling.

Maryanne Amacher created has created “expansive sound environments specifically drawing upon architectural space”. Her works revealed a “potential of working with architecture, not only as a spatial outline of air-space, but as structure”. In Amacher’s own words – “sound shapes interact with structural characteristics of the rooms before reaching the listener.” (LaBelle, 2006, p. 172) In her Music for Sound Joined Rooms she used “the architecture of the building — an entire house, or rooms and other features of its spaces — to create sound structures.”; “Defined by the architecture, set designs and the music, Locations/Scene for each Episode become the basis for staging the expressive DIMENSIONS of the music I compose BETWEEN places of thematic focus in the space. The intent is to create a range of MUSICAL INTERACTIONS between thematic places – a form of music matter, where ARCHITECTURE MAGNIFIES THE EXPRESSIVE DIMENSIONS OF MUSIC.”; “The extraordinary expressive effects which can result are produced NO OTHER WAY. They cannot be produced through music alone.” (Amacher, 1985). The “magnification of the expressive dimension of music” is perhaps the central point of this installation, this “magnification” is a focal point of most sound installations – music or sound without relation to space cannot have the powerful effect as it was designed to have. It is interesting to note that in Brewster’s See Hear Now it works the other way around – sound magnifies architecture.

Max Neuhaus’ Three to one was installed in 1992, and continues operating today as a permanent installation. It is located in a health insurance building and exists on three floors simultaneously. Listeners move around the floors and the space of each floor, partially creating the work. The first floor is described as “full-bodied, vibrant note”, the second as ““filled to the brim” with sound”, and on the third floor the first two converge “seeming to become a whole open landscape of a space. While lacking the narrative of Amacher’s Music for Sound Joined Rooms, it still offers the use of architecture, this time in the connection between the floors, and as the visitor climbs higher he is perhaps offered a Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis in a form of a sound installation.

In a number of experiments in sound spatialisation in the 1970’s, “utilising multiple loudspeakers… Leitner was able to create geometric patterns of sonic movements: circular motions of one sound oscillating against a larger elliptical movement of sound; lines of sound that move from point to point, directing the ear across the room, crisscrossing against a second line of movement; sounds beating across the floor in X formations, or up a wall and back down again.” (LaBelle, 2006, p. 176). This can be compared to Amacher’s and Neuhaus’ work mentioned in the previous paragraphs, or Janet Cardiff’s walks, with a difference that Leitner’s work invites the ear for a journey like most sound spatialisation works, while the mentioned works of Amacher and Cardiff require the movement of the whole body.

The Silophone is a “hybrid between a virtual network and a physical object”. It can be accessed in four ways, none of which include physical presence – either through “The Sonic Observatory”, a telephone exchange, a website, and a number of artists were asked to perform and compose for the Silophone instrument. This is an exceptionally interesting work considering its use of architecture as its main feature on one hand, and the impossibility of physically being in this place on the other. This installation is solely accessible through communications, and while the sound the space makes is of primary importance, we cannot see the inside of this space and appreciate its spatial qualities in its natural habitation.

Bandt’s A Garden for Percy’s Delight, 1997, “was a multi-channel flexible sound installation environment which changed in relation to itself and the listener over the twelve-week exhibition”, what is relevant is that “the continuous shifting counterpoint was programmed on computer and going from one suspended parabolic speaker to another in a complex design. “The six overhead parabolic speakers dispersed the sound from overhead, while the four hidden ground speakers reflected the sound off the ground to the surrounding brick walls of the courtyard”. (Bandt, 2001, p. 273)

Francisco López’s Buildings performed in the Judson Church in New York. It is acousmatic, meaning that the only sounding object are loudspeakers. It does not play for any exceptionally long duration, but it is interesting to note Lopez’s disregard for the place he performs in. His performance also includes turning down the lights and giving out blindfolds to the audience. Lopez is known for focusing only on sound and trying to avoid anything that he perceives as distracting from sound: Cox in (Kim-Cohen, 2009, p. 125) says “López… is critical of what he calls the “dissipative agents” of music, which is anything that distracts attention from the pure matter of sound: language, text, image, referentiality, musical form and structure, technique and process, instrumental virtuosity, etc.”. In this case of Buildings, the choice of place seems arbitrary and without regard to the fact that any place, imposes its own, and in the case of a church, very specific ambience. Once López has realised this, he tried to disconnect his music from a loaded site, by putting blindfolds on the audience.

 

Bringing it Together

Using the work of Brian Eno, Markus Popp, and Achim Wollscheid as an example of generative music, LaBelle (2006, p. 287) suggests their works (he mentions only Eno’s Generative Music I, and Popp’s Ovalprocess) as evidence for the “ultimate completion of sound’s journey from point of origin (as in the work of John Cage) to its relational proximity (in Minimalism) onward to performative voices (with Alvin Lucier and Vito Acconci) to sound installation (Max Neuhaus) and body-related events with architecture (Bernhard Leitner and Maryanne Amacher) and toward environmental and geographic, locational work (Hildegard Westerkamp and Bill Fontana), to arrive at network, interpersonal space and generative streams that locate sound in its actual generation and distribution rather than objectness and immediate experience… Like society itself, sound no longer explodes through its propagation, its performance, or its radiophonic broadcast, but implodes being everywhere at once. Sound no longer needs to appear here, as a particular event with specific locatable details, but rather it disappears in its own system of production that may in the end complete its journey, from the here and now to a virtual projection of future manifestations in which it is always already everywhere”

We have gone from the traditional setting of a concert hall, through a number of built and found spaces, to a non-existence of space through the location of sound in its generation and distribution, and for an overall conclusion it can be said that both time and space have experienced a considerable evolution, primarily through the medium of the sound installation. The change in duration of works has only become possible once the location of works changed from concert halls to a variety of other spaces. Even though music and sound have been, and are still considered art forms that exist in time, the shift on the spatial in music over the course of the last decades, has been having steadily growing – where something sounds is now at least as important as what sounds. With the introduction of terms like timespace (Voegelin, 2010, p. 126), signifying the unity between the two categories, it is now impossible to ignore the spatial aspect of sound and music, even of previous decades and centuries.

In regard to my own work, an extension of this text is necessary, one that will explore the technical possibilities of manifesting time and space through music technology, specifically algorithmic and generative systems, and sound spatialisation.

 

References

Amacher, Maryanne, 1985. Sound House, Artist Statement. http://libraries.cca.edu/capp/prop_r85d001.pdf Accessed on December 2012.

Augoyard, Jean-Francois and Torgue, Henry, 2008. Sonic experience: a guide to everyday sounds. Translated by Andrea McCartney and David Paquette. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Bandt, Ros, 2001. Sound Sculpture: Intersections in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Art Works. Sydney: Fine Art Publishing Pty Ltd.

Dewar, Andrew Raffo, 2011. Beyond Notation/Notation Beyond. Finer, Jem: Score for a Hole in the Ground. Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 21, 2011, p. 77

Dowell, Pat, 2011. Meditation and Modern Art Meet in Rothko Chapel. National Public Radio, March 1. http://www.npr.org/2011/03/01/134160717/meditation-and-modern-art-meet-in-rothko-chapel Accessed on November 2012.

Kahn, Douglas, 1999. Noise, water, meat: a history of sound in the arts. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press.

Kim-Cohen, Seth, 2009. In the blink of an Ear: Toward a non-cochlear Sonic Art. London: Continuum.

LaBelle, Brandon, 2003. Unstable Volumes. In: Grueneisen, P., 2003. Soundspace : architecture for sound and vision. Basel: Birkhauser.

LaBelle, Brandon, 2006. Background noise: Perspectives on sound art. New York; London: Continuum.

LaBelle, Brandon, 2010. Acoustic territories: sound culture and everyday life. New York; London: Continuum.

Mavash Kourosh, 2007. Site + Sound : Space. In: Muecke M.W and Zach M.S. eds., 2007. Resonance: Essays on the intersection of music and architecture. Ames, IA: Culicidae Architectural Press

Ott, Daniel, 2003. Sound Box Sound. In: Grueneisen, P., 2003. Soundspace: architecture for sound and vision. Basel: Birkhauser.

Ripley, Colin and Polo, Marco, et al., 2007. In the place of sound: architecture, music, acoustics. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.

Schafer R. Murray, 2001. Music and the Soundscape. In: Rothenberg D. and Ulvaeus M. eds., 2001. The book of music and nature: an anthology of sounds, words and thoughts. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. p.58-68.

Sterken Sven, 2007. Music as an Art of Space: Interactions between Music and Architecture in the Work of Iannis Xenakis, 2007. In: Muecke M.W and Zach M.S. eds., 2007. Resonance: Essays on the intersection of music and architecture. Ames, IA: Culicidae Architectural Press

Strouse, Jean, 2006. Perpetual Motion. The New Yorker, May 8, p. 37. http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2006-05-08#folio=036 Accessed on November 2012.

Voegelin, Salome, 2010. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. Continuum International Publishing Group.

Young, La Monte, 1971. Dream Music. Aspen Magazine, DATE

http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen9/dreamMusic.html Accesed on November 2012

Published on January 14, 2015