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Variations (Cage)
''Variations'' is a series of works by the American composer John Cage. A number of the pieces in the series are seminal examples of indeterminate music, others are happenings: performance pieces executed according to the score. The series ''Variations I'' (1958) The first piece in the series is dedicated to David Tudor and was a belated birthday present. The score consists of six transparent squares: one with 27 points of four different sizes, five with five lines each. The squares are to be combined in any way, with points representing sounds, and lines used as axes of various characteristics of these sounds: lowest frequency, simplest overtone structure, etc. Said characteristics are obtained by dropping perpendiculars from points and measuring these perpendiculars. The piece is to be performed by any number of performers on any kind and number of instruments. ''Variations II'' (1961) This work is intended "for any number of players and any sound producing means." The score co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous states border Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, with the semi-exclave of Alaska in the northwest and the archipelago of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. The United States asserts sovereignty over five Territories of the United States, major island territories and United States Minor Outlying Islands, various uninhabited islands in Oceania and the Caribbean. It is a megadiverse country, with the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, third-largest land area and List of countries and dependencies by population, third-largest population, exceeding 340 million. Its three Metropolitan statistical areas by population, largest metropolitan areas are New York metropolitan area, New York, Greater Los Angeles, Los Angel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Composer
A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and definition The term is descended from Latin, ''compōnō''; literally "one who puts together". The earliest use of the term in a musical context given by the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' is from Thomas Morley's 1597 ''A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music'', where he says "Some wil be good descanters ..and yet wil be but bad composers". "Composer" is a loose term that generally refers to any person who writes music. More specifically, it is often used to denote people who are composers by occupation, or those who work in the tradition of Western classical music. Writers of exclusively or primarily songs may be called composers, but since the 20th century the terms ' songwriter' or ' singer-songwriter' are more often used, p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives. Cage's teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various Eastern world, East and South Asia, South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of Aleatoric music, aleatoric or Indeterminism#Philosophy, chance-controlled music, which ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indeterminacy In Music
Indeterminacy is a composing approach in which some aspects of a musical work are left open to chance or to the interpreter's free choice. John Cage, a pioneer of indeterminacy, defined it as "the ability of a piece to be performed in substantially different ways". The earliest significant use of music indeterminacy features is found in many of the compositions of American composer Charles Ives in the early 20th century. Henry Cowell adopted Ives's ideas during the 1930s, in works allowing players to arrange the fragments of music in a number of different possible sequences. Beginning in the early 1950s, the term came to refer to the (mostly American) movement which grew up around Cage. This group included the other members of the New York School. In Europe, following the introduction of the expression " aleatory music" by Werner Meyer-Eppler, the French composer Pierre Boulez was largely responsible for popularizing the term. Definition Describing indeterminacy, composer John C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Happening
A happening is a performance, event, or situation art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow in 1959 to describe a range of art-related events. History Origins Allan Kaprow first coined the term "happening" in the spring of 1959 at an art picnic at George Segal's farm to describe the art pieces being performed. The first appearance in print about one was in Kaprow's famous "Legacy of Jackson Pollock" essay that was published in 1958 but primarily written in 1956. "Happening" also appeared in print in one issue of the Rutgers University undergraduate literary magazine, ''Anthologist''. The form was imitated and the term was adopted by artists across the U.S., Germany, and Japan. Happenings are difficult to describe, in part because each one is unique. One definition comes from Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort in ''The New Media Reader'', "The term 'happening' has been used to describe many performances and events, organized by Allan Kaprow and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sheet Music
Sheet music is a handwritten or printed form of musical notation that uses musical symbols to indicate the pitches, rhythms, or chords of a song or instrumental musical piece. Like its analogs – printed Book, books or Pamphlet, pamphlets in English, Arabic, or other languages – the medium of sheet music typically is paper (or, in earlier centuries, papyrus or parchment). However, access to musical notation since the 1980s has included the presentation of musical notation on computer screens and the development of scorewriter Computer program, computer programs that can notate a song or piece electronically, and, in some cases, "play back" the notated music using a synthesizer or virtual instrumentation, virtual instruments. The use of the term "sheet" is intended to differentiate written or printed forms of music from sound recordings (on vinyl record, compact cassette, cassette, Compact disc, CD), radio or Television broadcasting, TV broadcasts or recorded live perfor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Tudor
David Eugene Tudor (January 20, 1926 – August 13, 1996) was an American pianist and composer of experimental music. Life and career Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan Wolpe and became known as one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. He gave the first American performance of the '' Piano Sonata No. 2'' by Pierre Boulez in 1950, and a European tour in 1954 greatly enhanced his reputation. Karlheinz Stockhausen dedicated his ''Klavierstück VI'' (1955) to Tudor. Tudor also gave early performances of works by Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and La Monte Young. The composer with whom Tudor is particularly associated is John Cage; he gave the premiere of Cage's ''Music of Changes'', ''Concert For Piano and Orchestra'' and the notorious ''4' 33"''. Cage said that many of his pieces were written either specifically for Tudor to perform or with him in mind, once stating "what y ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Point (geometry)
In geometry, a point is an abstract idealization of an exact position, without size, in physical space, or its generalization to other kinds of mathematical spaces. As zero-dimensional objects, points are usually taken to be the fundamental indivisible elements comprising the space, of which one-dimensional curves, two-dimensional surfaces, and higher-dimensional objects consist. In classical Euclidean geometry, a point is a primitive notion, defined as "that which has no part". Points and other primitive notions are not defined in terms of other concepts, but only by certain formal properties, called axioms, that they must satisfy; for example, ''"there is exactly one straight line that passes through two distinct points"''. As physical diagrams, geometric figures are made with tools such as a compass, scriber, or pen, whose pointed tip can mark a small dot or prick a small hole representing a point, or can be drawn across a surface to represent a curve. A po ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cartesian Coordinate System
In geometry, a Cartesian coordinate system (, ) in a plane (geometry), plane is a coordinate system that specifies each point (geometry), point uniquely by a pair of real numbers called ''coordinates'', which are the positive and negative numbers, signed distances to the point from two fixed perpendicular oriented lines, called ''coordinate lines'', ''coordinate axes'' or just ''axes'' (plural of ''axis'') of the system. The point where the axes meet is called the ''Origin (mathematics), origin'' and has as coordinates. The axes direction (geometry), directions represent an orthogonal basis. The combination of origin and basis forms a coordinate frame called the Cartesian frame. Similarly, the position of any point in three-dimensional space can be specified by three ''Cartesian coordinates'', which are the signed distances from the point to three mutually perpendicular planes. More generally, Cartesian coordinates specify the point in an -dimensional Euclidean space for any di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perpendicular
In geometry, two geometric objects are perpendicular if they intersect at right angles, i.e. at an angle of 90 degrees or π/2 radians. The condition of perpendicularity may be represented graphically using the '' perpendicular symbol'', ⟂. Perpendicular intersections can happen between two lines (or two line segments), between a line and a plane, and between two planes. ''Perpendicular'' is also used as a noun: a perpendicular is a line which is perpendicular to a given line or plane. Perpendicularity is one particular instance of the more general mathematical concept of '' orthogonality''; perpendicularity is the orthogonality of classical geometric objects. Thus, in advanced mathematics, the word "perpendicular" is sometimes used to describe much more complicated geometric orthogonality conditions, such as that between a surface and its '' normal vector''. A line is said to be perpendicular to another line if the two lines intersect at a right angle. Explicitly, a fi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Music
Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all human societies. Definitions of music vary widely in substance and approach. While scholars agree that music is defined by a small number of elements of music, specific elements, there is no consensus as to what these necessary elements are. Music is often characterized as a highly versatile medium for expressing human creativity. Diverse activities are involved in the creation of music, and are often divided into categories of musical composition, composition, musical improvisation, improvisation, and performance. Music may be performed using a wide variety of musical instruments, including the human voice. It can also be composed, sequenced, or otherwise produced to be indirectly played mechanically or electronically, such as via a music box ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Musical Instrument
A musical instrument is a device created or adapted to make Music, musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be considered a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. A person who plays a musical instrument is known as an ''#Instrumentalist, instrumentalist''. The history of musical instruments dates to the beginnings of human culture. Early musical instruments may have been used for rituals, such as a horn (music), horn to signal success on the hunt, or a drum in a religious ceremony. Cultures eventually developed composition and performance of melody, melodies for entertainment. Musical instruments evolved in step with changing applications and technologies. The exact date and specific origin of the first device considered a musical instrument, is widely disputed. The oldest object identified by scholars as a musical instrument, is Divje Babe flute, a simple flute, dated back 50,000–60,000 years. Many scho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
