|
James Tenney
James Tenney (August 10, 1934 – August 24, 2006) was an American composer and music theorist. He made significant early musical contributions to plunderphonics, sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, process music, spectral music, microtonal music, and tuning systems including extended just intonation. His theoretical writings variously concern musical form, texture, timbre, consonance and dissonance, and harmonic perception. Biography James Tenney was born in Silver City, New Mexico, and grew up in Arizona and Colorado. He attended the University of Denver, the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College (B.A., 1958) and the University of Illinois (M.A., 1961). He studied piano with Eduard Steuermann and composition with Chou Wen-chung, Lionel Nowak, Paul Boepple, Henry Brant, Carl Ruggles, Kenneth Gaburo, John Cage, Harry Partch, and Edgard Varèse. He also studied acoustics, information theory and tape music composition under Lejaren Hiller. In 1961, Te ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Of Denver
The University of Denver (DU) is a private research university in Denver, Colorado, United States. Founded in 1864, it has an enrollment of approximately 5,700 undergraduate students and 7,200 graduate students. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". The main campus is a designated arboretum and is located five miles (8 km) south of downtown Denver. History In March 1864, John Evans, former governor of the Colorado Territory, appointee of President Abraham Lincoln, founded the Colorado Seminary in the newly created (1858) city of Denver, which was then a mining camp. Evans, governor and superintendent of Indian affairs of the Colorado Territory, lost his government position as a result of the November 1864 Sand Creek massacre (which was carried out by Colonel John Chivington, later a member of the Colorado Seminary's Trustees). At its founding the seminary was non-sectarian and operated by the Methodist Episcopal Chur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lejaren Hiller
Lejaren Arthur Hiller Jr. (February 23, 1924, New York City – January 26, 1994, Buffalo, New York)Lejaren Hiller (1924–1994) © 1994 by Peter Gena.Kozinn, Allan (February 1, 199 NYTimes.com; accessed July 1, 2017. was an American . Career In 1957 he collaborated with Leonard Isaacson ...[...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Information Theory
Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification (science), quantification, Data storage, storage, and telecommunications, communication of information. The field was established and formalized by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, though early contributions were made in the 1920s through the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley. It is at the intersection of electronic engineering, mathematics, statistics, computer science, Neuroscience, neurobiology, physics, and electrical engineering. A key measure in information theory is information entropy, entropy. Entropy quantifies the amount of uncertainty involved in the value of a random variable or the outcome of a random process. For example, identifying the outcome of a Fair coin, fair coin flip (which has two equally likely outcomes) provides less information (lower entropy, less uncertainty) than identifying the outcome from a roll of a dice, die (which has six equally likely outcomes). Some other important measu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edgard Varèse
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse (; also spelled Edgar; December 22, 1883 – November 6, 1965) was a French and American composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States. Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm; he coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "Sound mass, sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called Noise in music, noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?" Although his complete surviving works only last about three hours, he has been recognized as an influence by several major composers of the late 20th century. Varèse saw potential in using electron ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harry Partch
Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales, alongside Lou Harrison. He built his own instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described the method behind his theory and practice in his book '' Genesis of a Music'' (1947). Partch composed with scales dividing the octave into 43 unequal tones derived from the natural harmonic series; these scales allowed for more tones of smaller intervals than in standard Western tuning, which uses twelve equal intervals to the octave. To play his music, Partch built many unique instruments, with such names as the Chromelodeon, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl. Partch described his music as "corporeal" (emphasizing its physical/viscera ... [...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] |
Kenneth Gaburo
Kenneth Louis Gaburo (July 5, 1926 – January 26, 1993) was an American composer. Life Gaburo was born in Somerville, New Jersey. He served as a professor of music at the University of Illinois, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Iowa. His notable students include Louise Spizizen, James Tenney, Betty Ann Wong, and Allen Strange. He is renowned as a teacher, pioneer of electronics in music, jazz pianist, writer, ecologist, publisher, and proponent of compositional linguistics. In 1968, he joined the faculty at the new San Diego campus of the University of California where in 1972 a Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled him to start NMCE IV, this time with an actor, a virtuoso speaker, a mime, a gymnast, and a sound-movement artist. Until his resignation from UCSD in 1975 he produced a large number of integrated theatrical works, such as the collection ''Lingua and Privacy''. In 1975, Gaburo founded Lingua Press, which produces scores, books, records, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Ruggles
Carl Ruggles (born Charles Sprague Ruggles; March 11, 1876 – October 24, 1971) was an American composer, painter and teacher. His pieces employed "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by fellow composer and musicologist Charles Seeger to describe Ruggles' music. His method of atonal counterpoint was based on a non- serial technique of avoiding repeating a pitch class until a generally fixed number of eight pitch classes intervened. He is considered a founder of the ultramodernist movement of American composers that included Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford Seeger, among others. He had no formal musical education, yet was an extreme perfectionist—writing music at a painstakingly slow rate and leaving behind a very small output. Famous for his prickly personality, Ruggles was nonetheless close friends with Cowell, Seeger, Edgard Varèse, Charles Ives, and the painter Thomas Hart Benton. His students include the experimental composers James Tenney and Merton Brown. Condu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Brant
Henry Dreyfuss Brant (September 15, 1913 – April 26, 2008) was a Canadian-born American composer. An expert orchestrator with a flair for experimentation, many of Brant's works featured spatialization techniques. Biography Brant was born in Montreal, to American parents (his father was a violinist), in 1913. Something of a child prodigy, he began composing at the age of eight, and studied first at the McGill Conservatorium (1926–29) and then in New York City (1929–34). He played violin, flute, tin whistle, piano, organ, and percussion at a professional level and was fluent with the playing techniques for all of the standard orchestral instruments. As a 19-year-old, Brant was the youngest composer included in Henry Cowell's landmark book from 1933, ''American Composers on American Music''; and Cowell realized that Brant had already demonstrated an early identification with the American experimental musical tradition. He was represented in Cowell's anthology by an essay ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chou Wen-chung
Chou Wen-chung (; July 28, 1923 – October 25, 2019) was a Chinese American composer of contemporary classical music. He emigrated in 1946 to the United States and received his music training at the New England Conservatory and Columbia University. Chou is credited by Nicolas Slonimsky as one of the first Chinese composers who attempted to translate authentic East Asian melo-rhythms into the terms of modern Western music. Life Early years in China Chou was born in Yantai (Chefoo), Shandong. He grew up in China and developed an early love for music. ("Sights and Sounds" is an essay by Chou on early influences on his music.) Qin music, in particular, has proved fertile ground for his future exploration. Chou described his early explorations of musical instruments: While in Qingdao, I first discovered the meaning of music in life when I heard our household help enjoying their free time by playing instruments, singing, and drinking. I also became fascinated with harmonium ped ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eduard Steuermann
Eduard Steuermann (June 18, 1892, Sambor, Austria-Hungary – November 11, 1964, New York City) was an Austrian-born American pianist and composer. Steuermann studied piano with Vilém Kurz at the Lemberg Conservatory and Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin, and studied composition with Engelbert Humperdinck and Arnold Schoenberg. He played the piano part in the first performance of Schoenberg's '' Pierrot Lunaire'' and premiered his Piano Concerto. He continued his association with Schoenberg as a pianist for the composer's Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna, and made an arrangement for piano trio of Schoenberg's '' Verklärte Nacht''. He performed in the radio premiere of Schoenberg's "Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte" with the New York Philharmonic under Artur Rodziński on November 26, 1944. In 1952, he was awarded the Schoenberg Medal by the International Society for Contemporary Music. He taught at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Darmstadt. Steu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
