100 grand for 3 youngish composers

100 grand for 3 youngish composers

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norman lebrecht

February 19, 2020

The Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation is giving 35,000 Euros each to Samir Amarouch (France), Catherine Lamb (US, pictured) and Francesca Verunelli (Italy).

Comments

    • John Borstlap says:

      With all due respect, but this is not interesting at all. It is just very rudimentary sound art with zero musical substance, whereby extremely simple sound production is accompanied by all kinds of nonsensical information and instructions in the score which must give the impression of sophistication, but which are entirely meaningless and random anyway. This is, of course, to give the score the character of some high-tech cutting-edge thing, but the listening experience – which is the only experience that counts, the proof of the pudding – is extremely simplistic and primitive, some mood ambient sound wallpaper. (It makes me think of some type of abstract paintings in lounges of ‘modern’ international hotels, meant to give an update atmosphere but without causing irritation with the guests.) No musical talent necessary, just some practical knowledge of how music paper works, and a keen sense of 20C trendiness of the last century. It is very easy to produce these things.

    • Brettermeier says:

      meh

    • Ceasar says:

      It sounds like my refrigerator…

  • Anon says:

    From Catherine Lamb’s talk at Harvard:

    “We are transitioning into a new era of music. How we listen and how we perceive is different then it was one decade ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 500 years ago…

    In this new era, we need to divorce ourselves from habitual musical thinking and terminologies. Not that we can’t describe rhythm, melody, harmony as we have, but that we need to expand what these elemental musical terminologies really mean and function as. Standard harmonic theory simply does not apply anymore to the modern composer. It was helpful 100 years ago when looking towards a particular past, and then when serialists took that particular theory and inverted it and warped it, or how Ruth Crawford Seeger approached her own dissonant counterpoint. It has been helpful for songwriters, and a more complex variation of it for jazz musicians over the past 100 years, but now in our new era of the listener’s music, this simply does not apply anymore…

    harmonic thinking certainly still persists today (as we all know, because of our training), but it is the very thing that most modern composers hit a brick wall with when approaching harmonicity in their writing, due to its imprecise and narrow world vision …”

    http://www.sacredrealism.org/catlamb/writingsinterviews/Lamb_the_form_of_the_Spiral_Harvard_lecture2020.pdf

  • fflambeau says:

    I think this is small change for the von Siemens family.

    Siemens is a multibillion dollar enterprise.

    It’s kind of like Jeff Bezos (the world’s richest person) pledging (but not giving) $10 billion to combat climate change.

  • Jack Lunetti says:

    One by one.
    The sounds. The sound that move at a time
    stops. Starts again. Exceptions
    stops and starts again
    all but exceptions.
    Stop. Start. Starts.
    Contractions. Noise. Semblance of noise.
    Broken speech. One to one. At a time.
    Cracked tongue. Broken tongue.
    Swallows. Inhales. Stutter. Starts. Stops before
    starts.
    About to. Then stops. Exhale
    swallowed to a sudden arrest.
    Rest. Without. Can do without rests. Unseemly
    to rest before begun even. Probation of rest.
    Without them any.
    Stop start.
    Where no proper pauses were expected.
    But no longer.

    – Dan Reynolds, (date unknown)

  • Bartleby the Composner says:

    When older and at this point, culturally irrelevant composers rail against the dying of their light through demonizing types of music that they clearly dont understand as shown by their displays of ignorance of the very structural elements of, we, as the new adults in the room, turn to them and ask if their adult diaper needs changing. John is clearly one of these people and deserves all the compassion we give to our grandmother with alzheimer’s. Its ok John, you will be dead soon and your music will never be thought of again but that doesn’t mean we dont like you it just means that we don’t take you seriously as a musician any more…if we ever did.

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