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Death of a Japanese pioneer, 80

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norman lebrecht

October 15, 2018

The Fluxus composer Takehisa Kosugi died on October 12.

After an experimental youth in New York, he became music director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

We don’t hear much of this any more:

Comments

Acoustictourist says:

October 15, 2018 at 12:37 pm

Was that a fax machine in amongst the cacophony?

John Borstlap says:

October 15, 2018 at 1:25 pm

“We don’t hear much of this any more” – indeed. But why? When this was first presented as ‘new music’, the attraction was that it was so totally different (to put it mildly) from any other notion of music whatsoever, so it stimulated the idea of modernity. But since such noises have become a quite normal background of modern industrialised society, its attractiveness as an ‘aesthetic idea’ has evaporized and the reality of its deplorable nature has remained.

Interestingly, such sonic art has now taken-on the character of a time capsule, like an object in a museum in an exhibition about exotic rituals of primitive tribes.