Roland Kayn was a composer who pushed his music to the furthest extremes he could reach while doing his best to remove himself as completely as possible from the work. Kayn composed what he called “cybernetic music,” building elaborate electronics to generate systems that would respond in unplanned-for ways. He would build the basic system […]
Author Archives: David Menestres
Posted inInterview
Liquid Modernity
In his first book, Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 (University of California Press), Tim Rutherford-Johnson writes: “Searching for or describing unities in the present age, which is usually described as fragmentary, may be foolhardy. But as economic, political, and technological forces conspire to create a world that is more homogenous […]
Posted inInterview
Nonfictional Music
Jennie Gottschalk is a composer and scholar currently residing in Boston. Gottschalk holds degrees from The Boston Conservatory and Northwestern University. Her teachers have included Larry Bell, Yakov Gubanov, Jay Alan Yim, Augusta Read Thomas, and Aaron Cassidy. Gottschalk’s new book “Experimental Music Since 1970” was recently published by Bloomsbury. Over the course of a […]
Posted inInterview
Synthesis
You are as likely to hear electroacoustic composer Carl Stone’s works performed through an octophonic diffusion system in a fancy academic hall as you are to find him performing in a small club, set up on the requisite rickety noise table. A new three-LP set on the Unseen Worlds label, “Electronic Music of the Seventies […]
Posted inHistory
Scores on the Sidewalk
In late 1981 or early 1982, the composer and vocalist Julius Eastman was evicted from his apartment in New York City. City marshals placed his belongings on the sidewalk, including all of his scores, and Eastman walked away, leaving everything behind. After years of drifting in and out of homeless shelters and bumming money from […]