Smorzando. Chopin on the MP3 player
(2017)
author(s): Michel Roth
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
My article focuses on the phenomenon of the ephemeral in music in general. I would like to stay with piano music for a while, where the rapid fading away of tone is normal, and a central component for the regulation of this process, the damper, is called il smorzatore in Italian. The Préludes Op. 28 by Frédéric Chopin will serve as one example; I will later move on to a piano LP by the Swiss artist Dieter Roth and will end with an orchestral work by the young German composer Hannes Seidl.
Writing the Ephemeral. John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing as a Landmark in Media History
(2017)
author(s): Simon Aeberhard
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing is one of his early, legendarily forbidding speeches first held in 1950. The score of the lecture can be understood as a reaction to one of the most momentous cuts in twentieth century’s media history. Cage’s lecture overtly responds to the establishment of the electromagnetic recording, storing and distributing of acoustic material after World War II by reflecting on these technical developments. The text, however, also accurately and subtly reacts to the profound destabilization of the relationship between literacy and orality triggered by these inventions by applying new methods of writing.
Seen as such, the Lecture on Nothing can be connected to Cage’s electronic music on audiotape, Williams Mix for example, and his elaboration of 4’33”, which forms the basis of his “silent pieces.” What unifies these three contemporaneous, but essentially different, works is their thought-provoking semantic emptiness. This article argues that these works are best understood as an artist’s quest for an adequate semiotic means of writing an aural event after electroacoustic media have become widely accessible.
CCFT
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Johan Sandborg, Duncan Higgins, Bente Irminger, Linda H. Lien, andy lock, Ana Souto Galvan, Susan Brind, Shauna McMullan, Yiorgos Hadjichristou, Jim Harold, DÁNIEL PÉTER BIRÓ
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
As we move towards the first quarter of the third millennium, the impermanent and shifting influence of globalisation, economic division, migratory encounters, social media, historic narrative and tourism is having a major impact in our understanding of the making, belonging and occupying of place. It is widely documented that these conditions are contributing to a growing sense of displacement and alienation in what constitutes as place making, occupying, and belonging.
CCFT is asking how interdisciplinary artistic research practices contribute and share new critical understandings to aid this evolving understanding of place making, belonging and occupying?