Håkon Stene

 

This is not a drum

 

Norges Musikkhøgskole

Norwegian Academy of Music

 Viva Voce: 10. oktober 2014

 

Veiledere: Professor Ole Lützow-Holm, Gøteborgs universitet og professor Steven Schick, UCSD

 

Bedømmelseskomite:

Professor Åsa Unander-Scharin, Luleå tekniske universitet

Professor Andreas Boettger, University of Music, Drama and Media, Hanover

Professor Arnold Marinissen, Amsterdam School of Arts

This is Not a Drum: Towards a Post-Instrumental Practice thematizes the role of the performer in contemporary music. - One of the oldest crafts in musical arts, percussion playing, especially within the Western contemporary music tradition, has developed rapidly and been subject to significant change over the last 60 years. The growing presence of percussion as an autonomous source in classical music was primarily linked to avant-garde movements flourishing in the first decades of the twentieth century. Along with extra-musical objects such as household implements, and electronic devices such as radios, tape recorders, and turntables, percussion emerged as a fresh medium for expansion and alteration of Western music’s building blocks, perfectly suiting an escalating quest, characteristic of the period, to break new musical ground and move beyond the romantic tradition and mainstream conformism. This movement also fostered a new breed of performers. Emerging first as multi-tasking percussionists within the classical orchestra, these performers developed in the works of European and American experimentalists of the 1950s and 1960s into co-creators of a new genre. In the process, they developed skills that were unparalleled in classical music: using all imaginable sound-producing objects as instruments. My project takes as its starting point the notion that percussionists have so many instruments that, in effect, they have none to with which the can genuinely identify.

 

NMH | Håkon Stene: This is Not a Drum

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