Experimental Music, Avant Music, New Age

Looking at Music

0 Comments Published June 8th, 2009 in Museum Music.

The Museum of Modern Art presents Looking at Music: Side 2, a survey of over 120 photographs, music videos, drawings, audio recordings, publications, Super 8 films, and ephemera that look at New York City from the early 1970s to the early 1980s when the city became a haven for young renegade artists who often doubled as musicians and poets. Art and music cross-fertilized with a vengeance following a stripped-down, hard-edged, anti-establishment ethos, with some artists plastering city walls with self-designed posters or spray painted monikers, while others commandeered abandoned buildings, turning vacant garages into makeshift theaters for Super 8 film screenings and raucous performances. Many artists found the experimental music scene more vital and conducive to their contrarian ideas than the handful of contemporary art galleries in the city. Artists in turn formed bands, performed in clubs and non-profit art galleries, and self-published their own records and zines while using public access cable channels as a venue for media experiments and cultural debates.

Looking at Music: Side 2 is organized by Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and succeeds Looking at Music (2008), an examination of the interaction between artists and musicians of the 1960s and early 1970s. Looking at Music: Side 2 is on view from June 10 to November 30, 2009, with an accompanying film series in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters to commence in September 2009.

The exhibition spans numerous forms of media by a diverse group of artists including: drawings by Patti Smith and photography by Dan Graham, Nan Goldin, and Jimmy DeSana; experimental video by James Nares; issues of influential zines and magazines including Search & Destroy, Interview, and Punk; posters designed by Adrian Piper and Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab); prints by Jenny Holzer, Betsey Johnson, and Bern Boyle; music videos with songs by Blondie and Suicide; record covers designed by Kim Gordon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Raymond Pettibon; music from Television, The Ramones, and Talking Heads; and live band footage from performances at Max’s Kansas City.

Barbara London states: “This exhibition shows how musicians and artists coalesced at a time when New York City, while financially struggling, seemed to incubate innovative ideas and facilitate the phenomenal success of a few, marking the transition into the next, more commercial decade of artists in New York City.”

Outside The Yoshiko and Akio Morita Gallery, Looking at Music: Side 2 is introduced through a title wall designed by the New York artist Laurie Anderson. Within the exhibition James Nares’s video, Game (1975), greets viewers at the exhibition’s entrance. Active in the 1970s on the Lower East Side as a Super 8 filmmaker and member of The Del-Byzanteens, Nares concocted a percussive, imaginary board game, performed with Seth Tillett, which he turned into the subject of his experimental film. Nares’s work is accompanied by a monitor displaying segments from Glenn O’Brien’s late 1970s Manhattan Public Access television show, TV Party. Equal parts party, talk show, video art, concert, and political action, TV Party took live television to a place it had never been before, including interviews with a number of the artists included in the exhibition. Also on display are drawings by Patti Smith and an audio station playing her song Hey Joe/Piss Factory (1974), considered to be the first punk rock record and funded by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Two tracks from The Ramones, widely cited as the first punk rock group, play at a nearby audio station, including “Beat on the Brat” and “Blitzkrieg Bop” (1976). In vitrines, poetry from the musician Richard Hell and a record from the German artist Martin Kippenberger’s short-lived musical project with Christine Hahn and Eric Mitchell are on display.

The exhibition next focuses on the work of New York based Colab, a non-profit artist collective distinguished for political engagement and the co-opting of public spaces, including an abandoned building in the heart of Times Square in 1980. In a set of video monitors, works from Colab artists are on display, including Coleen Fitzgibbon, a founding Colab member and instigator of the Times Square Show, which housed socially themed artworks in a derelict Times Square building. With a background in 1960s structuralist cinema, Fitzgibbon’s Super 8 film transferred to video, Time (1975), is a nonstop visual flow of headlines and text, all drawn from an issue of Time magazine, with the effect of an incessant restlessness of the filmic frame. On a nearby monitor, the music video Frankie Teardrop (1978), set to the New York-based band Suicide, is on display. This coarsely-textured film-video hybrid combines super-imposed projector manipulations and high-end video post-production. An insightful collaboration between videomaker Paul Dougherty and Art-Rite zine editors Walter Robinson and Edit DeAk, the work interprets a strident song by Suicide about a poverty-stricken Vietnam vet pushed to the edge. These works are surrounded by posters, audio, and a video by Judith Barry, Richard Kern, and the New York band Sonic Youth and the work of Beth and Scott B.

Looking at Music: Side 2 next examines the cross-influence of hip hop and art in New York City, including the video of Rapture (1981) by Blondie. Rapture, the first video to incorporate elements from rap on MTV, opens with choreographer William Barnes dancing in a white suit and top hat in New York’s Upper East Side. Barnes is joined by Debbie Harry and her bandmates–easy-going, cross-over artists who bridged uptown and downtown scenes. In the final sequence of the music video, the band dances down a street passing Fab 5 Freddy and graffiti artists Lee Quiñones and Jean-Michel Basquiat in action. The video is accompanied by photographs of Basquiat’s graffiti work from the 1970s, by Peter Moore and Stephanie Chernikowski, and a large-scale drawing by the artist, Untitled (1981).

The exhibition concludes with images from five rock n’ roll photographers. Adjacent to a large-scale photographic collage of the work of Bob Gruen, adapted from the 2007 installation Rock and Roll Teenager’s Bedroom and measuring 7.5′ x 22.5′, the exhibition includes vitrines with photographs of Suicide by Godlis and Sonic Youth by Stephanie Chernikowski, along with additional photographs by Roberta Bayley and Marcia Resnick. On a monitor beside these works is Bob Gruen’s New York Death Cult (Live at Max’s Kansas City) (1976), featuring grainy footage from famed music club Max’s Kansas City, which captures the raw, immersive spirit of up-and-coming musicians of that era such as Patti Smith.

How Do You Improvise?

0 Comments Published June 5th, 2009 in Improvisation.

You need to know the following items to improvise and compose in a right and nice way: first you have to know all major and minor scalesand relative keys and all chords in every keys. Then you must play all chord inversionsand the building melody techniques. You have to practice so much so you can play right melodic lines with swing and without thinking about scales, rules, keys…

Phrasing is the following step. You must learn to begin and finish melodic phrases from every point of easure. Ear training, transcribing, music harmony, transposing, voicing, harmonization are other important and fundamental techniques to learn jazz improvisation and composing. These techniques can give you the skill for express the music you have inside.

Learning jazz improvisation is not simple. The theory and harmonic concepts you have to learn are few and easy to understand but the fundamental concept is just one: to learn improvisation you have to play much and practice for a longtime!

I used to compare improvisation with language. Improvisation is a language, you can express ideas, concepts and emotions and sometimes much deeper than language. So, as well as you have to study and practice a lot to learn English or French or Italian so you have to do the same with music improvisation.
You do not need to understand difficult concepts but without doubts you must be patient. Here in this site I offer free resources to learn this art but be patient if my English is not perfect.

Using Improvisation As A Form Of Prayer

0 Comments Published May 27th, 2009 in Healing Music.

Beginning in silence, holding only an instrument, listening within, observing a point for departure into the inner world of sudden creative expression, tapping the well to draw out a first sound in a musical exploration, that sound which then will be observed faithfully, and which then move with a life of it’s own into the next, and the next, growing naturally along an undetermined path, to be noticed as music becomes…

We follow this movement, listening creates a connection as we observe ourselves responding, and allowing the flow of motion, which becomes melody, rhythm, and harmony that reveals itself at the moment of creation, in the act of doing, listening and responding, allowing the inner workings of the Soul to be made manifest. Drawing new images, from the subconscious. Where do the images come from? Emotion and Sound-Vibrating Life and sustaining force… Who are we, but the vessel of transmission, the intermediary physician of this living sound, which shapes itself into a music, which becomes from our mediation. And then, what is the Source of this movement?

Improvisation is a part of life. It is a time of crossing. Crossing the threshold of known and unknown. It is truly the instantaneous momentary points of departure based on memoirs of experience and the void of the unknown. Whether we are listening for and through our inner voice, for the words we need, or the directions to do, or whether we are so tuned that our allowance of the given activity transcends beyond conscious direction, to psychic automatism, sudden acumen, or emotional abandon, we find the “flow” and observe the “direction”. We are challenged to accelerate, withdraw, or proceed beyond our own creative expectations, to discover that which is given to us, that we give over to, that we channel to new levels, and observe without self-judgment. We don’t know exactly where or how we will manage. When we can’t know a given outcome, but must respond, then we improvise and therefore experience. When we are living in the moment, we are improvising our life.

I would like to invite you to consider the nature of a very natural form of music, which is called “Free Improvised Music.” You may find it interesting to realize that this music is very akin to prayer. It begins with a point of departure, in which no one is certain what will happen, just as our lives begin each and every day. We wake up and proceed with faith that the walk, we are about to embark upon, will take us on the path to higher consciousness and service to a better world. Even on ordinary days, there is always a miracle, waiting to be realized. Sometimes they are small positive outcomes to mundane situations, but they are only real if they are noticed and felt. It can be as simple as a moment of sharing, or feeling the wonder of changing seasons, or noticing sentiments. Or the act of slowing down enough to notice that you are growing older, and that autumn is once again upon us, with it’s smells and sounds, it’s clear blue days…to be enjoyed. Never mind the “gotta’s” (gotta do this and gotta do that), but in noticing the feeling of the air at the point of the intake of your breathin

This submissive awareness is a form of prayer. Prayer is a time of introspection. It is the time when we search our heart for feelings, for needs, for communication with the Spirit, however we define it. We sit in silence and listen deeply. If we are fervent, we come away feeling a renewed connection with our world of Spirit, a gentle knowing, and even a subtle change in our heart.

Music, as the emotional transformation of Sound, has the power to move us to this point of connection. Just the act of simply listening and remaining aware and open to it’s message, comprehending it’s movement, in melody, harmony, and vibration can give us the same inspiration as drinking in the colors of the sunset upon the clouds while feeling a gentle breeze upon our skin and so we Silently listen…to the Spirit in music, to the awesome Sounds of our environment, and marvel at the Sound of Life all around us.

As a form of music, Free Improvisation is an art form. It is the art of taking the first sound uttered, and riding that sound through, while noticing a musical landscape that is forming, as we are attentive to its creation. It is the act of allowing the creation to manifest through our willingness to participate, whether as music maker, or as listener, by following the process. It is an opportunity for that which arrives from our subconscious to show us what is real and imaginary. It challenges a new kind of space. It does not just represent linear time from beginning to end, but it is manifesting real space with great depth, between the beginning and the end. It is a time of expansive listening, to both the music that is being received, but also to the subconscious thoughts and feelings that come up during that process of listening… It is the willingness to give over to another frame of reference. Of being guided, of being an instrument of guidance, and allowing the creative force to speak through us. It is not about a finished product, so much as it is about the process. The process of actively improvising music is a letting go of the standard passing of time, and receiving an expanded awareness of energy, manifested in sound, movement, and perception.

I invite you to participate, as improvisatory music is as natural and spontaneous as the cry of a baby. Begin with your subconscious mind, your ears, & your own voice. Just notice your first Sound, and allow its continuation. Connect with it, as the Sound continues to grow and explore it’s own territory. Take note of the feeling of it. See it as a touching in with the Soul, with the Spirit of the Universe, with the Creator of all Creation, in harmony with the great Unknown, and with others like yourself, who have given a moment of time to vibrate in the pool of frequencies that make up the Universal Movement which is known as Life. As you deepen in your musical practice, draw in your awareness and watch as you begin to improvise and respond, magnifying the musical moment into a metaphor for the events of the world.

By La Donna Smith

Viola Da Gamba

0 Comments Published April 4th, 2009 in Instruments.

The viola da gamba is an old instrument that is today making a comback. Check out this information on the instrument. What is a Viola da Gamba will give you some good insights into the history of the instrument. Further information on the Viola da Gamba can be found in this in depth article. Viola da Gamba Society of America The viola da gamba is slowly being introduced into modern music. This had led to the development of new instruments such as the Ruby Gamba which is a modern viola da gamba from the Netherlands Another interesting instrument is the Ergo electric viola da gamba built in the USA. If you are interested in buying a viola da gambait is usually best to shop online as stores that currently carry them are few and far between.

If you are interested in the viola da gamba, check out the movie Tous Les Matins Du Monde. It is a great French movie about the lives of two important players.

Between Smooth Jazz, World Fusion and New Age Music

0 Comments Published January 2nd, 2009 in New Age Music.

Scheherazade is both the name of the narrator of the legendary age-old tales “One-Thousand-and-One Arabian Nights” as well as the title of composer and instrumentalist Al Conti’s latest album which quickly hit #1 on the international New Age Reporter airplay charts.

Scheherazade (pronounced sheh-hair-uh-zahd) is Conti’s third album and contains ten original world-fusion tunes that musically tell the storyteller’s story. The famous tales originated throughout Persia, Arabia and India more than 1, 100 years ago, and Conti gives the music a Middle Eastern ambiance utilizing the sounds of exotic instruments (hurdy gurdy, udu, sitar, tablas and tribal drums), but making the music appealing to modern audiences by also incorporating piano, violin, cello and acoustic guitar. Read more jazz news…

Brighter Children Study Music

0 Comments Published November 5th, 2008 in New Age Music.

Harvard researchers Gottfried Schlaug and Ellen Winner say that their findings apply not only to tests of auditory discrimination and finger dexterity, but also to tests measuring verbal ability and visual pattern completion.

During the study published online in PLoS ONE, the researchers compared 41 eight- to eleven-year-olds who had studied either piano or a string instrument for a minimum of three years to 18 children who had no instrumental training.

Children in both groups spent 30-40 minutes per week in general music classes at school, but those in the instrumental group also received private lessons learning an instrument and spent additional time practicing at home.

The researchers observed that the young musicians scored significantly higher than those in the control group on two skills closely related to their music training—auditory discrimination and finger dexterity.

The musicians were also found to score higher in two skills that appeared unrelated to music—verbal ability (as measured by a vocabulary IQ test) and visual pattern completion (as measured by the Raven’s Progressive Matrices).

The researchers further said that the longer and more intensely the child had studied his or her instrument, the better he or she scored on the tests.

Based on their observations, the researchers came to the conclusion that though their study shed light on the question of whether connections between music and other, unrelated skills did exist.

They said that further studies were needed to examine the causal relationships between instrumental music training, practice intensity, and cognitive enhancements.

Shimla charm weaves Praveen Sharma?s new album - myHimachal

0 Comments Published August 26th, 2008 in New Age Music.

Shimla charm weaves Praveen Sharma?s new album
myHimachal, India - 17 hours ago
*How your journey into the music world did begin? Honestly, I was involved with music at a very young age but it wasn?t until I saw the hip hop group Run …

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