hillmancurtis : Lawrence Weiner

Some wonderful moments from 2008

1. Michael Pisaro's nachtstimmung (2008) performed by Object Collection as part of the Experimental Music series at the Ontological Theater in New York.

2. Seeing the Lawrence Weiner retrospective, AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE, on both coasts at the Whitney Museum (NYC) and MOCA (LA).

3. Sam Sfirri performing Radu Malfatti's nonostante II (2000) for solo piano in Charleston, South Carolina as part of Silent Music: 4'33'' and Beyond.

4. Performing Taku Sugimoto's two timbers (2008) at Listen/Space in New York.

5. "Machine Gun" by Portishead

6. Masafumi Ezaki, Othello/3 Minutes [Slub Music]

Silent Music
4'33'' and beyond

maltedmilk.org/433

"These are the points:

• Creating music that refers to the "world" with its (acoustic) conditions - nevertheless, these are caused by the inside, that means by social mechanisms, or by being forced upon people by another culture or power; from the outside to the inside;
  
• Composing music that is not only referring to an obsolete reality but - at least subliminally - to people, their feelings and their health;
  
• Composing music that refers to and deals with existing problems in society instead of neglecting, covering or even idealizing them;
  
• Composing music that shows social gashes and intensifies problems in society, even referring to them in a toxic way;
  
• Composing music that strengthens resistance and sharpens the emotions and ways of thinking instead of creating illusions of harmony and happiness;
  
• Composing music that refers to its own specific qualities and that offers food for the mind and soul in a multilayered (which does not mean complicated) way. Music should expand cognitive and emotional perception instead of reducing the reception of music to a level of animal-like reactions to superficial sentimentalities;
  
• Composers who do not capitulate at the sight of existing problems, but deal with diseases by transferring them into their work. Composers who provoke, shock and cause irritations in order to destroy social crusts and to show perspectives that lead to a free and broadened perception of social phenomena in society;
  
• Composers who develop clear positions and show alternative worlds to a daily routine - creating systems that refer to a change of existing conditions in an allegorical way;
  
• And composers who try to do these things with a certain verve, enthusiasm, fantasy, and serenity in order to open positive rooms, "alternative rooms and skies" (Luigi Nono); And
  
• An audience that is willing to open its minds and to be curious;
  
• An audience that replies to provocations and disturbances with its own engagement and thoughts;
  
• Listeners who learn to decipher musical contexts and to integrate these auditory experiences in their ways of thinking as a part of cognitive and emotional knowledge. And, as a consequence: listeners who increasingly react to acoustic environmental pollution - as caused by the worldwide tendency to background music, by noises directly or by music creating dull feelings - in allergic ways;
  
• An audience that is basically able to enjoy unsolved phenomena, and listeners who formulate questions without expecting definite answers. As a result, we have music characterized by specific places and situations and at least dealing with material that embodies everyday experience as well as its historical conditions and its meanings for the future;
  
• Composers who consider questionable phenomena as an important, even most decisive principle and who try to create a basis for opportunities to sharpen the senses. Questions - when answered - should at least cast new questions.
  
• An audience that demands these points and expects new music to refer to the past from a present point of view. The past tried the same in its times and as a result it developed out of the same principles."
  

- Gerhard Stäbler

Lawrence Weiner interviewed by Dazed Digital at Lisson Gallery, 2008

Kyle Gann, In Dispraise of Efficiency: Feldman

Six thoughts (for Kieran Daly)

1. Music is located in time; it occupies time. However, music is not simply a matter of duration. Duration means measured time. Sensation of time, on the contrary, refers to a particular awareness of presence. It involves a heightening of the senses and perhaps an ecstatic change of state.

2. Silence (in my work) is a direct - not symbolic or imaginary - encounter with reality. It is not necessarily calm and peaceful. I am not aspiring to a pretentious pseudo-mysticism. The silence may very well be confrontational and horrifying.

3. A network of dialectical relationships exists within my work: of sound and silence, of change and reiteration, of a subjective mental space and a physical world, of the maternal and paternal, of what is heard and what is thought.

4. My work is opposed to a capitalist culture that values both nostalgic humanism and the virtual, symbolic or imaginary experience.

5. I am not particularly concerned with new musical materials, new musical technology, new instruments and new sounds. I am, however, interested in new contexts and in finding new purposes for old materials.

6. My work is expressive but carries no message. It is expressive of that which can be expressed in no other way than in music. The work is universal in its address and yet the experience of it is subjective. Furthermore, the idea of a "public" is not its goal but simply one of its conditions.

What I am looking for, it's not really the expression through gesture, words, mimics, but expression through rhythm and a combination of images, through their position, their relation and their amount. Before anything else, the purpose of an image must be the exchange. But for that exchange to be possible, it is necessary that these images have something in common, that they participate together in a sort of union. That's why I try to give to my characters a sort of linkage, and ask my actors (all my actors) to speak in a certain way, to behave in a certain way, which is always the same one.

- Robert Bresson, from Michel Estève: Robert Bresson

About ten years ago, somebody asked John Cage, "Well Mr. Cage, aren't you troubled by all the suffering in the world?" And he said, "No I am not. There is exactly the right amount of suffering in the world." When I first heard it, I was quite revolted and disgusted by that statement, but in the ten years since I've come to agree with it totally: that to protest against the suffering in this world is an incredible insult to the victims of this world. Their suffering is exactly what they have received because of the conditions which are imposed upon them. To protest against suffering is to degrade suffering, without an understanding of why that suffering was made necessary. This is why I think that the Hans Haacke piece, which is a description of the trustees of the Guggenheim Museum, is to show nothing but the badges of their triumph. We know we are ruled. The question is not whether we are ruled or not. It's how we are ruled. And believe me, we are ruled not by the crimes of the people who rule us, but by their legal practices. [...] What we have to do is stop protesting and start understanding, because we can never overthrow the rulers who rule us unless we understand how they rule us.

- Carl Andre, statement from "Perimeters of Protest" Panel (1975)

Into Great Silence
a film by Philip Gröning

Six Favorite Recordings from 2007

Volume 3
Dogstar Orchestra


b-boim series [b-boim]
Radu Malfatti


Septet [IMJ]
Takefumi Naoshima, Hirozumi Takeda, Utah Kawasaki, Mitsuteru Takeuchi, Toshihiro Koike, Takahiro Kawaguchi & Yasuo Totsuka


The Room [Erstwhile]
Keith Rowe


Malignitat [Hibari Music]
Taku Unami


not BGM and so on [(h)earrings]
Mitsuhiro Yoshimura & Taku Sugimoto