Bob Gilmore

On Claude Vivier's 'Lonely Child'

This article is the first published extended analysis in English of any of the works of the French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier (1948-83). It is also the first article that Gilmore has published as a result of his extensive research conducted in preparation for writing Vivier’s biography. The latter is a much larger research project which is still about a year away from completion. Research for both this article and the book was supported by a British Academy Small Travel Grant in 2003. Despite his death at the age of 34, Vivier is increasingly acknowledged to be the leading Canadian composer of his generation. His work has so far received little scholarly study. This article was an attempt to explore in detail the main technical innovation in his later music, the use of “l’addition des frequences” as a means of generating new types of spectral harmony. This technique had hitherto never been discussed in detail in published sources, and Gilmore’s article attempts to illuminate the similarities and differences between Vivier’s compositional techniques and those of the so-called “spectral music” that arose in Paris in the 1970s. The biography on which he is currently working will be the first on Vivier in any language, and has been made possible by access granted to Vivier’s papers by Madame Therese Desjardins, his heir. As a result of his work on Vivier, Gilmore was asked to curate a concert of his works (and was invited to write the programme booklet) for the Vivier portrait concert at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam in June 2005.

SPECTRAL TECHNIQUES IN HORATIU RADULESCU'S SECOND PIANO SONATA

This article offers an analysis of the Second Piano Sonata ‘ being and non-being create each other ’, op. 82 (1990–91) by Horatiu Radulescu (1942–2008), the first work in which Radulescu applied the spectral techniques he had developed in his music since the late 1960s to that most apparently unpromising of instrumental media for this type of approach: the solo, equal-tempered piano. And it has a quite specific aim: to analyse Radulescus sonata in a descriptive language as close as possible to that used by the composer himself.

“Wild Ocean”: an interview with Horatiu Radulescu

This text is a much shortened transcription of an interview by the author with the composer Horatiu Radulescu, recorded in Freiburg, Germany, in 1996. The text preserves the unique flavour of Radulescu’s spoken English in an attempt to convey something of the multi-lingual nature of his thought. A secondary text has been added, made up mostly from statements by Radulescu himself and by various performers, musicologists and critics who have written about his music, to provide supplementary material illuminating further the issues that arise in the interview. The discussion centres around Radulescu’s development of the “spectral technique of composition” in the late 1960s and its application in his music.

The climate since Harry Partch

This article examines the legacy of ideas left by the American composer, theorist and instrument builder Harry Partch (1901–1974). Partch’s theoretical ideas about pure tunings and microtonal scales are examined, as is his application of them in his own compositional practice. The article then explores the impact of Partch’s work on composers in the United States – in particular Lou Harrison, Ben Johnston and James Tenney – and the very different impact of his work in Europe, looking at such figures as György Ligeti and Manfred Stahnke. The paper ends with the author’s personal evaluation of Partch’s importance in twentieth-century music and beyond.

EDITORIAL: THE GROUND BENEATH OUR FEET

One of the less commonly remarked consequences of increasing human longevity is that there are more very old composers on our streets than ever before. And while it may be some time before anyone surpasses, or even equals, the achievement of the late Elliott Carter – a major composer producing substantial work past his hundredth birthday – it is no longer unusual for a composer still to be productive in their ninth, or even tenth, decade. TEMPO 272 celebrates the achievement of two soon-to-be nonagenarians, Pierre Boulez and Ben Johnston, composers who, although at either ends of the fame scale, have been at pains not to leave new music as they found it. If Boulez, as Paul Griffiths suggests, had already painted his masterpiece by the age of 30, Marc Sabat shows that Johnston’s characteristic work had by that age not yet begun: his career has been a slow burn in contrast to the brilliant firecracker that was the young Boulez. Ninety years on, the worlds into which the two men were born no longer exist. Not only have their home towns changed almost beyond recognition – the small-town world of Montbrison in the Loire, in Boulez’s case; or Macon, the ’twenties transportation capital of middle Georgia, in Johnston’s – but, more importantly, so too have their whole musical and artistic worlds. Over such long lifetimes both men have seen not just a revolution but multiple revolutions, the ground shifting under their feet and then shifting again. That their music has endured, and is better known today than ever, is a cause for celebration. Many younger composers have appointed one or other (perhaps occasionally both) to the inner tribunal of inspirational figures they carry in their minds, where they act as an artistic, even a moral, conscience. TEMPO 272 also takes a fresh look at the problematic place of creative activity in academia, in the form of our thought-provoking lead article by composer John Croft. According to one politically pervasive stream of thought now widespread in the UK, the ‘problem’ is solved; we may have thought that composers putting notes on staves, or editing soundfiles, were being creative artists (read: ungovernable anarchists with no place in universities), but what they were really doing all along was research! On this hot topic, Croft’s text provides abundant food for thought. As, on a related subject, does Michael Hooper’s examination of the sorts of creative confusion that yield new knowledge, here as applied to the domain of performance with, as centrepiece, a work for mandolin and tape by Michael Finnissy. In this issue we also celebrate the merely 80-year-old Peter Dickinson, composer, pianist, scholar, teacher and long-time TEMPO contributor, and profile the pianist Nicolas Hodges, tireless champion of the contemporary piano. And we examine a new crop of books, CDs, and first performances. As always, we introduce several voices new to the journal, to help steady us as the ground continues to shift beneath our feet. TEMPO 69 (272) 3

James Tenney and the Poetics of Homage

One of the recurrent themes of James Tenneys highly diverse musical output is an engagement with the work of other composers. From QUIET FAN for ERIK SATIE of 1970 through Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow in 1974, all the way to ’Scend for Scelsi in 1996 and Song’n’Dance for Harry Partch in 1999, Tenneys compositions bear dedications to a wide range of composers whose work he admired. Besides those already mentioned, we find Ives, Varèse, Cowell, Ruggles, Crawford, Wolpe, Cage, Xenakis, Feldman and many others. This practice manifests a desire on Tenneys part consciously to link his work to tradition: not merely the American experimental tradition, of which his own work forms so significant a part, but to aspects of twentieth-century European music as well. A given piece by Tenney rarely sounds much like the music of the composer invoked in its title; rather, this article argues that Tenneys work embodies an ecology of ideas, where techniques and inventions of other composers are rationalised, restated in different terms and sometimes playfully juxtaposed with ideas of others. Tenney saw himself partly in the role of curator of other peoples ideas; and his work as a whole proposes a particular genealogy of twentieth-century music. This article discusses the nature of Tenneys dedicatory works and explores the possibility that his obsessive need to invoke other composers in the dedications of his works, while clearly on one level an affirmation—of heritage, identity and shared musical vision—nonetheless conceals a profound anxiety about the whole nature and purpose of musical composition in the second half of the twentieth century.