From
Germany:
West
Meets Rest by Thinking and
Acting Global
and Local
A
comparative look at bassist Peter Kowald and
percussionist Günter Sommer, two illustrious German
players who are also good friends and frequent bandmates,
one from former West and one from former East Germany.
Presented at the International
Society of Music Educators' 1998 conference in
Zimbabwe,
this paper looks at the different ways both found similar
paths as teachers, in conventional contexts, of the
unconventional music they play; it situates that look in
international discourse on music education, especially on
the nature of improvisation.
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Combination
of insider's look at Anthony Braxton's opera's New York
world premier, focusing on racial dynamics unique to the
production and pegging them to the New York opera scene,
with a close musical study of parts of the score. Pegs
the latter to current African-American scholarship
(Floyd, Gates).
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Combination
of insider's look at Anthony Braxton's opera's New York
world premier, focusing on racial dynamics unique to the
production and pegging them to the New York opera scene,
with a close musical study of parts of the score. Pegs
the latter to current African-American scholarship
(Floyd, Gates).
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Looks at
Anthony Braxton's "Tri-Metric" system of music-making,
pegging it to issues of Artificial Intelligence via
computers in music, including his own.
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Pondering the work
of ethno/musicological forbears for their leanings away
from traditional musicology and hard- and soft-scientific
(acoustics, anthropology) writing, and toward literary
techniques (metaphor, criticism, interdisciplinary
personal voice), I move into my own areas of creative
nonfiction as useful to my explorations of
European/German identity in jazz/free jazz/improvised
music. Extracted from longer work on the Berlin-based FMP
label.
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This paper
was provoked by my desire to explore some scholarship on
an area I have little interest in: "world music" as a
phenomenon of the global-capitalist music industry. I
compare the work of Veit Erlmann with George Lipsitz to
spark my own take on their subjects.
This lecture
is a talk I gave at the
University
of California/Santa Cruz.
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Born out of
a paper presented at a University
of Michigan/Ann Arbor conference on Music
Theory,
this expanded meditation travels deep and
wide...
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Three
Surveys of Untranslated German Scholarship on Jazz/Free
Jazz/New-and-Improvised Music
Jazz
in German Eyes
processes American and European jazz history articles
from Darmstadt Jazz-Institut publication That's Jazz:
The Sound of the Twentieth Century.
Free
Jazz in Western Eyes
compares German with French, English, and American
scholarship, criticism and journalism on the free-jazz
movement/new-and-improvised music scene.
German
Free Jazz in German Eyes
focuses on the German scholarship on the German history
and scene.
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surveys
the English-language literature on the issues of
improvisation and composition in new and improvised
music..
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overviews
and introduces five "elder statesman" of the music
(Albert Mangelsdorff, Günter Hampel, Joachim
Kühn, Vinko Globokar, and Ernst-Ludwig Petrovsky)
with peripheral/transitory links to FMP, who span
geopolitical as well as generational and stylistic
spectra, including the spectrum between improvisation and
composition.
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Published
in signal
to noise
(july/august
2000),
this piece on the pianist is a fun read informed by doses
of close, substantial scholarship.
Click
here
for the long, more academic version.
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The
flier for this presentation to Wesleyan University's
College of Social Sciences (CSS) read:
Wesleyan
alumnus Mike Heffley's 2000 Ph.D. dissertation explored
the free-jazz movement in Germany that emerged during the
time of the student protest movements of 1968, and
matured in the social history of the divided Germany and
into Reunification. He presents four musical examples
built overtly on Christian imagery and German history to
address the sociopolitical and cultural contexts couching
them.
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a
talk/performance given to Tim Eriksen's American Music
class of undergraduates at Dartmouth University.
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Presented
at Wesleyan University Symposium "Music in the 'Free'
World," on a panel with John Corbett and George Lewis,
February 2001.
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A
post-9/11 talk delivered at the 7. Darmstädter
Jazzforum "Jazz und Gesellschaft," Darmstadt, Germany,
September 2001.
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Anthony Braxton:
with Mike
Heffley
Copyright
© 2001
Published in signal
to noise (12/01) as "The Tri-Centric Transcripts", this
full transcript of
the interview is the real deal.
Click here, here, here and here for more of my scholarly work on Anthony Braxton's music;
and Books and Research
Papers to get to his own website's written work.
Click here to get to my recordings with Anthony Braxton, and/or of
his music...
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Presented
on panel with Eric Charry, Franya Berkman, and Michael
Veal: "Innovation, Upheaval, and Renewal: Exploring New
Directions in African American Music in the 1960s" at the
46th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in
Detroit, October 2001.
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