Tag: composers

Pierre Henry, French composer
Sound

Sampling of Found Sound – Composer Pierre Henry

youtu.be/Zsb1w-3iFa8

The Art Of Sounds is a 2007 documentary on French electronic music pioneer Pierre Henry (1927 – 2017). Henry, along with his colleague Pierre Schaeffer, creating a form they dubbed musique concrète – an approach to electronic music based on using recorded sampling (also known as ‘found-object’) as source material.

Pauline oliveros, Postcard Theatre
Sound

Pauline Oliveros and her Beautiful Canopies of Sound

youtu.be/pOxupW8b7GE

Pauline Oliveros was a vital creator of new music, a renowned electronic art music innovator and composer, an accordionist, the founder of deep listening and other experimental practices, a genius inventor of sound-making software, and a fearless champion on issues of gender, race, ability, and sexual orientation. Following is an essay on her “Sonic Meditations.”

Iannis Xenakis
Sound, Urban Land

Iannis Xenakis and the Notion of a Cosmic Utopia

youtu.be/yztoaNakKok

Iannis Xenakis, the Greek-French experimental composer and protege designer for the famous architect Le Corbusier, advanced theories of the vertical “Cosmic” city as the only sustainable way forward. Here, he wrote this essay in 1966, decrying decentralization (read: suburban sprawl) in favor of building up, up, up…5 million inhabitants to be housed in a single megastructure, a hyperbolic paraboloid of more than 3,000 meters high and 50 meters wide.

Fela Kuti, Afrobeat
Advocates, Sound

Fela Kuti, Revolutionary Insurrectionist, Talismanic Afrobeat Pioneer

Fela Kuti, Nigerian music legend, political insurrectionist and provocateur against the corporate and missionary sell-out of African wisdom and religion, ending up in jail and tortured…and loved by the African people. Here, Jamaican-born, Africa-based writer Lindsay Barrett puts us on Fela’s life path, his wild and unstructured Afrobeat sound, the commune, the wives, and the push against the Nigerian military dictatorship.