As part of Make Music New York, six percussionist performed Persephassa, by Iannis Xenakis, on boats in Central Park Lake. It was an interesting interpretation of a rarely performed piece. The piece is rarely played, in part because of the unusual spacing of the ensemble. The six percussionists must sit in a hexagonal [...]

Patrick Liddell has created an interesting new twist on Alvin Lucier’s sublimely minimal composition, I am Sitting in a Room. In the original piece, Lucier fed the same spoken text back into a microphone over and over again until the sound of the room overcame the original input. In this new version, the [...]

On February 23rd, 1924, Lejaren Hiller was born in New York City. Hiller would become recognized as one of the pioneers of algorithmic composition. In 1957 he wrote the first major computer assisted composition. The Illiac Suite was composed using University of Illinois’ Illiac computer.

Actual work on this problem was started [...]

A new piece on Arts Electric attempts to answer that question.

Shortly after Xenakis settled into his work as a civil engineer with Le Corbusier, he began his music career by looking for someone with whom he could study. After being turned down by Nadia Boulanger, Arthur Honegger, and Darius Milhaud, he followed the advice [...]

Les Paul passed away on Thursday. He was 94. Musically, he was more involved with popular entertainment than with the kind of music that we write about on this blog. But he invented an instrument that, in many respects, defined twentieth century musical innovation: the solid-body electric guitar.

Beyond defining the sound of [...]

In the spring of 1981, during a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage sat down to discuss their work and artistic process. As frequent collaborators, Cage and Cunningham pioneered a new framework of performance. Their novel approach allowed for mediums to exist independently, or rather [...]

Merce Cunningham passed away on Sunday, July 26th. Cunningham was known as a choreographer and dancer, but in this article, I want to review his work with composers of electroacoustic music. He collaborated extensively with John Cage, and also worked on a number of early movement-music interfaces. His ideas had a direct [...]

In this interview, Alex Ross talks about his 2007 book The Rest is Noise. The book treads familiar territory: 20th Century Music. Still, it is one of the few books that tackles the subject at a layperson’s level. His book is one of very few that attempt to make 20th [...]