Notes Archives » edition — a festival for other music.

Det var mycket tråkigt att läsa Johannes Cornells recension av Anthony Braxtons konsert i Eric Ericssonhallen i söndagens DN (här). Inte för att han inte tyckte om musiken, utan för att han motiverade sin oförmåga att engagera sig i den med samma utslitna, okunniga och sist och syvendes rasistiska argumentation som kritiker använts av i årtionden för att avfärda Braxtons musik. Uppenbarligen har Cornell inte lagt någon möda på att bekanta sig med Braxtons kompositionsmetoder eller teoretiska skrifter – trots att de är enkelt tillgängliga via Braxtons Tri-Centricstiftelses webbsajt. Det räcker med att ta en snabb titt på dessa texter för att det ska stå fullständigt klart att Braxton aldrig varit, och inte kan reduceras till, en fri improvisationsmusiker som lånat den ”europeiska konstmusikens pretentioner.” Såna påstående underblåser det fortgående utraderandet av svarta kompositörer från konstmusikens historia, och förnekar existensen av en bredare svart intellektuell tradition, trots de bidrag som getts av till exempel the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM).

Recensionen var en obehaglig påminnelse om en av grundanledningarna varför jag ursprungligen startade denna festival – för att göra motstånd mot den dominerande berättelsen om vad som låter sig höras, och vilken slags musik som räknas. Braxton, liksom de musiker som framträder med honom, har ägnat sitt liv åt föra musiken framåt. Är det för mycket begärt att förvänta sig ett uns av möda och självkritik av musikbevakningen på en rikstäckande tidning som DN?

John Chantler
Konstnärlig Ledäre,
Edition Festival for Other Music

It was disappointing to read Johannes Cornell’s review in Sunday’s DN of the Anthony Braxton Concert at Eric Ericssonhallen — not so much because he didn’t like the music, but because he justified his inability to engage with it using the same tired, ignorant and fundamentally racist tropes that critics have been deploying in relation to Braxton’s music for decades. It was clear that Cornell had made little to no effort to familiarise himself with Braxton’s compositional practices and theoretical writings — despite them being readily available via Braxton’s Tri-Centric Foundation website. Even a cursory glance would make it crystal clear that Braxton has never simply borrowed ‘the pretensions of european art music’. To suggest so continues an ongoing erasure of black composers from art music history and denies a broader black intellectual tradition, ignoring the contributions made, for example, by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM).

It was a stark reminder of why I started the festival in the first place — to counter the dominant narrative of what gets heard here and what counts. Braxton, and the musicians performing with him have dedicated their lives to the advancement of music — is it too much to expect a little effort and some self-awareness from those with the power of a national newspaper platform?

Cara Tolmie & Stine Janvin: In Conversation

Cara Tolmie and Stine Janvin have been commissioned to create a new collaborative performance for the Fourth Edition Festival in Stockholm, Borealis Festival for Experimental Music, Bergen and Äänen Lumo in Helsinki.

This conversation took place in November 2018 in Oslo during their initial meeting to begin work on the project.

CARA TOLMIE There is something that I inherently seem to rebel against the minute I enter the realm of “extended vocal technique”. Even that term I really grapple with, I don’t totally understand what it means or how the formal education of this “technique” works.

STINE JANVIN What is the un-extended technique?

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Christine Ödlund & Leif Elggren: In Conversation

An English translation of the following conversation between Swedish artists Christine Ödlund and Leif Elggren is included in Notes on Other Music. Both artists performed as part of the SuperDeluxe Edition in Tokyo in November 2018. This conversation took place in Stockholm in December 2018.

Christine Ödlund: Senaste gången som jag träffade dig var i Tokyo, på SuperDeluxe. Då uppträdde du tillsammans med två andra personer. Ni spelade på kontaktmikrofoner.

Leif Elggren: Ja, det gjorde vi.

CÖ: Performancen avslutades med att du ställde dig upp och började med att – i alla fall som jag tolkar det – snyta ut något ur ditt huvud, eller snarare ur dina lungor. Har jag tolkat dig rätt? Var det något som skulle komma fram där, som skulle komma ut?

LE: Jag tror det. Du tänker på gesten när något förs ur munnen?

CÖ: Ja, ur näsan eller ur munnen. Som man gör när man nyser eller kräks när man inte ska kräkas.

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Annea Lockwood — Sound Streams

by Louise Gray

It was while attending summer schools in Darmstadt during the early 1960s that Annea Lockwood realised that there was more to sound than its orderly manipulation into the composed form of music alone, into what Edgard Varèse would have termed “organised sound”. At the time, she was a young postgraduate student, newly arrived in Europe from New Zealand for studies in composition and piano at the Royal College of Music in London. She was an enthusiastic participant at Darmstadt, then very much the world’s focal point for the pure, electronic music associated with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez. She remembers the excitement of Darmstadt, its generous teachers (one of them was the German-Dutch composer Gottfried Michael Koenig, with whom she later studied under), the heady atmosphere of it. “I was really drawn to, excited by, electronic music,” she recalled in an interview we did in 2016, “because now, finally, other than writing for one’s own instrument, I was having the experience of feeling that sound was in my own hands and malleable. [It was] just there for me to work with, which was thrilling.”¹

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