Experimental music
Encyclopedia
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage
(Grant 2003, 174). More loosely, the term "experimental" is used in conjunction with genre names to describe music
within specific genres
that pushes against their boundaries or definitions, or else whose approach is a hybrid of disparate styles, or incorporates unorthodox, new, distinctly unique ingredients (Anon. [n.d.]a). Similarly, it has sometimes been used to describe "transethnic" music: the mixture of recognizable music genres. A quite distinct sense was current in the late 1950s to describe computer-controlled composition, and the term at that time also was sometimes used for electronic music
and musique concrète
. "Experimental music" has also been used in music journalism as a general term of disapprobation for music departing from traditional norms.
, organized the First International Decade of Experimental Music between 8 and 18 June 1953. This appears to have been an attempt by Schaeffer to reverse the assimilation of musique concrète into the German elektronische Musik, and instead tried to subsume musique concrète, elektronische Musik, tape music, and world music under the rubric "musique experimentale" (Palombini 1993, 18). Publication of Schaeffer's manifesto (Schaeffer 1957) was delayed by four years, by which time Schaeffer was favoring the term "recherche musicale" (music research), though he never wholly abandoned "musique expérimentale" (Palombini 1993a, 19; Palombini 1993b, 557).
John Cage was also using the term as early as 1955. According to Cage's definition, "an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen" (Cage 1961, 39), and he was specifically interested in completed works that performed an unpredictable action (Mauceri 1997, 197). In Germany, the publication of Cage's article was anticipated by several months in a lecture delivered by Wolfgang Edward Rebner at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse on 13 August 1954, titled “Amerikanische Experimentalmusik". Rebner's lecture extended the concept back in time to include Charles Ives
, Edgard Varèse
, and Henry Cowell
, as well as Cage, due to their focus on sound as such rather than compositional method (Rebner 1997).
Michael Nyman
starts from Cage's definition (Nyman 1974, 1), and develops the term "experimental" also to describe the work of other American composers (Christian Wolff
, Earle Brown
, Meredith Monk
, Malcolm Goldstein
, Morton Feldman
, Terry Riley
, La Monte Young
, Philip Glass
, John Cale
, Steve Reich
, etc.), as well as composers such as Gavin Bryars
, Toshi Ichiyanagi
, Cornelius Cardew
, John Tilbury
, Frederic Rzewski
, and Keith Rowe
(Nyman 1974, 78–81, 93–115). Nyman opposes experimental music to the European avant-garde
of the time (Boulez
, Kagel
, Xenakis
, Birtwistle
, Berio
, Stockhausen
, and Bussotti
), for whom "The identity of a composition is of paramount importance" (Nyman 1974, 2 and 9). The word "experimental" in the former cases "is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success or failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown" (Cage 1961, 13).
David Cope
also distinguishes between experimental and avant garde, describing experimental music as that "which represents a refusal to accept the status quo
" (Cope, 1997, 222). David Nicholls, too, makes this distinction, saying that "...very generally, avant-garde music can be viewed as occupying an extreme position within the tradition, while experimental music lies outside it" (Nicholls 1998, 318).
Warren Burt
cautions that, as "a combination of leading-edge techniques and a certain exploratory attitude", experimental music requires a broad and inclusive definition, "a series of ands, if you will", encompassing such areas as "Cageian influences and work with low technology and improvisation and sound poetry and linguistics and new instrument building and multimedia and music theatre and work with high technology and community music, among others, when these activities are done with the aim of finding those musics 'we don't like, yet,' [citing Herbert Brün
] in a 'problem-seeking environment' [citing Chris Mann
]” (Burt 1991, 5).
In a recent dissertation, Benjamin Piekut argues that this "consensus view of experimentalism" is based on an a priori "grouping", rather than asking the question "How have these composers been collected together in the first place, that they can now be the subject of a description?" That is, "for the most part, experimental music studies describes [sic] a category without really explaining it" (Piekut 2008, 2–5). He finds laudable exceptions in the work of David Nicholls and, especially, Amy Beal (Piekut 2008, 5), and concludes from their work that "The fundamental ontological
shift that marks experimentalism as an achievement is that from representationalism to performativity
", so that "an explanation of experimentalism that already assumes the category it purports to explain is an exercise in metaphysics
, not ontology" (Piekut 2008, 7).
Leonard B. Meyer
, on the other hand, includes under "experimental music" composers rejected by Nyman, such as Berio
, Boulez
, and Stockhausen
, as well as the techniques of "total serialism
" (Meyer 1994, 106–107 and 266), holding that "there is no single, or even pre-eminent, experimental music, but rather a plethora of different methods and kinds" (Meyer 1994, 237).
In the late 1950s, Lejaren Hiller and L. M. Isaacson used the term in connection with computer-controlled composition, in the scientific sense of "experiment" (Hiller and Isaacson 1959): making predictions for new compositions based on established musical technique (Mauceri 1997, 194–95). The term "experimental music" was used contemporaneously for electronic music
, particularly in the early musique concrète
work of Schaeffer
and Henry
in France (Vignal 2003, 298). There is a considerable overlap between Downtown music
and what is more generally called experimental music, especially as that term was defined at length by composer Michael Nyman
in his book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (1974, second edition 1999).
and Ruth Crawford Seeger
,[Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles
, and John Becker
(Nicholls 1990).
, Earle Brown
, Christian Wolff
, Morton Feldman
, David Tudor
, Related: Merce Cunningham
as well as Ivor Darreg
worked with other tuning scales based on the physical laws for harmonic music. For this music they both developed a group of experimental musical instruments. La Monte Young is known for using this technique when he began working on his minimal drone pieces which consisted of layers of sounds in different pitches. See also spectral music
.
(French
; literally, "concrete music"), is a form of electroacoustic music
that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sonorities derived from musical instruments or voice
s, nor to elements traditionally thought of as 'musical' (melody
, harmony
, rhythm
, metre
and so on). The theoretical underpinnings of the aesthetic were developed by Pierre Schaeffer
, beginning in the late 1940s.
Artists to be added: Nam June Paik
, Charlotte Moorman
, Wolf Vostell
, Dick Higgins
,
Fluxus was an artistic movement started in the 1960s, characterized by an increased theatricality and the use of mixed media
. Another known musical aspect appearing in the Fluxus movement was the use of primal scream
at performances, derived from the primal therapy
. Yoko Ono
used this technique of expression (Bateman [n.d.]).
, Chou Wen-chung
, Steve Reich
, Kevin Volans
, Martin Scherzinger, Michael Blake, and Rüdiger Meyer (Blake 1999; Jaffe 1983; Lubet1999).
Free improvisation
or free music
is improvised music
without any rules beyond the taste or inclination of the musician(s) involved; in many cases the musicians make an active effort to avoid overt references to recognizable musical genres. The term is somewhat paradoxical, since it can be considered both as a technique (employed by any musician who wishes to disregard rigid genres and forms) and as a recognizable genre in its own right.
appeared in the Steve Allen Show where he did an experimental music piece called Playing Music on a Bicycle, a performance very similar to John Cage's Water Walk of 1960 in the I've Got a Secret show. Zappa later became mainly famous for his rock music. At the end of the 1960s rock groups like The Beach Boys
and The Beatles
began adding musical influences outside the common field of popular music of those days: non-western music and musical instruments as well as ideas, concepts and techniques copied for traditional classical music as well as modern classical music. They experimented with all kinds of new recording techniques like reverse tape recording. Besides those mainstream artists, a group of underground artists like The Velvet Underground
, Pink Floyd
, Frank Zappa, White Noise
and The Residents
began incorporating the experimental musical aspects of Varese, La Monte Young, Cage and the minimal music as well as adding new extended techniques like audio feedback
, heavy uses and multiple combining of stomp boxes and other electronic sound effects. The Residents
started in the seventies as an idiosyncratic musical group mixing all kinds of artistic genres like pop music
, electronic music
, experimental music with movies, comic book
s and performance art
(Ankeny [n.d.]).
Other pop musicians who made experimental music are Captain Beefheart
, Brian Eno
, John Zorn
, Pere Ubu
, Faust
, Can
, Robert Wyatt
, DNA
, Robert Fripp
, Diamanda Galás
, Cabaret Voltaire
, Boyd Rice
, etc. Throbbing Gristle
experimented with electronic noise and cut-up technique
s with short pieces of tape with recorded sound on it. Fred Frith
as well as Keith Rowe
began exploring new experimental possibilities with prepared guitar
s. In the seventies Chris Cutler
began experimenting with an eclectic drum kit with all kinds of added sound possibilities acoustic as well as electric. The self-titled debut album of This Heat
was recorded between February 1976 and September 1978, and characterized by heavy use of tape manipulation
and looping, combined with more traditional performance, to create dense, eerie, electronic soundscapes.
Rhys Chatham
and Glenn Branca
composed multi guitar compositions in the late 1970s. Chatham worked for some time with LaMonte Young and afterwards mixed the experimental musical ideas with punk rock in his piece Guitar Trio. Lydia Lunch
started incorporating spoken word
with punk rock
and Mars
explored new sliding guitar techniques. Arto Lindsay
neglected to use any kind of musical practise or theory to develop an idiosyncratic atonal playing technique. DNA
and James Chance
are other famous no wave artists. Change later on moved more up to Free improvisation
. The No Wave movement was closely related to transgressive art
and, just like Fluxus, often mixed performance art
with music (Masters 2007). It is alternatively seen, however, as an avant-garde offshoot of 1970s punk, and a genre related to experimental rock
(Anon. [n.d.]b).
started in 1983 releasing a magazine with added cassette tapes focusing broadly on experimental music from the past as well as from the present. Lee Ranaldo
and Thurston Moore
experimented heavily with altered tuning
s and playing with a third bridge
technique with screwdrivers jammed between the strings and the neck. Following the krautrock
movement of the 1970s, German musicians started to experiment with unusual song structures and instruments. Einsturzende Neubauten
created their own instruments made out of scrap metal and building tools.
Also Aphex Twin as well as Jim O'Rourke
experimented with circuit bending
to create new experimental music. Closely related to the circuit bending is the musical genre EAI of which Merzbow
is the most famous artist. He worked with series of radios all positioned differently for receiving different FM and AM frequencies and making new experimental musical compositions with all these derived sound signals.
High profile artists like Björk
and Beck
framed their solo work with extensive collaborations, building up platforms for avant-garde
and experimental music reach popular knowledge.
built a series of self-designeds among which a microtonal 13-TET guitar (Hasse 2007) to create new sounds, and have released their fourth or fifth CD, but the first on the Table of the Elements’ Radium imprint
label (Crumsho 2008). Micachu
also makes other instruments herself, but is reluctant to describe her work as anything but "pop music, … maybe experimental pop" (Parkin 2008).
Zippy Kid released many experimental albums on his net label mARS since 2005.
-
A term coined by Werner Meyer-Eppler
and used by Boulez and other composers of the avant-garde
(in Europe) to refer to a strictly limited form of indeterminacy, also called "controlled chance". As this distinction was misunderstood, the term is often (and somewhat inaccurately) used interchangeably with, or in place of, "indeterminacy".
Graphic notation
-
Music which is written in the form of diagrams or drawings rather than using “conventional” notation (with staves, clefs, notes, etc).
Indeterminate music
-
Related to 'chance music' (one of Cage's terms). Music in which the composer introduces the elements of chance or unpredictability with regard to either the composition or its performance. This term is used by experimental composers, performers and scholars working in experimental music in the United States, Britain, and in other countries influenced by Cagean aesthetics
.
Microtones -
A pitch interval that is smaller than a semitone. This includes quarter tones and intervals even smaller. Composers have, for example, divided the octave into 22
, 31
, 43
, 53
, 72
, etc. microtones, either equally or unequally, and then used this scale as a basis for composition.
Some of the more common techniques include:
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
(Grant 2003, 174). More loosely, the term "experimental" is used in conjunction with genre names to describe music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
within specific genres
Music genre
A music genre is a categorical and typological construct that identifies musical sounds as belonging to a particular category and type of music that can be distinguished from other types of music...
that pushes against their boundaries or definitions, or else whose approach is a hybrid of disparate styles, or incorporates unorthodox, new, distinctly unique ingredients (Anon. [n.d.]a). Similarly, it has sometimes been used to describe "transethnic" music: the mixture of recognizable music genres. A quite distinct sense was current in the late 1950s to describe computer-controlled composition, and the term at that time also was sometimes used for electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
and musique concrète
Musique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
. "Experimental music" has also been used in music journalism as a general term of disapprobation for music departing from traditional norms.
Origin and definition
The Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète (GRMC), under the leadership of Pierre SchaefferPierre Schaeffer
Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician of the 20th century. His innovative work in both the sciences —particularly communications and acoustics— and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end...
, organized the First International Decade of Experimental Music between 8 and 18 June 1953. This appears to have been an attempt by Schaeffer to reverse the assimilation of musique concrète into the German elektronische Musik, and instead tried to subsume musique concrète, elektronische Musik, tape music, and world music under the rubric "musique experimentale" (Palombini 1993, 18). Publication of Schaeffer's manifesto (Schaeffer 1957) was delayed by four years, by which time Schaeffer was favoring the term "recherche musicale" (music research), though he never wholly abandoned "musique expérimentale" (Palombini 1993a, 19; Palombini 1993b, 557).
John Cage was also using the term as early as 1955. According to Cage's definition, "an experimental action is one the outcome of which is not foreseen" (Cage 1961, 39), and he was specifically interested in completed works that performed an unpredictable action (Mauceri 1997, 197). In Germany, the publication of Cage's article was anticipated by several months in a lecture delivered by Wolfgang Edward Rebner at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse on 13 August 1954, titled “Amerikanische Experimentalmusik". Rebner's lecture extended the concept back in time to include Charles Ives
Charles Ives
Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original"...
, Edgard Varèse
Edgard Varèse
Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, , whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....
, and Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell
Henry Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s:...
, as well as Cage, due to their focus on sound as such rather than compositional method (Rebner 1997).
Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman
Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano...
starts from Cage's definition (Nyman 1974, 1), and develops the term "experimental" also to describe the work of other American composers (Christian Wolff
Christian Wolff (composer)
Christian G. Wolff is an American composer of experimental classical music.-Biography:Wolff was born in Nice in France to German literary publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff, who had published works by Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. After relocating to the U.S...
, Earle Brown
Earle Brown
Earle Brown was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems...
, Meredith Monk
Meredith Monk
Meredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.-Life and work:Meredith Monk is primarily known for her...
, Malcolm Goldstein
Malcolm Goldstein
Malcolm Goldstein is a composer, violinist and improviser who has been active in the presentation of new music and dance since the early 1960s. He received an M.A. in music composition from Columbia University in 1960, having studied with Otto Luening...
, Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman was an American composer, born in New York City.A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown...
, Terry Riley
Terry Riley
Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer intrinsically associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music and was a pioneer of the movement...
, La Monte Young
La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
, Philip Glass
Philip Glass
Philip Glass is an American composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public .His music is often described as minimalist, along with...
, John Cale
John Cale
John Davies Cale, OBE is a Welsh musician, composer, singer-songwriter and record producer who was a founding member of the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground....
, Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
, etc.), as well as composers such as Gavin Bryars
Gavin Bryars
Richard Gavin Bryars is an English composer and double bassist. He has been active in, or has produced works in, a variety of styles of music, including jazz, free improvisation, minimalism, historicism, experimental music, avant-garde and neoclassicism.-Early life and career:Born in Goole, East...
, Toshi Ichiyanagi
Toshi Ichiyanagi
is a Japanese composer of avant-garde music. He studied with Tomojiro Ikenouchi and John Cage.One of his most notable works is the 1960 composition, Kaiki, which combined Japanese instruments, shō and koto, and western instruments, harmonica and saxophone. Another work Distance requires the...
, Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer, and founder of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected the avant-garde in favour of a politically motivated "people's liberation music".-Biography:Cardew was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire...
, John Tilbury
John Tilbury
John Tilbury is a British pianist. He is considered one of the foremost interpreters of Morton Feldman's music, and since 1980 has been a member of the free improvisation group AMM.- Early life and education :...
, Frederic Rzewski
Frederic Rzewski
Frederic Anthony Rzewski is an American composer and virtuoso pianist.- Biography :Rzewski began playing piano at age 5. He attended Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt...
, and Keith Rowe
Keith Rowe
Keith Rowe is an English free improvisation tabletop guitarist and painter. Rowe is a founding member of both the hugely influential AMM in the mid-1960s and M.I.M.E.O. Having trained as a visual artist, Rowe's paintings have been featured on most of his own albums...
(Nyman 1974, 78–81, 93–115). Nyman opposes experimental music to the European avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
of the time (Boulez
Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.-Early years:Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics...
, Kagel
Mauricio Kagel
Mauricio Kagel was a German-Argentine composer. He was notable for his interest in developing the theatrical side of musical performance .-Biography:...
, Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis
Iannis Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek ethnic, naturalized French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers...
, Birtwistle
Harrison Birtwistle
Sir Harrison Paul Birtwistle CH is a British contemporary composer.-Life:Birtwistle was born in Accrington, a mill town in Lancashire some 20 miles north of Manchester. His interest in music was encouraged by his mother, who bought him a clarinet when he was seven, and arranged for him to have...
, Berio
Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.-Biography:Berio was born at Oneglia Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003) was an Italian...
, Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
, and Bussotti
Sylvano Bussotti
Sylvano Bussotti is an Italian composer of contemporary music whose work is unusually notated and often creates special problems of interpretation.Born in Florence, Bussotti learned to play the violin as a child, becoming a prodigy...
), for whom "The identity of a composition is of paramount importance" (Nyman 1974, 2 and 9). The word "experimental" in the former cases "is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success or failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is unknown" (Cage 1961, 13).
David Cope
David Cope
David Cope is an American author, composer, scientist, and professor emeritus of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz...
also distinguishes between experimental and avant garde, describing experimental music as that "which represents a refusal to accept the status quo
Status quo
Statu quo, a commonly used form of the original Latin "statu quo" – literally "the state in which" – is a Latin term meaning the current or existing state of affairs. To maintain the status quo is to keep the things the way they presently are...
" (Cope, 1997, 222). David Nicholls, too, makes this distinction, saying that "...very generally, avant-garde music can be viewed as occupying an extreme position within the tradition, while experimental music lies outside it" (Nicholls 1998, 318).
Warren Burt
Warren Burt
Warren Burt is an Australia-based composer of American birth. He is known for composing in a wide variety of new music styles, ranging from acoustic music, electroacoustic music, sound art installations, and text-based music...
cautions that, as "a combination of leading-edge techniques and a certain exploratory attitude", experimental music requires a broad and inclusive definition, "a series of ands, if you will", encompassing such areas as "Cageian influences and work with low technology and improvisation and sound poetry and linguistics and new instrument building and multimedia and music theatre and work with high technology and community music, among others, when these activities are done with the aim of finding those musics 'we don't like, yet,' [citing Herbert Brün
Herbert Brun
Herbert Brün was a composer and pioneer of electronic and computer music. Born in Berlin, Germany, he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1962 until he retired, several years before his death.-Career:...
] in a 'problem-seeking environment' [citing Chris Mann
Chris Mann
Chris Mann is an Australian composer, poet and performer specializing in the emerging field of compositional linguistics, coined by Kenneth Gaburo and described by Mann as "the mechanism whereby you understand what I'm thinking better than I do."...
]” (Burt 1991, 5).
In a recent dissertation, Benjamin Piekut argues that this "consensus view of experimentalism" is based on an a priori "grouping", rather than asking the question "How have these composers been collected together in the first place, that they can now be the subject of a description?" That is, "for the most part, experimental music studies describes [sic] a category without really explaining it" (Piekut 2008, 2–5). He finds laudable exceptions in the work of David Nicholls and, especially, Amy Beal (Piekut 2008, 5), and concludes from their work that "The fundamental ontological
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
shift that marks experimentalism as an achievement is that from representationalism to performativity
Performativity
Performativity is an interdisciplinary term often used to name the capacity of speech and language in particular, as well as other non-verbal forms of expressive action, to intervene in the course of human events. The term derives from the work in speech act theory originated by the analytic...
", so that "an explanation of experimentalism that already assumes the category it purports to explain is an exercise in metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
, not ontology" (Piekut 2008, 7).
Leonard B. Meyer
Leonard B. Meyer
Leonard B. Meyer was a composer, author, and philosopher. He contributed major works in the fields of aesthetic theory in Music, and compositional analysis.-Career:...
, on the other hand, includes under "experimental music" composers rejected by Nyman, such as Berio
Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.-Biography:Berio was born at Oneglia Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003) was an Italian...
, Boulez
Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez is a French composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a conductor.-Early years:Boulez was born in Montbrison, Loire, France. As a child he began piano lessons and demonstrated aptitude in both music and mathematics...
, and Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...
, as well as the techniques of "total serialism
Serialism
In music, serialism is a method or technique of composition that uses a series of values to manipulate different musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though his contemporaries were also working to establish serialism as one example of...
" (Meyer 1994, 106–107 and 266), holding that "there is no single, or even pre-eminent, experimental music, but rather a plethora of different methods and kinds" (Meyer 1994, 237).
In the late 1950s, Lejaren Hiller and L. M. Isaacson used the term in connection with computer-controlled composition, in the scientific sense of "experiment" (Hiller and Isaacson 1959): making predictions for new compositions based on established musical technique (Mauceri 1997, 194–95). The term "experimental music" was used contemporaneously for electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
, particularly in the early musique concrète
Musique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
work of Schaeffer
Pierre Schaeffer
Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician of the 20th century. His innovative work in both the sciences —particularly communications and acoustics— and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end...
and Henry
Pierre Henry
Pierre Henry is a French composer, considered a pioneer of the musique concrète genre of electronic music.-Biography:...
in France (Vignal 2003, 298). There is a considerable overlap between Downtown music
Downtown music
Downtown music is a subdivision of American music, closely related to experimental music. The scene the term describes began in 1960, when Yoko Ono—one of the Fluxus artists, at that time still seven years away from meeting John Lennon—opened her loft at 112 Chambers Street to be used...
and what is more generally called experimental music, especially as that term was defined at length by composer Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman
Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano...
in his book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (1974, second edition 1999).
Influential antecedents
A number of early 20th-century American composers, seen as precedents to and influences on John Cage, are sometimes referred to as the "American Experimental School". These include Charles Ives, CharlesCharles Seeger
Charles Seeger, Jr. was a noted musicologist, composer, and teacher. He was the father of iconic American folk singer Pete Seeger .-Life:...
and Ruth Crawford Seeger
Ruth Crawford Seeger
Ruth Crawford Seeger , born Ruth Porter Crawford, was a modernist composer and an American folk music specialist.-Life:...
,[Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles
Carl Ruggles
Charles "Carl" Sprague Ruggles was an American composer of the American Five group. He wrote finely crafted pieces using "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by Charles Seeger to describe Ruggles' music...
, and John Becker
John J. Becker
John Joseph Becker was an American composer of contemporary classical music. He is grouped together with Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, and Wallingford Riegger as a member of the "American Five" composers of "ultra-modern" music.The John J...
(Nicholls 1990).
New York School
Artists: John CageJohn Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...
, Earle Brown
Earle Brown
Earle Brown was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems...
, Christian Wolff
Christian Wolff (composer)
Christian G. Wolff is an American composer of experimental classical music.-Biography:Wolff was born in Nice in France to German literary publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff, who had published works by Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. After relocating to the U.S...
, Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman was an American composer, born in New York City.A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown...
, David Tudor
David Tudor
David Eugene Tudor was an American pianist and composer of experimental music.- Biography :Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan Wolpe and became known as one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. He gave the...
, Related: Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham
Mercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of the American avant-garde for more than 50 years. Throughout much of his life, Cunningham was considered one of the greatest creative forces in American dance...
Microtonal music
Harry PartchHarry Partch
Harry Partch was an American composer and instrument creator. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments that he built himself, tuned in 11-limit just intonation.-Early...
as well as Ivor Darreg
Ivor Darreg
Ivor Darreg was a leading proponent of and composer of microtonal or "xenharmonic" music. He also created a series of experimental musical instruments.Darreg, a contemporary of Harry Partch and a close colleague of John H...
worked with other tuning scales based on the physical laws for harmonic music. For this music they both developed a group of experimental musical instruments. La Monte Young is known for using this technique when he began working on his minimal drone pieces which consisted of layers of sounds in different pitches. See also spectral music
Spectral music
Spectral music is a musical composition practice where compositional decisions are often informed by the analysis of sound spectra. Computer-based sound spectrum analysis using tools like DFT, FFT, and spectrograms...
.
Musique concrète
Musique concrèteMusique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
(French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
; literally, "concrete music"), is a form of electroacoustic music
Electroacoustic music
Electroacoustic music originated in Western art music during its modern era following the incorporation of electric sound production into compositional practice. The initial developments in electroacoustic music composition during the mid-20th century are associated with the activities of composers...
that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sonorities derived from musical instruments or voice
Register (music)
In music, a register is the relative "height" or range of a note, set of pitches or pitch classes, melody, part, instrument or group of instruments...
s, nor to elements traditionally thought of as 'musical' (melody
Melody
A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...
, harmony
Harmony
In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...
, rhythm
Rhythm
Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
, metre
Meter (music)
Meter or metre is a term that music has inherited from the rhythmic element of poetry where it means the number of lines in a verse, the number of syllables in each line and the arrangement of those syllables as long or short, accented or unaccented...
and so on). The theoretical underpinnings of the aesthetic were developed by Pierre Schaeffer
Pierre Schaeffer
Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician of the 20th century. His innovative work in both the sciences —particularly communications and acoustics— and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end...
, beginning in the late 1940s.
Abortive critical term
In the 1950s, the term "experimental" was often applied by conservative music critics—along with a number of other words, such as "engineers art", "musical splitting of the atom", "alchemist's kitchen", "atonal", and "serial"—as a deprecating jargon term, which must be regarded as "abortive concepts", since they did not "grasp a subject" (Metzger 1959, 21). This was an attempt to marginalize, and thereby dismiss various kinds of music that did not conform to established conventions (Mauceri 1997, 189). In 1955, Pierre Boulez identified it as a "new definition that makes it possible to restrict to a laboratory, which is tolerated but subject to inspection, all attempts to corrupt musical morals. Once they have set limits to the danger, the good ostriches go to sleep again and wake only to stamp their feet with rage when they are obliged to accept the bitter fact of the periodical ravages caused by experiment." He concludes, "There is no such thing as experimental music … but there is a very real distinction between sterility and invention" (Boulez 1986, 430 & 431). Starting in the 1960s, "experimental music" began to be used in America for almost the opposite purpose, in an attempt to establish an historical category to help legitimize a loosely identified group of radically innovative, "outsider" composers. Whatever success this might have had in academe, this attempt to construct a genre was as abortive as the meaningless namecalling noted by Metzger, since by the "genre's" own definition the work it includes is "radically different and highly individualistic" (Mauceri 1997, 190). It is therefore not a genre, but an open category, "because any attempt to classify a phenomenon as unclassifiable and (often) elusive as experimental music must be partial" (Nyman 1974, 5). Furthermore, the characteristic indeterminacy in performance "guarantees that two versions of the same piece will have virtually no perceptible musical 'facts' in common" (Nyman 1974, 9).Fluxus
For full article, see FluxusFluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
Artists to be added: Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....
, Charlotte Moorman
Charlotte Moorman
Madeline Charlotte Moorman Garside was an American cellist and performance artist.She was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied cello from age ten and won a scholarship to Centenary College where she took her B.A. in music in 1955. She received her M.A...
, Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell
Wolf Vostell was a German painter, sculptor, noise music maker and Happening artist of the second half of the 20th century. Wolf Vostell is considered one of the pioneers of video art, environment-sculptures, Happenings and the Fluxus Movement...
, Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.Like other Fluxus artists, Higgins studied...
,
Fluxus was an artistic movement started in the 1960s, characterized by an increased theatricality and the use of mixed media
Mixed media
Mixed media, in visual art, refers to an artwork in the making of which more than one medium has been employed.There is an important distinction between "mixed-media" artworks and "multimedia art". Mixed media tends to refer to a work of visual art that combines various traditionally distinct...
. Another known musical aspect appearing in the Fluxus movement was the use of primal scream
Primal scream
Primal Scream may refer to:* The Primal Scream, a psychology book by Dr. Arthur Janov about primal therapy* Primal Scream, a British rock band* Primal Scream , a 1989 album by the UK band Primal Scream...
at performances, derived from the primal therapy
Primal therapy
Primal therapy is a trauma-based psychotherapy created by Arthur Janov, who argues that neurosis is caused by the repressed pain of childhood trauma. Janov argues that repressed pain can be sequentially brought to conscious awareness and resolved through re-experiencing the incident and fully...
. Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
used this technique of expression (Bateman [n.d.]).
Transethnicism
The term "experimental" has sometimes been applied to the mixture of recognizable music genres, especially those identified with specific ethnic groups, as found for example in the music of Laurie AndersonLaurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s...
, Chou Wen-chung
Chou Wen-chung
Chou Wen-chung , Shandong, China) is a Chinese American composer of contemporary classical music. He emigrated in 1946 to the United States where he lives.-Life:...
, Steve Reich
Steve Reich
Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
, Kevin Volans
Kevin Volans
Kevin Volans is a composer associated with the post-minimalist movement in contemporary composition. He was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa on July 6, 1949, and even though he has spent most of his life outside his native country, is the best known South African composer active today.In...
, Martin Scherzinger, Michael Blake, and Rüdiger Meyer (Blake 1999; Jaffe 1983; Lubet1999).
Free improvisation
For main article see: Free improvisationFree improvisation
Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any rules beyond the logic or inclination of the musician involved. The term can refer to both a technique and as a recognizable genre in its own right....
Free improvisation
Free improvisation
Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any rules beyond the logic or inclination of the musician involved. The term can refer to both a technique and as a recognizable genre in its own right....
or free music
Free music
Free music is music that, like free software, can freely be copied, distributed and modified for any purpose. Thus free music is either in the public domain or licensed under a free license by the artist or copyright holder themselves, often as a method of promotion. It does not mean that there...
is improvised music
Musical improvisation
Musical improvisation is the creative activity of immediate musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians...
without any rules beyond the taste or inclination of the musician(s) involved; in many cases the musicians make an active effort to avoid overt references to recognizable musical genres. The term is somewhat paradoxical, since it can be considered both as a technique (employed by any musician who wishes to disregard rigid genres and forms) and as a recognizable genre in its own right.
1960–1980
In 1963 Frank ZappaFrank Zappa
Frank Vincent Zappa was an American composer, singer-songwriter, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote rock, jazz, orchestral and musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed...
appeared in the Steve Allen Show where he did an experimental music piece called Playing Music on a Bicycle, a performance very similar to John Cage's Water Walk of 1960 in the I've Got a Secret show. Zappa later became mainly famous for his rock music. At the end of the 1960s rock groups like The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys are an American rock band, formed in 1961 in Hawthorne, California. The group was initially composed of brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and friend Al Jardine. Managed by the Wilsons' father Murry, The Beach Boys signed to Capitol Records in 1962...
and The Beatles
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English rock band, active throughout the 1960s and one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Formed in Liverpool, by 1962 the group consisted of John Lennon , Paul McCartney , George Harrison and Ringo Starr...
began adding musical influences outside the common field of popular music of those days: non-western music and musical instruments as well as ideas, concepts and techniques copied for traditional classical music as well as modern classical music. They experimented with all kinds of new recording techniques like reverse tape recording. Besides those mainstream artists, a group of underground artists like The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground was an American rock band formed in New York City. First active from 1964 to 1973, their best-known members were Lou Reed and John Cale, who both went on to find success as solo artists. Although experiencing little commercial success while together, the band is often cited...
, Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd were an English rock band that achieved worldwide success with their progressive and psychedelic rock music. Their work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album art, and elaborate live shows. Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially...
, Frank Zappa, White Noise
White Noise (band)
White Noise is an experimental electronic music band formed in London, England, in 1968 by American-born David Vorhaus, a classical bass player with a background in both physics and electronic engineering...
and The Residents
The Residents
The Residents is an American art collective best known for avant-garde music and multimedia works. The first official release under the name of The Residents was in 1972, and the group has since released over sixty albums, numerous music videos and short films, three CD-ROM projects and ten DVDs....
began incorporating the experimental musical aspects of Varese, La Monte Young, Cage and the minimal music as well as adding new extended techniques like audio feedback
Audio feedback
Audio feedback is a special kind of positive feedback which occurs when a sound loop exists between an audio input and an audio output...
, heavy uses and multiple combining of stomp boxes and other electronic sound effects. The Residents
The Residents
The Residents is an American art collective best known for avant-garde music and multimedia works. The first official release under the name of The Residents was in 1972, and the group has since released over sixty albums, numerous music videos and short films, three CD-ROM projects and ten DVDs....
started in the seventies as an idiosyncratic musical group mixing all kinds of artistic genres like pop music
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
, electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
, experimental music with movies, comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
s and performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
(Ankeny [n.d.]).
Other pop musicians who made experimental music are Captain Beefheart
Captain Beefheart
Don Van Vliet January 15, 1941 December 17, 2010) was an American musician, singer-songwriter and artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. His musical work was conducted with a rotating ensemble of musicians called The Magic Band, active between 1965 and 1982, with whom he recorded 12...
, Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
, John Zorn
John Zorn
John Zorn is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer...
, Pere Ubu
Pere Ubu
Pere Ubu is an experimental rock music group from Cleveland, Ohio.Père Ubu may also refer to:* Ubu, the enigmatic central figure of a series of French plays by Alfred Jarry, including Ubu Roi, and subsequent plays Ubu Cocu and Ubu Enchaîné...
, Faust
Faust
Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend; a highly successful scholar, but also dissatisfied with his life, and so makes a deal with the devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Faust's tale is the basis for many literary, artistic, cinematic, and musical...
, Can
Can (band)
Can was an experimental rock band formed in Cologne, West Germany in 1968. Later labeled as one of the first "krautrock" groups, they transcended mainstream influences and incorporated strong minimalist and world music elements into their often psychedelic music.Can constructed their music largely...
, Robert Wyatt
Robert Wyatt
Robert Wyatt is an English musician, and founding member of the influential Canterbury scene band Soft Machine, with a long and distinguished solo career...
, DNA
DNA (band)
DNA was a No Wave band formed in 1978 by guitarist Arto Lindsay and keyboardist Robin Crutchfield. Rather than playing their instruments in a traditional manner, they instead focused on making unique and unusual sounds...
, Robert Fripp
Robert Fripp
Robert Fripp is an English guitarist, composer and record producer. He was ranked 42nd on Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and #47 on Gibson.com’s "Top 50 Guitarists of All Time". Among rock guitarists, Fripp is a master of crosspicking, a technique...
, Diamanda Galás
Diamanda Galás
Diamanda Galás is an American avant-garde composer, vocalist, pianist, organist, performance artist and painter.Galás has been described as "capable of the most unnerving vocal terror", with her three and a half octave vocal range. She often screams, hisses and growls...
, Cabaret Voltaire
Cabaret Voltaire (band)
Cabaret Voltaire were a British music group from Sheffield, England.Initially composed of Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson, the group was named after the Cabaret Voltaire, a nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland that was a centre for the early Dada movement.Their earliest performances...
, Boyd Rice
Boyd Rice
Boyd Blake Rice is an American experimental sound/noise musician using the name of NON since the mid-1970s, archivist, actor, photographer, author, member of the Partridge Family Temple religious group, co-founder of the UNPOP art movement and current staff writer for Modern Drunkard...
, etc. Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle were an English industrial, avant-garde music and visual arts group that evolved from the performance art group COUM Transmissions...
experimented with electronic noise and cut-up technique
Cut-up technique
The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing....
s with short pieces of tape with recorded sound on it. Fred Frith
Fred Frith
Fred Frith is an English multi-instrumentalist, composer and improvisor.Probably best known for his guitar work, Frith first came to attention as one of the founding members of the English avant-rock group Henry Cow. Frith was also a member of Art Bears, Massacre and Skeleton Crew...
as well as Keith Rowe
Keith Rowe
Keith Rowe is an English free improvisation tabletop guitarist and painter. Rowe is a founding member of both the hugely influential AMM in the mid-1960s and M.I.M.E.O. Having trained as a visual artist, Rowe's paintings have been featured on most of his own albums...
began exploring new experimental possibilities with prepared guitar
Prepared guitar
A prepared guitar is a guitar that has had its timbre altered by placing various objects on or between the instrument's strings, including other extended techniques...
s. In the seventies Chris Cutler
Chris Cutler
Chris Cutler is an English percussionist, composer, lyricist and music theorist. Best known for his work with English avant-rock group Henry Cow, Cutler was also a member and drummer of a number of other bands, including Art Bears, News from Babel, Pere Ubu and Gong/Mothergong...
began experimenting with an eclectic drum kit with all kinds of added sound possibilities acoustic as well as electric. The self-titled debut album of This Heat
This Heat
This Heat were a British experimental music group formed in early 1976 in Camberwell, London by multi-instrumentalists Charles Bullen , Charles Hayward and Gareth Williams .This Heat were active in the ascendancy of British progressive rock and punk rock, but stood apart...
was recorded between February 1976 and September 1978, and characterized by heavy use of tape manipulation
Tape Music
Tape Music is an experimental 10" vinyl release by Jack Dangers. The vinyl release was coupled with the album Sounds Of The 20th Century No2 when released as a flexi disc vinyl....
and looping, combined with more traditional performance, to create dense, eerie, electronic soundscapes.
Rhys Chatham
Rhys Chatham
Rhys Chatham is an American composer, guitarist, and trumpet player, primarily active in avant-garde and minimalist music. He is best known for his "guitar orchestra" compositions...
and Glenn Branca
Glenn Branca
Glenn Branca is an American avant-garde composer and guitarist known for his use of volume, alternative guitar tunings, repetition, droning, and the harmonic series. In 2008 he was awarded an unrestricted grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.-Beginnings: 1960s and early 1970s:Branca...
composed multi guitar compositions in the late 1970s. Chatham worked for some time with LaMonte Young and afterwards mixed the experimental musical ideas with punk rock in his piece Guitar Trio. Lydia Lunch
Lydia Lunch
Lydia Lunch is an American singer, poet, writer, and actress whose career was spawned by the New York No Wave scene...
started incorporating spoken word
Spoken word
Spoken word is a form of poetry that often uses alliterated prose or verse and occasionally uses metered verse to express social commentary. Traditionally it is in the first person, is from the poet’s point of view and is themed in current events....
with punk rock
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
and Mars
Mars (band)
Mars was a New York City No Wave band formed by vocalist Sumner Crane in 1975. He was joined by China Burg , Mark Cunningham , and artist Nancy Arlen , and briefly by guitarist Rudolph Grey. The band played one live gig under the name China before changing it to Mars...
explored new sliding guitar techniques. Arto Lindsay
Arto Lindsay
Arthur Morgan Lindsay is an American guitarist, singer, record producer and experimental composer. He is a 1974 graduate of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida....
neglected to use any kind of musical practise or theory to develop an idiosyncratic atonal playing technique. DNA
DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...
and James Chance
James Chance
James Chance, also known as James White , is an American saxophonist, songwriter and singer....
are other famous no wave artists. Change later on moved more up to Free improvisation
Free improvisation
Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any rules beyond the logic or inclination of the musician involved. The term can refer to both a technique and as a recognizable genre in its own right....
. The No Wave movement was closely related to transgressive art
Transgressive art
Transgressive art refers to art forms that aim to transgress; i.e. to outrage or violate basic mores and sensibilities. The term transgressive was first used by American filmmaker Nick Zedd and his Cinema of Transgression in 1985...
and, just like Fluxus, often mixed performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
with music (Masters 2007). It is alternatively seen, however, as an avant-garde offshoot of 1970s punk, and a genre related to experimental rock
Experimental rock
Experimental rock or avant-garde rock is a type of music based on rock which experiments with the basic elements of the genre, or which pushes the boundaries of common composition and performance technique....
(Anon. [n.d.]b).
1980–2000
Tellus Audio Cassette MagazineTellus Audio Cassette Magazine
Launched from the Lower East Side, Manhattan, in 1983 as a subscription only bimonthly publication, the Tellus cassette series took full advantage of the popular cassette medium to promote cutting-edge downtown music, documenting the New York scene and advancing experimental composers of the time...
started in 1983 releasing a magazine with added cassette tapes focusing broadly on experimental music from the past as well as from the present. Lee Ranaldo
Lee Ranaldo
Lee M. Ranaldo is an American singer, guitarist, writer, record producer, and visual artist, best known as a co-founder of the alternative rock band Sonic Youth...
and Thurston Moore
Thurston Moore
Thurston Joseph Moore is an American musician best known as a singer, songwriter and guitarist of Sonic Youth. He has also participated in many solo and group collaborations outside of Sonic Youth, as well as running the Ecstatic Peace! record label...
experimented heavily with altered tuning
Scordatura
A scordatura , also called cross-tuning, is an alternative tuning used for the open strings of a string instrument, in which the notes indicated in the score would represent the finger position as if played in regular tuning, while the actual pitch is altered...
s and playing with a third bridge
3rd Bridge
The 3rd bridge is an extended playing technique used on some string instruments , that allows a musician to produce distinctive timbres and overtones that are unavailable on a conventional string instrument with two bridges...
technique with screwdrivers jammed between the strings and the neck. Following the krautrock
Krautrock
Krautrock is a generic name for the experimental music scenes that appeared in Germany in the late 1960s and gained popularity throughout the 1970s, especially in Britain. The term is a result of the English-speaking world's reception of the music at the time and not a reference to any one...
movement of the 1970s, German musicians started to experiment with unusual song structures and instruments. Einsturzende Neubauten
Einstürzende Neubauten
Einstürzende Neubauten is a German post-industrial band, originally from West Berlin, formed in 1980. The group currently comprises Blixa Bargeld , Alexander Hacke , N.U...
created their own instruments made out of scrap metal and building tools.
Also Aphex Twin as well as Jim O'Rourke
Jim O'Rourke (musician)
Jim O'Rourke is an Irish-American musician and record producer. He was long associated with the Chicago experimental and improv scene...
experimented with circuit bending
Circuit bending
Circuit bending is the creative customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, children's toys and small digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators....
to create new experimental music. Closely related to the circuit bending is the musical genre EAI of which Merzbow
Merzbow
is the main recording name of the Japanese noise musician , born in 1956. Since 1979 he has released in excess of 350 recordings.The name "Merzbow" comes from German artist Kurt Schwitters' artwork, "Merzbau”. This was chosen to reflect Akita's dada influence and junk art aesthetic...
is the most famous artist. He worked with series of radios all positioned differently for receiving different FM and AM frequencies and making new experimental musical compositions with all these derived sound signals.
High profile artists like Björk
Björk
Björk Guðmundsdóttir , known as Björk , is an Icelandic singer-songwriter. Her eclectic musical style has achieved popular acknowledgement and popularity within many musical genres, such as rock, jazz, electronic dance music, classical and folk...
and Beck
Beck
Beck Hansen is an American musician, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, known by the stage name Beck...
framed their solo work with extensive collaborations, building up platforms for avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
and experimental music reach popular knowledge.
2000–present
The band NeptuneNeptune (band)
Neptune is a noise music band from Boston, noted for having built their custom-made guitars and basses out of scrap metal. The band also plays custom-made percussion instruments and electric lamellophones.-Band history:...
built a series of self-designeds among which a microtonal 13-TET guitar (Hasse 2007) to create new sounds, and have released their fourth or fifth CD, but the first on the Table of the Elements’ Radium imprint
Table of the Elements
Table of the Elements is an American record label. It concentrates on re-released and specially recorded experimental music, including many of the great avant garde musicians of the 20th and 21st centuries — John Cale, Tony Conrad and La Monte Young, for instance — as well as...
label (Crumsho 2008). Micachu
Micachu
Mica Levi, known by her stage name Micachu , is an English singer, songwriter, composer, and producer. She is classically trained and is best known for experimental music in a variety of genres.-Biography:...
also makes other instruments herself, but is reluctant to describe her work as anything but "pop music, … maybe experimental pop" (Parkin 2008).
Zippy Kid released many experimental albums on his net label mARS since 2005.
Concepts
Aleatoric musicAleatoric music
Aleatoric music is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer...
-
A term coined by Werner Meyer-Eppler
Werner Meyer-Eppler
Werner Meyer-Eppler , was a German physicist, experimental acoustician, phoneticist, and information theorist....
and used by Boulez and other composers of the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
(in Europe) to refer to a strictly limited form of indeterminacy, also called "controlled chance". As this distinction was misunderstood, the term is often (and somewhat inaccurately) used interchangeably with, or in place of, "indeterminacy".
Graphic notation
Graphic notation
Graphic notation is the representation of music through the use of visual symbols outside the realm of traditional music notation. Graphic notation evolved in the 1950s, and it is often used in combination with traditional music notation...
-
Music which is written in the form of diagrams or drawings rather than using “conventional” notation (with staves, clefs, notes, etc).
Indeterminate music
Indeterminacy in music
Indeterminacy in music, which began early in the twentieth century in the music of Charles Ives, and was continued in the 1930s by Henry Cowell and carried on by his student, the experimental music composer John Cage beginning in 1951 , came to refer to the movement which grew up around Cage...
-
Related to 'chance music' (one of Cage's terms). Music in which the composer introduces the elements of chance or unpredictability with regard to either the composition or its performance. This term is used by experimental composers, performers and scholars working in experimental music in the United States, Britain, and in other countries influenced by Cagean aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
.
Microtones -
A pitch interval that is smaller than a semitone. This includes quarter tones and intervals even smaller. Composers have, for example, divided the octave into 22
22 equal temperament
In music, 22 equal temperament, called 22-tet, 22-edo, or 22-et, is the tempered scale derived by dividing the octave into 22 equal steps . Each step represents a frequency ratio of 21/22, or 54.55 cents ....
, 31
31 equal temperament
In music, 31 equal temperament, 31-ET, which can also be abbreviated 31-TET, 31-EDO , , is the tempered scale derived by dividing the octave into 31 equal-sized steps...
, 43
Harry Partch's 43-tone scale
The 43-tone scale is a just intonation scale with 43 pitches in each octave, invented and used by Harry Partch.The first of Partch's "four concepts" is "The scale of musical intervals begins with absolute consonance and gradually progresses into an infinitude of dissonance, the consonance of the...
, 53
53 equal temperament
In music, 53 equal temperament, called 53-TET, 53-EDO, or 53-ET, is the tempered scale derived by dividing the octave into 53 equal steps . Each step represents a frequency ratio of 21/53, or 22.6415 cents , an interval sometimes called the Holdrian comma.- History :Theoretical interest in this...
, 72
72 equal temperament
In music, 72 equal temperament, called twelfth-tone, 72-tet, 72-edo, or 72-et, is the tempered scale derived by dividing the octave into twelfth-tones, or in other words 72 equal steps...
, etc. microtones, either equally or unequally, and then used this scale as a basis for composition.
Common elements
- Extended techniqueExtended techniqueExtended techniques are performance techniques used in music to describe unconventional, unorthodox, or non-traditional techniques of singing, or of playing musical instruments to obtain unusual sounds or instrumental timbres....
s: Any of a number of methods of performing with voice or a musical instrumentMusical instrumentA musical instrument is a device created or adapted for the purpose of making musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can serve as a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. The history of musical instruments dates back to the...
that are unique, innovative, and sometimes regarded as improper. - "Prepared" instruments—ordinary instruments modified in their tuning or sound-producing characteristics. For example, guitar strings can have a weight attached at a certain point, changing their harmonic characteristics (Keith RoweKeith RoweKeith Rowe is an English free improvisation tabletop guitarist and painter. Rowe is a founding member of both the hugely influential AMM in the mid-1960s and M.I.M.E.O. Having trained as a visual artist, Rowe's paintings have been featured on most of his own albums...
is one musician to have experimented with such prepared guitarPrepared guitarA prepared guitar is a guitar that has had its timbre altered by placing various objects on or between the instrument's strings, including other extended techniques...
techniques). Cage's prepared pianoPrepared pianoA prepared piano is a piano that has had its sound altered by placing objects between or on the strings or on the hammers or dampers....
was one of the first such instruments. A different form is not hanging objects on the strings, but divide the string in two with a third bridge3rd BridgeThe 3rd bridge is an extended playing technique used on some string instruments , that allows a musician to produce distinctive timbres and overtones that are unavailable on a conventional string instrument with two bridges...
and play the inverse side, causing resonating bellBell (instrument)A bell is a simple sound-making device. The bell is a percussion instrument and an idiophone. Its form is usually a hollow, cup-shaped object, which resonates upon being struck...
-like harmonicHarmonicA harmonic of a wave is a component frequency of the signal that is an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency, i.e. if the fundamental frequency is f, the harmonics have frequencies 2f, 3f, 4f, . . . etc. The harmonics have the property that they are all periodic at the fundamental...
tones at the pick-up side. - Unconventional playing techniques—for example, strings on a piano can be manipulated directly instead of being played the orthodox, keyboard-based way (an innovation of Henry CowellHenry CowellHenry Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s:...
's known as "string pianoString pianoString piano is a term coined by American composer-theorist Henry Cowell to collectively describe those pianistic extended techniques in which sound is produced by direct manipulation of the strings, instead of or in addition to striking the piano's keys...
"), a dozen or more piano keys may be depressed simultaneously with the forearm to produce a tone clusterTone clusterA tone cluster is a musical chord comprising at least three consecutive tones in a scale. Prototypical tone clusters are based on the chromatic scale, and are separated by semitones. For instance, three adjacent piano keys struck simultaneously produce a tone cluster...
(another technique popularized by Cowell), or the tuning pegs on a guitar can be rotated while a note sounds (called a "tuner glissandoGlissandoIn music, a glissando is a glide from one pitch to another. It is an Italianized musical term derived from the French glisser, to glide. In some contexts it is distinguished from the continuous portamento...
"). - Extended vocal techniques—any vocalized sounds that are not normally utiliized in classical or popular music, such as moaning, howling, vocal fryVocal fry registerThe vocal fry register , is the lowest vocal register and is produced through a loose glottal closure which will permit air to bubble through slowly with a popping or rattling sound of a very low frequency...
, overtone singingOvertone singingOvertone singing, also known as overtone chanting, or harmonic singing, is a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the resonances created as air travels from the lungs, past the vocal folds, and out the lips to produce a melody.The partials of a sound wave made by the human voice can be...
, screaming, death growls, or making a clicking noise. Artists such as Cathy BerberianCathy BerberianCatherine Anahid Berberian was an American soprano and composer. She interpreted contemporary avant-garde music composed, among others, by Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna, John Cage, Henri Pousseur, Sylvano Bussotti, Darius Milhaud, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati , Igor Stravinsky.She also interpreted...
, Roy HartRoy HartRoy Hart was an actor from South Africa at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. He was a pupil of Alfred Wolfsohn's for many years and then furthered the work on voice after Wolfsohn's death...
, Meredith MonkMeredith MonkMeredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.-Life and work:Meredith Monk is primarily known for her...
, Michael VetterMichael VetterMichael Vetter is a German composer, novelist, poet, performer, calligrapher, artist, and teacher.-Biography:Vetter was born in Oberstdorf in the Allgäu region of Germany, and received a conventional school education...
, and BjörkBjörkBjörk Guðmundsdóttir , known as Björk , is an Icelandic singer-songwriter. Her eclectic musical style has achieved popular acknowledgement and popularity within many musical genres, such as rock, jazz, electronic dance music, classical and folk...
. BerioLuciano BerioLuciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.-Biography:Berio was born at Oneglia Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003) was an Italian...
's Sequenza III for female voice (1965) and Peter Maxwell DaviesPeter Maxwell DaviesSir Peter Maxwell Davies, CBE is an English composer and conductor and is currently Master of the Queen's Music.-Biography:...
's Eight Songs for a Mad KingEight Songs for a Mad KingEight Songs for a Mad King is a monodrama by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies with a libretto by Randolph Stow, based on words of George III. The work was written for the South-African actor Roy Hart and the composer's ensemble the Pierrot Players, and premiered on 22 April 1969...
(1969) utilize many of these techniques. - Incorporation of instrumentMusical instrumentA musical instrument is a device created or adapted for the purpose of making musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can serve as a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. The history of musical instruments dates back to the...
s, tuningMusical tuningIn music, there are two common meanings for tuning:* Tuning practice, the act of tuning an instrument or voice.* Tuning systems, the various systems of pitches used to tune an instrument, and their theoretical bases.-Tuning practice:...
s, rhythmRhythmRhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...
s or scales from non-Western musical traditions. - Use of sound sources other than conventional musical instruments such as trash cans, telephone ringers, and doors slamming.
- Playing with deliberate disregard for the ordinary musical controls (pitch, duration, volume).
- Use of graphic notationGraphic notationGraphic notation is the representation of music through the use of visual symbols outside the realm of traditional music notation. Graphic notation evolved in the 1950s, and it is often used in combination with traditional music notation...
, non-conventional written/graphic 'instructions' actively interpreted by the performer(s). This practice continued through composers/artists such as La Monte YoungLa Monte YoungLa Monte Thornton Young is an American avant-garde composer, musician, and artist.Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer. His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, and contemporary music. Young is...
, George BrechtGeorge BrechtGeorge Brecht , born George Ellis MacDiarmid, was an American conceptual artist and avant-garde composer as well as a professional chemist who worked as a consultant for companies including Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Mobil Oil...
, George CrumbGeorge CrumbGeorge Crumb is an American composer of contemporary classical music. He is noted as an explorer of unusual timbres, alternative forms of notation, and extended instrumental and vocal techniques. Examples include seagull effect for the cello , metallic vibrato for the piano George Crumb (born...
, Annea LockwoodAnnea LockwoodAnnea Lockwood is a New Zealand born American composer. She taught electronic music at Vassar College. Her work often involves recordings of natural found sounds...
, Yoko OnoYoko Onois a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
, and Krzysztof PendereckiKrzysztof PendereckiKrzysztof Penderecki , born November 23, 1933 in Dębica) is a Polish composer and conductor. His 1960 avant-garde Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for string orchestra brought him to international attention, and this success was followed by acclaim for his choral St. Luke Passion. Both these...
. - Creating experimental musical instruments for enhancing the timbre of compositions and exploring new techniques or possibilities. Artists such as Harry PartchHarry PartchHarry Partch was an American composer and instrument creator. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments that he built himself, tuned in 11-limit just intonation.-Early...
, Luigi RussoloLuigi RussoloLuigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist painter and composer, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises . He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of "noise concerts" in 1913-14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921...
, Bradford ReedBradford ReedBradford Reed is an American multi-instrumentalist, experimental luthier, and member of avant-garde band King Missile III. He is proficient at such instruments as drums, guitar, melodica, piano, and synthesizer. In the 1980s he invented the pencilina, a custom-made string instrument.-Pencilina:The...
, Iner Souster, NeptuneNeptune (band)Neptune is a noise music band from Boston, noted for having built their custom-made guitars and basses out of scrap metal. The band also plays custom-made percussion instruments and electric lamellophones.-Band history:...
, Hans ReichelHans ReichelHans Reichel was a German improvisational guitarist, experimental luthier, inventor, and type designer.-Career:...
.
Further reading
- Ballantine, Christopher. 1977. "Towards an Aesthetic of Experimental Music". The Musical Quarterly 63, no. 2 (April): 224–46.
- Benitez, Joaquim M. 1978. "Avant-Garde or Experimental? Classifying Contemporary Music". International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 9, no. 1 (June): 53–77.
- Broyles, Michael. 2004. Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Cameron, Catherine. 1996. Dialectics in the Arts: The Rise of Experimentalism in American Music. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.
- Ensemble Modern. 1995. "Was ist experimentelles Musiktheater? Mitglieder des 'Ensemble Modern' befragen Hans Zender". Positionen: Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 22 (February): 17–20.
- Bailey, Derek. 1980. "Musical Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music". Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall; Ashbourne: Moorland. ISBN 0-13-607044-2. Second edition, London: British Library National Sound Archive, 1992. ISBN 0-7123-0506-8
- Experimental musical instruments (magazine). 1985–1999. A periodical (no longer published) devoted to experimental music and instruments.
- Gligo, NikšaNikša GligoNikša Gligo is a Croatian musicologist and university professor.His scientific interests include 20th-century music, music terminology, the aesthetics of music and music semiology. Gligo has been involved with the Music Biennale Zagreb in various capacities from 1973 to 1991 and from 2002 to the...
. 1989. "Die musikalische Avantgarde als ahistorische Utopie: Die gescheiterten Implikationen der experimentellen Musik". Acta Musicologica 61, no. 2 (May-Aug): 217–37. - Henius, Carla. 1977. "Musikalisches Experimentiertheater. Kommentare aus der Praxis". Melos/Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 3, no. 6:489–92.
- Henius, Carla. 1994. "Experimentelles Musiktheater seit 1946". Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste: Jahrbuch 8:131-54.
- Holmes, Thomas B. 2008. Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition. Third edition. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-95781-6 (hbk.) ISBN 978-0-415-95782-3 (pbk.)
- Lucier, Alvin. 2002. "An einem hellen Tag: Avantgarde und Experiment", trans. Gisela Gronemeyer MusikTexte: Zeitschrift für Neue Musik, no. 92 (February), pp. 13–14.
- Saunders, James. 2009. The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music. Aldershot, Hants, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. ISBN 978-0-7546-6282-2
- Schnebel, Dieter. 2001. "Experimentelles Musiktheater". In Das Musiktheater: Exempel der Kunst, edited by Otto Kolleritsch, 14–24. Vienna: Universal Edition. ISBN 3-7024-0263-2
- Shultis, Christopher. 1998. Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition. Boston: Northeastern University Press. ISBN 1-55553-377-9
- Smith Brindle, Reginald. 1987. The New Music: The Avant-Garde Since 1945, second edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-315471-4 (cloth) ISBN 0-19-315468-4 (pbk.)
- Sutherland, Roger, 1994. New Perspectives in Music. London: Sun Tavern Fields. ISBN 0-9517012-6-6