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viernes, 7 de diciembre de 2007

Long Life To Stockhausen!!!!


Hoy cuando fui a la casa de Chrs nos dimos con la ingrata sorpresa de la muerte de uno de los pioneros de la música electrónica, Karlheinz Stockhausen quien feneció el pasado Miércoles a la edad de 79 años.

Stockhausen ha sido el culpable de muchos de los desarrollos que a partir de él han dado varios de sus pupilos y/o influenciados alumnos. Aquí en el Perú entre la gente que cultivamos la electrónica experimental pues nos ha tocado mucho su música sobre todo, a mí en particular también me ha influenciado sus pensamientos, los cuales denotaban la comunión genuina con el universo que el alemán había experimentado desde chico en su Colonia (Alemania) natal de pos guerra.

Bueno, como dicen los Bowery Electric: “words are just words” (“las palabras son sólo palabras”). Y pues éste momento es para celebrar ya que como nos dijo Fa Tica, “él ya está mejor que nosotros”.

Larga vida a Stockhausen! Larga vida a la música electrónica!

Wild3r.
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KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN

Both a rationalist and a mystic, the composer's influence stretched from Boulez to the Beatles
Ivan Hewett
Friday December 7, 2007
KARLHEINZ Stockhausen, who has died aged 79, was one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music. He was fond of quoting Blake's lines "He who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in Eternity's sunrise"; and like Blake, the pursuit of his vision led him down strange, and often awkward paths. The results earned him a reverence among a cult following which is unique among 20th-century composers; but they also earned him a fair amount of ridicule. Roger Scruton's memorable judgment, that Stockhausen "is not so much an Emperor with no clothing, but a splendid set of clothes with no Emperor" sums up the sceptical view, which in Anglo-Saxon countries has become the dominant one since the 1970's.
All this might create the impression of a musical crank with a taste for electronics and vast stage spectacles. What is often forgotten, in the noisy polemics around Stockhausen, is the fact that his visions were put into practice with a colossal speculative and practical intelligence, which earned him the respect and enthusiasm of musicians as diverse as Boulez and the Beatles.

Article continuesWhen Stockhausen was 18, and a music-student in war-devastated Cologne, he read Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. This crystallised the conviction, already forming within him that "the highest calling of mankind can only be to become a musician in the profoundest sense; to conceive and shape the world musically." Stockhausen had reason enough to avert his eyes from the world as it was. His early life was tormented by Nazism and the war it had unleashed. When he was six years old his mother had been taken into an insane asylum; nine years later she was legally killed, one of the victims of the Nazis enforced euthanasia policy. Meanwhile his father had become an enthusiastic Nazi, and eventually fought on the Eastern front, where he went missing and was presumed dead. Stockhausen recalled how as a boy he heard marching songs played incessantly on the radio; an experience which left him with an abiding hatred of regular repetitive rhythms in music. Not all his early experiences were negative ones. The boy was profoundly impressed by the Catholic ritual of rural Germany, where his father had been a schoolteacher, the Easter procession of young girls was recalled, 45 years later, in Act 2 of Montag, one of the cycle of seven linked music-dramas named Licht (Light) to which Stockhausen devoted the last third of his life.

Stockhausen was fortunate in that his speculative turn of mind, and his impatience with inherited forms and vocabulary, caught the mood of the times. Although the Stockhausen of the 1980s seemed a lonely figure, he was not so in the 1950s. As he put it "At the middle of the century . . . an orientation away from mankind began. Once again one looked up to the stars and began an intensive measuring and counting." We see him, in these pictures of the summer music schools at Darmstadt, as just one of many lean, impoverished, idealistic young composers, indelibly marked by the war, and determined to rework the language of music from scratch. They were all possessed of a self-confidence, and an impatience and scorn of their elders, that seems astonishing in these creatively diffident times. Two older composers they made an exception for; one was Anton Webern, whose rigourous form of serialism was to be an inspiration for them; he, however, was already dead, killed accidentally by a member of the occupying forces in Vienna. The other was Olivier Messiaen, in whose class at the Paris Conservatoire many of these composers came together.

Messiaen's experiments in extending arithmetical forms of organisation beyond pitch, to embrace rhythm, timbre and dynamics, confirmed Stockhausen in his belief that this was the way forward. But over the next few years he was to take the serial ideas into wholly now areas. Like Ligeti and Boulez, he passed through a "pointillist" phase, in which the texture is splintered into individual notes, and like them, he soon became dissatisfied with it. Several key works of the 1950s, all since confirmed as classics of the century's music, found a new way of utilising the serial idea, in which the elements to be organised were no longer "points", but groups of variable length, each defined by certain overall features such as speed, density and range. The title of his most famous (and some would say best) piece, Gruppen, has a marvellous exuberance, in which fantasy and rigour feed off one another.

By this time Stockhausen had already become the acknowledged leader in what was then a fledgling medium; electronics. In the threadbare studio of the Paris Technical College he worked on a new dream: "I now wanted a structure, to be realised in an Etude, that was already worked into the micro-dimension of a single sound, so that in every moment, however small, the overall principle of my idea would be present." He worked on this idea with obsessive thoroughness, later recalled by Pierre Schaeffer, the director of the studio: "He absolutely refused to follow my advice; he did not want any advice at all . . . what I remember is a charming young man who . . . could have been involved in a mutually interesting exchange of ideas, but just did not want to listen to any rational view of things and clung on to his Study on One Sound with a perfectly natural sense of ambition."

As a critique of Stockhausen's approach, this seems wide of the mark. The real problem about Stockhausen's approach was not that it was irrational, but that it was altogether too rational. Like Ptolemaic astronomy, it was wedded too much to ideal abstractions, and could not mesh with the real world without a vast sense of strain. It also needed much special pleading on the part of the listener, a problem epitomised in the conclusion of Schaeffer's story: ". . . he got down to splicing and came back very happy, and we said, 'Well, fine, let's have a listen to it.' So we played back the tape - and all you heard was 'Schuuut'. That was Stockhausen's sound study: a sort of 'Schuuutt'. He was terribly pleased with it . . ."

This anecdote echoes the accusation levelled at Stockhausen's music as a whole, that the vast ideas it contains often sound chaotic or merely ugly. He was accused, by Hans Keller in particular, of having no ear (an accusation also levelled against that other mystical rationalist of music, Iannis Xenakis). It is certainly true that Stockhausen's music never has the exquisitely gorgeous sonorities of Boulez, or the hypersensitive shadings and nuances of Ligeti. What he has in abundance is the ability to focus a long and apparently rambling argument in a sudden, blazingly dramatic gesture. Stockhausen's music contains some of the great, defining aural images of 20th-century music, on a par with the flute that opens Debussy's L'après-midi d'un Faune or the upward swoop that ends Schoenberg's Erwartung. Take for example the closing pages of Gruppen, where apocalytic brass chords are teased from one orchestra to another over the listener's head; or the moment in Kontakte where an electronic wail descends into the depths and turns magically into a series of pulses. This amazing piece was created by the same laborious cut-and-splice techniques which had left Schaeffer so unimpressed in 1951, only eight years later, they yielded what is still felt to be a masterpiece of the electronic medium.

That Stockhausen could achieve such a result with such primitive means (as they now seem), in the face of scepticism from his professional elders, and constant hostility and incomprehension from audiences, is a tribute to his strength of character and his unwavering visionary purpose. The obvious fact that it could not have been achieved without a high degree of pragmatism, of "making do," is often overlooked. The visionary in Stockhausen was always allied with the meticulous calculator and the practical musician and studio technician. "Don't give me ideas, give me sounds," he would say to his composition students. This gives the lie to another frequent criticism of Stockhausen; that he was the prisoner of rigid, "mathematical" systems of composing. On the contrary, he was always finding ways of letting spontaneity in. In all his pieces there occurs a little bit of devilment that does not actually belong in the construction of the whole thing. "It shows that I can always allow myself to escape from my own house, from my own system . . ."

That urge became stronger with the years, fueled by his contact with oriental music and religion. As his fame grew, Stockhausen began to travel the world on concert tours. The encounters he had on these tours with Indian and Japanese culture reawakened the religious streak which had lain dormant in Stockhausen since his childhood. It led him to reconsider how his overriding aim in music, to achieve an absolute unity, a "oneness" of form and material, might be brought about. Previously this had been achieved by constructive means, in the studio; now meditation, improvisation, and a willingness to allow the "voices" of the world to speak in his music became more important.

One of the first fruits of this new inclusiveness was Telemusic in which Stockhausen uses electronics to create a kind of world music. Among the electronic sounds we catch fugitive glimpses of Japanese monks chanting, folk songs, Christian hymns. This was followed by Hymnen, in which the hymns of the title are national anthems from around the world, electronically transformed, and Stimmung, Stockhausan's own contribution to flower-power culture. The trend towards spontaneity reached its apogee in 1968 with Aus den Sieban Tagen. These were examples of what Stockhausen called "intuitive music" a kind of group improvization guided by a series of verbal texts. In 1970 came yet another new development, perhaps the most surprising. This was a rediscovery of melody, now conceived as a kind of "formula," whose components would no longer be simple notes, but types of musical behaviour clustered round a note. This formula would then be expanded over long stretches of time, surounded by the same formula in a smaller form.

By this time Stockhausen was no longer the lean, rather hollow-cheeked and impoverishad composer of the 1950s. He was now something of a celebrity, with a reputation that had penetrated even into rock music circles (his photo appears on the cover of Sergeant Pepper). He had acquired the long hair of a rock musician (but not their appetite for drugs, of which he strongly disapproved) and his domestic menage was becoming ever more extraordinary. By the late 1970s the four children of Stockhausen's second marriage (to the painter Mary Bauermeister, who by now had parted from him), together with the children of the first marriage, had been joined in Stockausen's self-designed house at Kurten by two "companions" the flautist Kathinka Paeveer and the clarinettist Suzane Stephens. Both of these, and the composer's children Markus, Majella and Simon, were to become brilliant exponents of Stockhausen's music, and in his seven-opera cycle they assumed crucial roles.

This cycle was begun in Kyoto in 1977, with a notation for the three "formulas" that attach to the three main characters of the cycle. These are Lucifer, Eve and Michael. The whole cycle was a vast creation and redemption myth, in which the dark angel Lucifer battles with, and eventually is vanquished by, the Creator-Angel Michael and Eve, who symbolizes "the rebirth, in music, of mankind." Three operas would be centred around one character, three around the encounter between two of them, and one would equally involve all three.

The combination of vast mythical ambition with a strict permutational form is absolutely typical of Stockhausen. This is why it makes no sense to divide his career into a rationalist and a mystical phase; both were intertwined from the beginning, and they came together in the serial principle, to which Stockhausen, remained loyal to the end. (This is why his music has absolutely nothing in common with the "religious minimalists," of the 1990s). In the early 1970s Stockhausen declared that "Serial thinking is something that's come into our consciousness and will be there forever; it's relativity and nothing else . . . it's a spiritual and democratic attitude toward the world." That may have been true of him, but it certainly hasn't been true for the rest of the musical world, which has for the most part turned its back not just on serialism, but on the whole modernist enterprise. Like Boulez, Stockhausen had a contempt for post-modernism, and for much the same reasons; it was nostalgic, lazy, parochial. But whereas Boulez's activities as conductor and dirigeur of French musical culture kept him before the public eye, Stockhausen retreated from view. Every few years another mystical music-drama emerged from Kurten, to be greeted with a mixture of awed puzzlement and amusement; meanwhile a new generation of "post-modern" composers arose for whom Stockhausen was anathema.

Is it true, as the more extreme of these young historicists claim, that Stockhausen is nothing but a symptom of an aberration in the history of music? If one based one's view of his achievement on Licht, so often theatrically naive and musically otiose, the answer might well be yes. But taken as a whole, Stockhausen's achievement must be the most fertile in ideas, if not of perfectly achieved works, of any composer of the 20th century. Those ideas are strenuous, boldly speculative, and high-minded in a way that doesn't really suit our more cautious age; but when the time to explore and dream comes again, Stockhausen's music will be waiting for it.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, composer, born August 22, 1928; died December 5, 2007

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SUPPORT PERU AVANTGARDE////APOYA LA AVANZADA PERUVIANA

PROMO DEL CD DE FRACTAL

barbarismos

barbarismos
El Comité empezó a ser acosado por la policía. Hipólito Salazar, que había fundado la Federación Indígena Obrera Regional Peruana, fue deportado. Urviola enfermó de tuberculosis y falleció el 27 de enero de 1925. Cuando enterraron a Urviola varios dirigentes de la Pro-Derecho Indígena Tahuantinsuyo no pudieron asistir a su velatorio en el local de la Federación de Choferes, en la calle Sandia. El sepelio fue multitudinario. Los ejércitos particulares de los hacendados se dedicaron a quemar las escuelas que el Comité había abierto en diversos puntos del interior del Perú y persiguieron también a sus alumnos y profesores. Antes de la sublevación de Huancané de 1923, fusilaron a tres campesinos de Wilakunka solo porque asistían a una de estas escuelas. El año siguiente, durante una inspección que realizó a las comunidades de Huancané, el Obispo de Puno, Monseñor Cossío, constató la acción vandálica de los terratenientes que habían incendiado más de sesenta locales escolares. No contentos con quemar las escuelas que organizaba el Comité y asesinar a sus profesores o alumnos, los gamonales presionaron a las autoridades locales para que apresen a los delegados indígenas y repriman a los campesinos que los apoyaban. Entre 1921 y 1922, diversos prefectos y subprefectos perpetraron crímenes y atropellos. Hubo casos donde fueron los mismos gamonales los que se encargaron de asesinar a los delegados de la Pro-Derecho Indígena Tahuantinsuyo. Domingo Huarca, delegado de los comuneros de Tocroyoc, departamento del Cusco, quien había estado en Lima tramitando memoriales, fue brutalmente asesinado. Los gamonales primero lo maltrataron, después le sacaron los ojos y finalmente lo colgaron de la torre de una iglesia. Vicente Tinta Ccoa, del subcomité de Macusani, en Puno, que fue asesinado por los gamonales del lugar. En agosto de 1927, la Pro-Derecho Indígena Tahuantinsuyo dejó de funcionar luego que, mediante una resolución suprema, el gobierno de Leguía prohibió su funcionamiento en todo el país. Gran parte de la promoción de líderes indígenas que se forjó con la Pro-Derecho Indígena Tahuantinsuyo engrosó los nuevos movimientos sociales que iban a desembocar en la formación del Partido Comunista y el Partido Aprista. Fueron los casos de Ezequiel Urviola, Hipólito Salazar y Eduardo Quispe y Quispe, que fueron atraídos por la prédica socialista de José Carlos Mariátegui; o de Juan Hipólito Pévez y Demetrio Sandoval, que se acercaron a Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre y el Partido Aprista. En 1931, después del derrocamiento de Leguía y la muerte de Mariátegui, el Partido Socialista, convertido en Partido Comunista, lanzó la candidatura del indígena Eduardo Quispe y Quispe a la Presidencia de la República. HÉCTOR BÉJAR.

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realismo capitalista peruano, ¡ja, ja!

rojo 2

es más fácil imaginarse el fin del mundo que el fin del capitalismo

En tercer lugar, un dato: una generación entera nació después de la caída del Muro de Berlín. En las décadas de 1960 y 1970, el capitalismo enfrentaba el problema de cómo contener y absorber las energías externas. El problema que posee ahora es exactamente el opuesto: habiendo incorporado cualquier cosa externa de manera en extremo exitosa, ¿puede todavía funcionar sin algo ajeno que colonizar y de lo que apropiarse? Para la mayor parte de quienes tienen menos de veinte años en Europa o los Estados Unidos, la inexistencia de alternativas al capitalismo ya ni siquiera es un problema. El capitalismo ocupa sin fisuras el horizonte de lo pensable. Jameson acostumbraba a detallar con horror la forma en que el capitalismo penetraba en cada poro del inconsciente; en la actualidad, el hecho de que el capitalismo haya colonizado la vida onírica de la población se da por sentado con tanta fuerza que ni merece comentario. Sería peligroso y poco conducente, sin embargo, imaginar el pasado inmediato como un estado edénico rico en potencial político, y por lo mismo resulta necesario recordar el rol que desempeñó la mercantilización en la producción de cultura a lo largo del siglo XX. El viejo duelo entre el détournement y la recuperación, entre la subversión y la captura, parece haberse agotado. Ahora estamos frente a otro proceso que ya no tiene que ver con la incorporación de materiales que previamente parecían tener potencial subversivo, sino con su precorporación, a través del modelado preventivo de los deseos, las aspiraciones y las esperanzas por parte de la cultura capitalista. Solo hay que observar el establecimiento de zonas culturales «alternativas» o «independientes» que repiten interminablemente los más viejos gestos de rebelión y confrontación con el entusiasmo de una primera vez. «Alternativo», «independiente» yotros conceptos similares no designan nada externo a la cultura mainstream; más bien, se trata de estilos, y de hecho de estilos dominantes, al interior del mainstream.
Nadie encarnó y lidió con este punto muerto como Kurt Cobain y Nirvana. En su lasitud espantosa y su furia sin objeto, Cobain parecía dar voz a la depresión colectiva de la generación que había llegado después del fin de la historia, cuyos movimientos ya estaban todos anticipados, rastreados, vendidos y comprados de antemano. Cobain sabía que él no era nada más que una pieza adicional en el espectáculo, que nada le va mejor a MTV que una protesta contra MTV, que su impulso era un cliché previamente guionado y que darse cuenta de todo esto incluso era un cliché. El impasse que lo dejó paralizado es precisamente el que había descripto Jameson: como ocurre con la cultura posmoderna en general, Cobain se encontró con que «los productores de la cultura solo pueden dirigirse ya al pasado: la imitación de estilos muertos, el discurso a través de las máscaras y las voces almacenadas en el museo imaginario de una cultura que es hoy global». En estas condiciones incluso el éxito es una forma del fracaso desde el momento en que tener éxito solo significa convertirse en la nueva presa que el sistema quiere devorar. Pero la angustia fuertemente existencial de Nirvana y Cobain, sin embargo, corresponde a un momento anterior al nuestro y lo que vino después de ellos no fue otra cosa que un rock pastiche que, ya libre de esa angustia, reproduce las formas del pasado sin ansia alguna.
La muerte de Cobain confirmó la derrota y la incorporación final de las ambiciones utópicas y prometeicas del rock en la cultura capitalista. Cuando murió, el rock ya estaba comenzando a ser eclipsado por el hiphop, cuyo éxito global presupone la lógica de la precorporación a la que me he referido antes. En buena parte del hip hop, cualquier esperanza «ingenua» en que la cultura joven pueda cambiar algo fue sustituida hace tiempo por una aceptación dura de la versión más brutalmente reduccionista de la «realidad». «En el hip hop», escribió SimonReynolds en su ensayo de 1996 para The Wire :
«Lo real» tiene dos significados. En primer lugar, hace referencia a la música auténtica que no se deja limitar por los intereses creados y se niega a cambiar o suavizar su mensaje para venderse a la industria musical. Pero «real» también es aquella música que refleja una «realidad» constituida por la inestabilidad económica del capitalismo tardío, el racismo institucionalizado, la creciente vigilancia y el acoso sobre la juventud de parte de la policía. «Lo real» es la muerte de lo social: es lo que ocurre con las corporaciones que, al aumentar sus márgenes de ganancia, en lugar de aumentar los sueldos o los beneficios sociales de sus empleados responden […] reduciendo su personal, sacándose de encima una parte importante de la fuerza de trabajo para crear un inestable ejército de empleados freelance y demedio tiempo, sin los beneficios de la seguridad social.


MARK FISHER.

perú post indie

Haz el ejercicio de pasear una tarde por la plaza del Cuzco, siéntate a la vera de su fuente y distinguirás entre cuzqueños, entre las decenas de argentinos hippies (muchos realmente insoportables), unos cuantos chilenos y de esa pléyade de "gringos" -que vienen dispuestos a ser estafados, bricheados, etc-, a unos curiosos especímenes: los limeños.
Contrariamente a lo que creemos los hijos de esta tierra, lo primero que nos delatará será nuestro "acento". Sí, querido limeño, tenemos acento, un acentazo como doliente, como que rogamos por algo y las mujeres, muchas, además un extraño alargamiento de la sílaba final. Pero lo que realmente suele llamarme la atención es la manera como nos vestimos para ir al Cuzco, porque, el Cuzco es una ciudad, no el campo. Tiene universidades, empresas, negocios, etc. Siin embargo, casi como esos gringos que para venir a Sudamérica vienen disfrazados de Indiana Jones o su variante millenial, nosotros nos vestimos como si fuésemos a escalar el Himalaya. Ya, es verdad que el frío cuzqueño puede ser más intenso que el de la Costa -aunque este invierno me esté haciendo dudarlo- pero echa un vistazo a todo tu outfit: la casaca Northfake, abajo otra chaquetilla de polar o algo así de una marca similar, las botas de montañista, tus medias ochenteras cual escarpines, todo...
Y es que esa es la forma como imaginamos la Sierra: rural, el campo, las montañas, aunque en el fondo no nos movamos de un par de discotecas cusqueñas. Es decir, bien podrías haber venido vestido como en Lima con algo más de abrigo y ya; pero no, ir al Cuzco, a la sierra en general es asistir a un pedazo de nuestra imaginación geográfica que poco tiene que ver con nuestros hábitos usuales del vestido, del comportamiento, etc. Jamás vi en Lima a nadie tomarse una foto con una "niña andina" como lo vi en Cuzco y no ha sido porque no haya niños dispuestos a recibir one dollar por una foto en Lima, pero es que en Cuzquito (cada vez que escucho eso de "Cuzquito" me suda la espalda) es más cute. Ahora, sólo para que calcules la violencia de este acto, ¿te imaginas que alguien del Cuzco -Ayacucho, Huancavelica, Cajamarca o hasta de Chimbote- viniese y te pidiera tomarse una foto con tu hijita, tu sobrino, o lo que sea en Larcomar para subirlo a Instagram o al Facebook? ¿Hardcore, no?


FRED ROHNER
Historia Secreta del Perú 2

as it is when it was

sonido es sonido

sonido es sonido

pura miel

nogzales der wil

RETROMANÍA

"...Pero los 2000 fueron también la década del reciclado rampante: géneros del pasado revividos y renovados, material sonoro vintage reprocesado y recombinado. Con demasiada frecuencia podía detectarse en las nuevas bandas de jóvenes, bajo la piel tirante y las mejillas rosadas, la carne gris y floja de las viejas ideas... Pero donde lo retro verdaderamente reina como sensibilidad dominante y paradigma creativo es en la tierra de lo hipster, el equivalente pop de la alta cultura. Las mismas personas que uno esperaría que produzcan (en tanto artistas) o defiendan (en tanto consumidores) lo no convencional y lo innovador: ese es justamente el grupo más adicto al pasado. En términos demográficos, es exactamente la misma clase social de avanzada, pero en vez de ser pioneros e innovadores han cambiado de rol y ahora son curadores y archivistas. La vanguardia devino en retaguardia." SIMON REYNOLDS Retromanía

kpunk

las cosas como son

las cosas como son

las cosas como son II

las cosas como son II