In re: ‘Experimental Music’

John Cage is universally associated with the phrase experimental music. But what did that phrase mean, for Cage and for Cage’s predecessors? I begin with Cage and Lejaren Hiller, both writing important texts on ‘experimental music’ in 1959. From there, I trace the phrase backwards, eventually reaching Emile Zola, Gertrude Stein, and William James. A final section traces the phrase forward to Cage and Hiller’s collaboration on HPSCHD (1969)

25 years of ESCOM: Achievements and challenges

This reflection on the first 25 years of ESCOM’s activities is in two parts. In the first part we analyse the country and discipline spread of contributors to its journal Musicae Scientiae and its formal membership. In the second we address the choice of “cognitive sciences of music” as the initial focus of both Society and journal by comparing the topics of early meetings and publications with those that are current now. Journal contributors and members are both concentrated in a small number of countries. When corrected for population size, the countries with the highest levels of activity are, in order: Finland, Estonia, UK, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria. This has not changed substantially over the duration of ESCOM’s existence. In contrast, there have been significant changes in the disciplinary spread of contributions, psychology becoming increasingly popular in recent years to the near exclusion of some other disciplinary approaches including ethnomusicology, computational modelling and theoretical musicology. Current topics include performance and composition, emotion, musical development, perception, music therapy and well-being, music learning, preferences, cognition, and neuropsychological approaches. An early aspiration of the Society was that the wide range of disciplines represented by the cognitive sciences of music might eventually converge, but this has proved difficult to achieve. An increasing convergence on the use of English as its normative language, however, has provided ESCOM with both new challenges and some opportunities

Liber Amicorum Paul Delnoy

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe