Robert Schwalm News
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2024-04-24
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2021-07-23 16:01:13
A few years ago, in a book about ambient music that i co-edited with Monty Adkins, i wrote a chapter where i proposed the possibility of ‘meta-ambient’, the idea that a great deal of music not necessarily immediately heard as being related or even connected to ambient – as it…
2021-07-02 08:19:00
How classical music ignored the awakening electronic dream
[…] out to the progressive non-classical audience. This, of course, does not mean dumbing down the classical masterworks, so no Beethoven Nine with added synthesizer. However a post here discussed the difficulty of finding music to preface that symphony. So how about Beethoven's Ninth prefaced in the first half with Steve Roach's essay in electronica Truth & Beauty? Or Pictures at an Exhibition paired with Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings, and Mahler's Sixth Symphony following J. Peter Schwalm's The Beauty of Disaster?Visionary composer and Renaissance man Jonathan Harvey was deeply committed to new technologies. In the 1980s he was invited by Pierre Boulez to work at IRCAM's cutting edge electronic studio in Paris, where he composed another overlooked 20th century masterwork Mortuos Plango, Vivis Voco - listen via this link - and his other notable compositions utilising electronic sounds include Bhakti (for chamber ensemble and quadraphonic tape), Advaya (for cello, electronic keyboard […]
2021-01-14 10:33:00
Genres converge in this legendary album dedicated to Richard Wagner
[…] in 1976, and how genres converged as Olivier Messiaen was a fellow recipient. This award compelled public libraries, universities and school in France to hold copies of Timewind, resulting in overnight orders for 25,000 copies. Schulze's follow-up album in 1976 Moondawn reached number two in the French charts, headed only by Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here. Since then Schulze has released more than sixty albums. Although inspired by Wagner, Timewind is, unlike J. Peter Schwalm's noteworthy Wagner Transformed, not an electronic reworking of Wagnerian themes. Rather it is new music that takes Wagner's apocalyptic vision to a new level using electronics. Wagner reappears in other Klaus Schulze albums; notably in Das Wagner Desaster (1994) inspired by the quarrel between Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. However, although openly acknowledging his debt to Wagner, Klaus Schulze is not a sycophant. When questionned in an interview about the influence of the master of Bayreuth, he […]
2020-12-11 20:24:24
The time-themed soundscapes are resilient at the core and solitary in tone
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- timeline: Composers (Europe).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): S...