Common Elements
Some of the more common techniques include:
- Extended techniques: Any of a number of methods of performing with voice or a musical instrument 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 Rowe is one musician to have experimented with such prepared guitar techniques). Cage's prepared piano 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 bridge and play the inverse side, causing resonating bell-like harmonic 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 Cowell's known as "string piano"), a dozen or more piano keys may be depressed simultaneously with the forearm to 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 glissando").
- Extended vocal techniques—any vocalized sounds that are not normally utiliized in classical or popular music, such as moaning, howling, vocal fry, overtone singing, screaming, death growls, or making a clicking noise. Artists such as Cathy Berberian, Roy Hart, Meredith Monk, Michael Vetter, and Björk. Berio's Sequenza III for female voice (1965) and Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) utilize many of these techniques.
- Incorporation of instruments, tunings, rhythms 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 notation, non-conventional written/graphic 'instructions' actively interpreted by the performer(s). This practice continued through composers/artists such as La Monte Young, George Brecht, George Crumb, Annea Lockwood, Yoko Ono, and Krzysztof Penderecki.
- Creating experimental musical instruments for enhancing the timbre of compositions and exploring new techniques or possibilities. Artists such as Harry Partch, Luigi Russolo, Bradford Reed, Iner Souster, Neptune, Hans Reichel.
- Creative use of sound recording techniques, such as the use of a tape loop to create a tape phase.
- Removal of perceived barriers of traditional concert settings: performers scattered among the audience; audience on stage; events designed to encourage (or compel) audience participation; anticonic activities (piano burning; attacking a guitar with an axe; threatening the audience; nudity; etc.)
Read more about this topic: Experimental Music
Famous quotes containing the words common and/or elements:
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“An illustrious individual remarks that Mrs. [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton is the salt, Anna Dickinson the pepper, and Miss [Susan B.] Anthony the vinegar of the Female Suffrage movement. The very elements get the “white male” into a nice pickle.”
—Anonymous, U.S. women’s magazine contributor. The Revolution (August 19, 1869)