Styles
And although the majority of his works are considered material aimed toward the “vocal experiment” and 12-tone side of music, his pieces do have a wide range of styles, even with such a small size of composed repertoire. For instance, he put forth many arrangements of Bach, Beethoven, Webern and Wagner; sometimes using their traditional concepts to the idea of untraditional techniques and ways of listening to them.
Theories self-created and inherited were/are often practiced at performances. He believed that you could increase a student’s vocal range through the use of specific psychological methods, or physical placement. For example, placing singers far apart in a triangular shape causes a musically spatial feeling, and therefore sounds much different from the density when singers are close together. Other times he may just take a traditional piece and turn it into an improvised 13-voice canon. Pieces using such theories can be found in his most famous works’ set; the “Fur Stimmen (...missa est)” choral pieces, like “:! (madrasha 2)” and “AMN”. The first, an unpronounceable title, means “a non-verbal outburst or exclamation”, and used to explore the options in human phonetic sounds, such as vocal and musical versions in lips, tongue, glottus, nasal and other pressures through pitches. The second (unvocalized Hebrew) emphasizes the idea of musical space, with several large gaps in the piece, as well as bizarre vocal experiments.
Read more about this topic: Dieter Schnebel
Famous quotes containing the word styles:
“... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Can we love our children when they are homely, awkward, unkempt, flaunting the styles and friendships we don’t approve of, when they fail to be the best, the brightest, the most accomplished at school or even at home? Can we be there when their world has fallen apart and only we can restore their faith and confidence in life?”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)