Experimental Music - Common Elements

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.)