Contemporary Composers and Experimental Projects
The history of Electronic Music, from Stockhausen to DJ Spooky and Squarepusher, was the subject of Sonic Acts (1998). This was followed by three experimental projects searching for the influence of the digital medium in film and music: Sonic Images (1998), Sonic Fragments / The Poetics of Digital Fragmentation (1999) and Sonic Genetics (2000).
In 1999 Scheffer made Music for Airports, a video on Brian Eno's music of the same name as arranged by Bang on a Can founders Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, David Lang and Evan Ziporyn. The sprawling In the Ocean (2001), on present day New York composers, features Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Elliott Carter, John Cage, Brian Eno and the Bang on a Can founders.
Scheffer is also working on several in depth films on specific composers — The Present Day Composer Refuses to Die on Frank Zappa, in cooperation with the Zappa Family Trust (2000, featuring The Mothers of Invention, Pierre Boulez and Ensemble Modern), and the 90-minute Zappa feature Phaze II, The Big Note (2002), to be followed by a third film which will complete his Zappa trilogy. Scheffer has been following and filming Elliott Carter for 25 years; this culminated in A Labyrinth of Time (2005), a portrait on the composer as well as a view of the history of modernism in the 20th century. In 2005 Scheffer also finished a documentary on the Tea-Opera composed by Tan Dun, with Pierre Audi (Director) and Xiu Ying Li (libretto), Tea.
Read more about this topic: Frank Scheffer
Famous quotes containing the words contemporary, composers, experimental and/or projects:
“That nameless and infinitely delicate aroma of inexpressible tenderness and attentiveness which, in every refined and honorable attachment, is contemporary with the courtship, and precedes the final banns and the rite; but which, like the bouquet of the costliest German wines, too often evaporates upon pouring love out to drink, in the disenchanting glasses of the matrimonial days and nights.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“Whenever a man acts purposively, he acts under a belief in some experimental phenomenon. Consequently, the sum of the experimental phenomena that a proposition implies makes up its entire bearing upon human conduct.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)