Experimental music: If you are not failing regularly, you are probably not doing it right. ... Good experimental music is like a bank heist: high-risk, a huge chance of failure, but an enormous pay-off. Bad music is like a savings account. ... "Form" is not simply putting material from the start of the piece at the end of the piece. - this is It Was All A Dream Form. ... Avoid Child’s Story Form: ". . .and then this happened. . .and then this happened. . .and then this happened. . .and then this happened. . .". ... Consider Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch as a musical form. ... If there isn't a good reason for the way your piece ends, there probably isn't a good reason for it starting.

Abstract: I start from the principle that composition is a historical lineage of techniques that have traditionally been applied to music but need not be. To illustrate this, I apply composition principles to the writing of this PhD thesis. In describing this process, I draw parallels between the musical work I have composed during 2013-2017 and the process of thesis writing. Along the way, I show how quantization is not only central to my composition practice but fundamental to the act of composing; I rethink the basic epistemological principles of PhD research, using John Cage's ideology of chance and Arthur Koestler's idea of bisociation; I develop a new set of categories for classifying artworks that use combinatorics, under the umbrella neologism "completism"; expand upon James Tenney's ideas to create a new typology of musical form based on completist principles; and finish by composing the bibliography, font, page-layout, semantics, word choice, and syntax of the Conclusion of this thesis.

If music is ‘organized sound’, as Varese posits, then form is the ‘organized’ half of that phrase. If you have one job as a composer, it is arranging things in time in an interesting order. This ordering takes place at small and large scales in a musical work, and we could describe the largest scale of ordering as form. My recently-completed PhD thesis proposed a new theory of musical form, which extrapolated many of James Tenney’s ideas about the subject. However, in that document I did not discuss the aesthetics of form i.e. what makes a good musical form. Whilst it might seem that this would be an impossible task, given the huge stylistic range of Contemporary Music, I think there are actually a pretty fixed set of criteria we could use for assessing a given form. As a working definition, we could consider a form as being "bad" when the composer’s intention conflicts with the audience’s experience.

One could perhaps see Charlie Sdraulig’s pieces as similar “anecdote factories”, in which rules and systems of interactions are set up to govern the interaction of the performers. This approach could be traced back to earlier precedents such as Christian Wolff’s "For Pianist" or "Duo For Pianists I & II", or seen in James Saunders’ recent music. But the difference in Sdraulig’s music is the reduced sphere of action in which these interactions take place.

The ideas of a “cannon” and a “canon of works” have one thing in common: to use either seems pretty outdated. However, it would seem churlish to ignore the popularity of a particular work and its prevalence in concerts, even if we baulk from referring to it as a “classic” – a word which, whether referring to a musical work or a car, seems designed for middle-aged white men. One work which has become a frequent feature of concerts of experimental music is G Douglas Barrett’s "A Few Silence (Location, Date, Time of Performance)", a work which would classify as being over-played, if it wasn’t for the paucity of experimental music concerts and, more importantly, the way in which its construction is so contingent upon environment, performer, and instrument that each iteration reveals a new type of richness. "A Few Silence" engages with several recurrent aspects of Barrett’s work – transcription and the grid.

We set out with no theme and with no set format – I just cast the blankest of pages and slimmest of stipulations out into the shimmering cloud of Huddersfield's postgrad intellect and it came back with ideas clumped to it like iron filings. Much to everyone's surprise there were themes that emerged, however unintentionally, or, at least, overlaps and resemblances...

Abstract: This paper takes a statistical approach to keyboard usage in Beethoven's pianoforte sonatas through the analysis of MIDI files of the works. The data obtained is used to draw conclusions about Beethoven's usage of his piano keyboards over this repertoire. It is shown that Beethoven's key usage closely approximates a normal distribution, and the data is used to examine possible biomechanical, aesthetic, pedagogic and topological reasons for this and the implications this has for the predictability of composers and improvisers who compose or improvise at a piano. Two solutions to this statistical bias are proposed: the creation of alternatively shaped keyboards which compensate for the aforementioned biases by inverting the size of keys relative to their statistical probability of usage, and the creation of a pure data patch that remaps MIDI keyboards through the random reassignment of pitches. This research is part of an ongoing collaboration with Alex Grimes, looking at the role of topology in piano music.

"Some of my favourite of Robert's work are the sprawling, multi-layered, metaphorically-rich, alchemical music-theatre works, he wrote in The Hague, such as "Sacrament or: Meanwhile the earth has intercourse with the sun, and is impregnated for its yearly parturition" (2011), and "Nuit or: That which is below is as above, and that which is above is as below." (2010), both of which married an expansive vision to an aesthetic of financial pragmatism I’ve rarely seen matched; both performances, unfortunately, are barely documented – you really had to be there…"

"To my knowledge, Elias Canetti was the first European writer to draw the parallel between the conductor and power in his book "Crowds and Power": 'There is no more obvious expression of power than the performance of a conductor. Every detail of his public behaviour throws light on the nature of power. Someone who knew nothing about power could discover all its attributes, one after another, by careful observation of a conductor.' ... The orchestra is not totalitarian. In fact, it cannot be a model for anything other than a socio-political organization of the same size. The movement of 100 or so people all following a set of instructions towards a single musical goal strikes me more as a unique type of political and social situation which has no other analogue in the real world that I can think of – another reason why mobilizing it to model a non-existent social situation seems to miss the point."

This data shows that, for the 68 competitions surveyed in 2010, a duet lasting 5-7 minutes between any combination of flute, violin, clarinet and cello is eligible for the most competitions (8). Other high-eligibility pieces include a 10 minute piece for symphony orchestra (7), a 3-7 minute piece for any 3 or 4 member combination of violin, flute, cello and clarinet (7), a 10 minute quartet for the same ensemble (7), and a 5-7 minute solo flute piece ... Given the results of this research, the author recommends that composers interested in increasing the possibility of winning competitions by submitting a large amount of entries, produce pieces with the durations and instrumentations listed on the right side of the page.

Psychological insecurity frequently plays a role in the adoption of unique styles by artists. Since the abandonment of the Romantic ideals of art as a mediator of the universal sublime, it has been increasingly seen as a form of “self-­‐expression”, with all the attendant difficulties that this brings with it. Art provides a useful outlet for presenting to the world a coherent version of “self” – using style as a way to highlight the uniqueness of the individual and project characteristics that amplify a positive and simplistic self-­‐image, shorn of conflict, out into the marketplace.

This paper attempts to use an analysis of the system for publicly funding music in The Netherlands to highlight what this author sees as a worrying move towards the free-market mentality in the performing arts that is contributing to a sub-prime culture of art. The paper is split up into two sections: One in which I discuss the structure of the public funding system and particular trends which have recently appeared in it, and the second, in which I speculate on the consequences for the type of tendencies highlighted in the first half of the paper. The Netherlands provides an ideal barometer of the artistic climate throughout Europe due to its compact size, transparent and well-documented bureaucracy, and funding structures similar to other, neighbouring European countries.

No response can come too late; unless it is “don’t shoot”. So forgive my tardiness in analyzing a paper already dust-snowed in the yellowing purgatory of library archives. In 2002, Reinhold Friedl’s article “Some Sadomasochistic Aspects of Musical Pleasure” was published in Leonardo Music Journal to a criticism of anechoic and tumbleweeded magnitudes.2 But a decennially amnesiaced birthday can always be passed off as an anniversary, even if time has hardened the celebratory cake as much as our loveless souls.

This “actual rubato” is not as a romantic stylistic, decorative flourish but temporal distortions in clock time created by the engagement of a performer with a score that induces flow, and the discrepancy between the psychological inertial reference frames of the performer and those of the audience. The distortion of times created by the ability of musical actions to place players in a state of flow has another off-shoot, little considered by composers: that each musical action has its own “mass”. In the same way that the mass of an object will warp the space-time around it, we can talk of actions or sets of actions creating different levels of temporal distortions, according to the psychological and physical challenges they present to the performer, the listening skills of the audience members and their attendant skill-sets.

This edition of the zine has been published to coincide with the Hague-based group Acid Police Noise Ensemble’s music theatre piece; Stockhausen Serves Terrorism, 10 Years Of Sodom and Gomorrah, which will be performed on 11 September 2011, in Nutshuis, Den Haag. Put together in collaboration with Anonymous Stateless Immigrants, it is an evening of political work analyzing 9/11 and its fall-out through Stockhausen and Pasolini, and forms the basis for the texts in the first half of the zine. However, there are also fantastic articles on Maslow, improvisation, and death, as well as a reprinted version of an extremely important, but overlooked, essay by Joseph Massad on the historico-cultural implications of the Abu-Graihb atrocities.

It is widely believed that humans perceive time exponentially rather than linearly. e.g. A periodic set of events spread over a large time period will appear to get further apart, the longer they are observed. Thus, through mapping a set of linear time-values onto an exponential curve one could closer approximate the human perception of time. Throughout the centuries it has been thought that the Golden Section has proportional qualities ideal for architecture, art and music. As a purely academic exercise I decided to combine the two above ideas into a single approach.

"Molly's Song 3 - Shades of Crimson" is a piece for guitar, viola, alto flute, four radios and music boxes. The piece, like much of Rebecca Saunders' work, is sparse and uses a plethora of instrumental techniques that sit on the boundaries between pitch noise and silence."