Composer of the Day!

Today's Composer of the Day! is Kurt Schwitters.

(1887-1948)

Schwitters was a Dadaist/Surrealist painter, sculptor, poet, and sound artist ("composer"). He experimented with, well, lots of different things, especially collage. He invented his own school of collage-based art called "Merz".

Here are some things that he made:


That is fun to look at, no? How about this one, it's called "Murder Machine":

Hm. Perhaps marginally less fun to look at, but still full of Bauhaus-y goodness!

Anyway. Here are lots more things to look at...er, at which to look.

Schwitters was a pioneer in sound art, taking advantage of emerging recording technologies to design recorded nonsense poetry. The most famous example is the Ursonate (link to score).

I know, right? How freaking cool is that? But here is a link to Schwitters performing the piece:

A Link to Schwitters Perorming Ursonate.

Awesome. You should listen to his music.

Composer of the Day!

Today's Composer of the Day! is Charles Amirkhanian.

(b. 1945-)

Amirkhanian's music is mostly electro-acoustic, focusing on recordings of him speaking. He manipulates the spoken words, repeated in various guises, and overlays them. Basically, he composes auditory collages created from words. This has been called several things like sound-poetry.

I find it remarkable that he creates the illusion of space with his recording techniques. Also, the words become so decontextualized that they lose meaning and become only sound-objects.

Here is a link to some pieces. Scroll down to number 10, "Just". (It opens in Windows Media Player.)

The entire composition is made of 4 words, "rainbow, chug, bandit, bomb". Notice the layering and overlapping techniques he uses to change textures and create a sense of growth and decay, building up textures, then collapsing them. Listen to the whole thing!...Neat!

Here is a link to a video (that I can't figure out how to embed) with a piece called "Radii" which is composed of words that have the root "radio". I have no idea what the video has to do with anything, but the piece is cool.

Cool stuff. You should check out his music!
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