Composing With Media"For a long time a form had been in my mind which I believed to be the only in which a musician might express himself in the theater. I called it, in my own private language, making music with the media of the stage." — Arnold Schoenberg, 1912 OvertureSince Richard Wagner introduced the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk in his music dramas, composers have turned beyond music to other disciplines — to embrace all the arts as a single unified form of expression. In essence, composing with media. This notion of using compositional techniques that derive from music for the organization of media that are not musical, has had a profound effect on the way artists of other disciplines have embraced time-based genres, including: film, kinetic sculpture, video and digital media. Moreover, the influence of interdisciplinary forms emerging from the work of composers and sound artists has played an important role in the evolution of digital media forms, advancing such paradigms specific to the medium such as integration, interactivity, immersion, and hypermedia, and the resulting forms of narrativity that have reshaped contemporary art. Richard Wagner and the Gesamtkunstwerk"Whereas the public, that representation of daily life, forgets the confines of the auditorium, and lives and breathes now only in the artwork which seems to it as Life itself, and on the stage which seems the wide expanse of the whole World." Notes on Richard Wagner
Video: Festpielhaus Theater, Bayreuth, Germany, built in 1876 John Cage and the Music of Indeterminacy"What'll art become? A family reunion? If so, let's have it with people in the round, each individual free to lend his attention wherever he will." Notes on John Cage
Video: John Cage at the California Institute of the Arts Audio: Imaginary Landscape #2 for percussion ensemble, 1942 Video: Variations V, a collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and film by Stan Vanderbeek, 1964 Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Music of Theatre"Things separated in different times and spaces — people, activities, events from daily life (nothing pretends to be "as if," nothing is "meant"; everything is composed, everything means itself) — compressed into one space, into one time: THEATRE" Notes on Karlheinz Stockhausen
Audio: Studie II for synthesized sounds on tape, 1954 Audio: Kontakte for piano, percussion, and tape, 1960 Video: Originale, music theatre, 1961 Morton Subotnick’ Electronic "Sound Sculpture""All the works somehow come together through editing and splicing and thinking and then I would have a piece that was that year’s work." Notes on Morton Subotnick
Audio: Switched-on-Bach for Moog Synthesizer, Wendy Carlos, 1968 Audio: Silver Apples of the Moon, for Buchla Synthesizer, 1969 Video: Ramon Sender and Pauline Oliveros, Desert Ambulance, multimedia performance, San Francisco Tape Music Center, 1964 Robert Wilson’s Visual Theatre"Go like you would to a museum, like you would look at a painting. Appreciate the color of the apple, the line of the dress, the glow of the light... You just enjoy the scenery, the architectural arrangements in time and space, the music, the feelings they all evoke. Listen to the pictures." Notes on Robert Wilson
Video: Einstein on the Beach, music theatre collaboration by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, 1976
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