CNM Concerts XVII-XX
Sixth Annual Exchange
Midwest Collegiate Composers
An annual spring festival of contemporary music
featuring new music from the composition programs of
The University of Colorado-Boulder,
The University of Missouri, Kansas City, and
The University of Iowa
Jonah Elrod, Nima Hamidi & Joshua Marquez, Student Committee
Session IV — Presentation of Papers
| Recent Trends in Cello Notation | Zane Winter (UMKC) |
| The notation of music for the cello has been forced to expand significantly over the last fifty-plus years in order to account for new techniques developed by composers and performers. Presenting a chronology for the development and evolution of new notations helps to isolate the necessary features of a new notation powerful enough to suit the needs of composers today and in the future. Specifically, this paper explores the evolution and standardization of notations for various types of glissandi, quarter tone notation, and the notation of multilayer scalable parameters. | |
Musical Strands and Their Use in the Art Music Canon |
Jim Simmons (CU-B) |
| I am currently researching a ubiquitous sort of musical expression common to the 20th and 22st centuries, which has its roots in Bach and the late Baroque. This sort of musical idea shares characteristics of other types while being of a different sort, combining the drive of an ostinato with the presence of a melody or theme, but often demonstrating a propensity for both evolution and stasis, making it a challenge to classify (it also will not follow the rules of a traditional tone row). I call these phenomena “strands,” and am currently creating my own taxonomy and terminology to grapple with them, while also researching what other theorists and composers have to say on the subject, though, as of it, the phenomena have not been officially named by anyone but myself (although when I start describing them to another composer or theorist, they usually know what I’m talking about.) It is my belief that this widely practiced form of musical expression should named, talked about, analyzed, and given the chance to move both music theorists and composers into new realms of creativity and interpretation (whether or not the phenomena bear my labels or not). | |
| From abstract to concrete vs from concrete to abstract: Opposite vectors of development in artistic language in painting and music. |
Leonid Iogansen (UI) |
| It is often thought that aesthetics of visual and musical arts develop in parallel with each other and their languages of expression become progressively more abstract. The following presentation challenges this notion by presenting a case that the languages of expression of the two arts develop in opposite directions. As visual arts diverge from representational aesthetic to embrace abstract images, musical arts tend to do the opposite: they embrace progressively concrete sounds. This presentation explores how the aesthetic of the two media change and how they effect and influence each other while taking the opposite course. | |