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!!!3. -- Listening Historical examples demonstrate how music sometimes distracts us from our environments : strolls during specific concerts in the groves or under a canopy, orchestras set in gardens or in music pavilions, areas set up through a soniferous garden consisting of “auto-resonant” (or “autophone”) instruments played by the water and the wind (eolian harp, musical automats, ‘shishi-odoshi’ or deer scarer, ‘sozu’ or water fountain, ‘fuurin’ or wind bells, etc.), and even imitating instruments (bird organs, such as ‘merline’ and ‘serinette’, which imitated respectively the timbre of blackbirds and of finches, etc.). Let us explore the history of music from the point of view of its dialogue with the fortuitous and contingent, considered as an extension of the musical means of creation and diffusion. A whole series of experimental dimensions linked to instrumentation represents part of the conditions of contemporary music and determines the challenges of a musical horizon: the horizon operated by Karlheinz Stockhausen in Mikrophonie (I et II) (1964/1965) in which a musical piece is created through experimenting with an instrument, by David Tudor in Rainforest (1968/1976) and John Cage in Cartridge Music (1960) concerning the integration of live music in the composition of a piece, or even, the challenges launched by initiatives considering the recording as a support of creation and investigation of transmission of live music (for instance ‘GrammophonMusik’ created by Alexander Dillmann in 1910 and Heinz Stuckenschmidt in 1925 and carried out in 1929 by Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch before Pierre Schaeffer starts the adventure of concrete music, then electroacoustic and acousmatic music). Such experimentations are rich by their characters and contents and they seem connected to another question, concerning the intent of playing and resounding the real in a musical piece: experimentations using borrowed sounds in the works of Charles Ives, Gustav Mahler, even Béla Bartók (and even, more remote in the past, in specific works by Jean-Philippe Rameau using in the shape of instrumental additions some acoustic images of chaos and storms), and those, before the recent access to sampling techniques, by John Cage (Roaratorio in 1979), Luciano Berio (Sinfonia, 1968), Karlheinz Stockhausen (Telemusik, 1966 , Hymnen, 1967) and in electroacoustic music (the series of Presque Rien (Almost Nothing) by Luc Ferrari, 1967-1998), and the very recent works linked to specific sonification techniques to produce resonant and musical material from variations of data picked up in the surroundings (the works by Charles Dodge and Andrea Polli). Similarly, taking into account the environment in a piece found its peak in 4'33" by John Cage when on 29th August 1952 this “noisy” piece had been interpreted by David Tudor in a concert hall (the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York) whose back door was directly open to the outside, allowing the fortuitous dubbing of surrounding sounds from the outside and sounds inadvertently produced by the public to “compose” the music. Experimentations concerning the use of space and acoustic multi-dimensions that may develop in a musical piece, have existed in European music for several centuries - one example : ‘Cori Spezzati’ (separated and allocated choirs) by Giovanni Gabrieli (1557-1612). Today, the development of instrumental dimensions linked to space is expressed through the appropriation and musicalization of computerized techniques of spatialization and those linked to networks and streaming techniques. Regarding the use of distance through the positioning, travel or movement of musicians beyond the walls of a concert hall, in order to create acoustic effects of intensity and accentuation, Hector Berlioz in his book Les Soirées de L'Orchestre (Evenings with the Orchestra), and more specifically in a fiction titled Euphonia ou la Ville Musicale (Euphonia or the Musical City), described monumental concerts of over ten thousand musicians spread through the city. Another example is Charles Ives' Universe Symphony in 1911, uncompleted, for which he imagined several orchestras and instrumental ensembles, each tuned on various harmonic systems and playing simultaneously despite being spread across mountains and valleys. Furthermore, Karlheinz Stockhausen' works Sternklang — Parkmusic (1971) for 5 groups of instrumentalists over a duration of about three hours and Musik für ein Haus (1968) consisting of collective compositions simultaneously performed in four rooms of a same house, or even, Alphabet für Liège (1972), a work lasting 4 hours spread in fourteen rooms open side by side whereas the listeners were crossing these rooms and wandering (set in the basement of the Exhibition Hall of Liege in Belgium, which was under construction at the time). More recently, other wandering and ambulatory works (musicians and/or audience) are developed, such as, as Bastien Gallet pointed out, Rebecca Saunders' works in the series Chroma (2003), an instrumental “spatialized” piece utilizing the allocation and distribution of the musicians over various acoustic rooms within the same building. In addition, the Locus Sonus research group explored through networked acoustic spaces the concepts of “field spatialization” and “networked sonic spaces” in which sounds can cross and be transmitted in acoustic spaces of various nature (natural or synthetic, close by or remote: transmission through loud-speakers in a local area, in “outdoor” traveled-through places, streaming transmission in disconnected and distant spaces, intricate transmissions and acoustics between physical and virtual spaces). In these experiments, each space brought its own reverberation qualities and ambiance, according to the position of the listeners who might also have been spread in these various spaces (physical, virtual, mobile, etc.). {br}{br}
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