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"Vera Wyse Munro (1897-1966) was a pioneering New Zealand radio broadcaster, improviser, and experimental sound artist. As an artist, her primary media were amateur radio broadcasts, Morse poetry, and sono-topographical scores. Via her broadcasts, which were frequently received by amateur radio operators as far afield as the United States and Europe, Munro initiated some of the earliest telematic performances, in which she would perform prepared violin in structured improvisations with other musicians broadcasting from elsewhere in the world. Munro's work was often necessarily clandestine, as a result of legislation curbing amateur radio activity in New Zealand. As a result of this, as well as the absence of extant documentation of her live and ephemeral practice, Munro's work has been largely overlooked in New Zealand's cultural history."

" At the turn of the millennium, improvised music from Japan became incredibly quiet. Clive Bell explains why previously noisy artists turned the volume down."

The Ground: From the Land to the Sea" brings together some of the most important works by the sound artist, forming a musical and spatial composition in the gallery. For some video, go to this Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/B05G-URnJJ3/?igshid=ftwbbfdvvh4j

"Ellis speaks with a stutter - more specifically, a glottal block - a form of speech dysfluency that creates silent gaps in his speech that he calls "clearings," often without warning and sometimes for prolonged periods of time. For most of his life, these clearings became unintentional performances of improvisation."

"Video presentation during the international online seminar 'Design as Collective Improvisation' 4-6 November 2021. Presentation on behalf of the team of the collective project 'What Do I Hear?', an initiative of the OtherAbilities http://otherabilities.org/ "

The name of Walter Fähndrich is not likely to provoke many nods of recognition. This is unfortunate, given that the Swiss composer and violist has been a fervent artist for nearly four decades. A teacher of improvisation and designer of sound installations, Fähndrich seems to prefer the indeterminacy of real-time human interaction over recordable media and gives us this rare glimpse into his open reach.

Iris Garrelfs is an artist working on the cusp of music, art and sociology. Her practice includes fixed media, installation, improvised performance and has been included in major institutions worldwide

"From 1976 to 1982, Tony Conrad (1940-2016) created "Music and the Mind of the World," a piano composition comprising over 200 hours of recorded music. During this time everything Conrad played on the piano was recorded (with the incidental exception of perhaps three or four hours). In this endeavor - which includes the sounds of practicing, banging on the keys, formal exercises, experiments with the harmonic sonority of the piano itself, and even "On Top of Old Smokey" - we witness what might in essence be described as the total encounter between an improvising performer and the central instrument of Western musical culture. Now, for the first time, this influential yet largely unknown work has been published and is now available online for free at the domain musicandthemindofthe.world."

"His latest piece includes some of those elements usually present in his installations but instead of being fixed in rooms and sculptures, are used in an improvised performance called Small Movements, in which feedbacks, grains, objects, tiny spaces, delicate rhythms and thin drones interact to create a beautiful dynamic continuum of microsonic silhouettes."

"is new music journal focused on improvised music, open scores in various forms like prose, graphic and action notations. "

"Cornelius Cardew was a fascinating figure. Both in his life, and through his music, he posed questions with which I find myself in equal sympathy and conflict. He is undeniably one of the most important figures in the Post-War British avant-garde. Cardew, by all accounts, was a prodigy. During his early twenties he worked at the highest levels of performance. In 1958 (age 22) he won a scholarship to study at the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, and was promptly asked by Karlheinz Stockhausen to serve as his assistant. Stockhausen's recollections of Cardew are drenched in respect. He was one of the few people whom he allowed to work on his scores unsupervised. During the late 50's, influenced by John Cage and other members of his generation, Cardew abandoned Serialism and began to compose scores utilizing indeterminacy and experiment. It was this period of his work for which he is most remembered, and from which Treatise (our subject) comes. In 1967 he joined the iconic free-improvisation collective AMM with Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Keith Rowe and Christopher Hobbs, which advanced his sense of compositional possibility. The following year with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons he formed the equally important Scratch Orchestra, which grew into a large ensemble, preforming over the following four years."

PDF of a booklet on radical activist listening practices. there exists a counter-discourse of improvised listening linked to collective practice.

"Ambulation: to walk or move from place to place. Ambulation is a sound walk that uses field recording techniques and listening technologies to create a walking performance using environmental sound. Ambulation engages with the act of recording as an improvised performance in response to the soundscapes it is presented within.  "

"Sounds carry intelligence. If you are too narrow in your awareness of sounds, you are likely to be disconnected from your environment. Ears do not listen to sounds; the brain does. Listening is a lifetime practice that depends on accumulated experiences with sound; it can be focused to detail or open to the entire field of sound. Octogenarian composer and sound art pioneer Pauline Oliveros describes the sound experiment that led her to found an institute related to Deep Listening, and develop it as a theory relevant to music, psychology, and our collective quality of life. Pauline is a composer and accordionist who significantly contributed to the development of electronic music. The culmination of her life-long fascination with music and sound is what inspired the practice of Deep Listening, the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions. As a Professor of Practice in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, she produced highly regarded work as a composer and improviser. Pauline's 1989 recording, Deep Listening, is considered a classic in her field."

Sound artist Rutger Zuydervelt and designer Gerco Hiddink have teamed up to organize a new audio project called Bridges. The project asked a group of eight well-known improvisational musicians to "react" to four Dutch bridges (or, more accurately, to field recordings made on, under, and near those bridges). The project is thus as much about musical improv as it is about infrastructural acoustics-a structural ecology of sound vibrantly humming in the spaces around us. "

"This extraordinarily inventive duo has a way of making music all their own. At the heart of their duo is a self-designed, cutting-edge digital cueing system which operates as a sometimes visible third member. Both prodding and reactive, the Shackle system suggests musical directions and textures to these two highly gifted performers, opening up a fascinating array of sonic choices for La Berge and van Heumen to play with and against. "

"Treatise, which was composed between 1963 and 1967, is considered to be Cardew's greatest achievement. It's also a total head-fuck for anyone who attempts to approach it. It's a 193 page graphic score with no instruction - completely in the hands of the conductor and musicians who interpret it."

"After his friend Toru Takemitsu, Toshi Ichiyanagi is one of the most famous Japanese composers of the 20th century. He was an early member of Fluxus and a student of both Aaron Copeland and John Cage, but unlike most of his contemporaries with similar pedigrees, he is largely unknown outside of the country of birth. His important contributions to Fluxus have been largely lost within the long shadow of historical revisionism. Like the efforts of many of his peers, they are somewhat obscured by the success of his first wife Yoko Ono."