This article aims to outline an exploration of the processes of interpretation in electronic music, rooted in my broader engagement with music, technology and performance. The research presented here traverses the boundaries between composition, technology and performance, seeking to understand how these elements interact and inform each other in the practice of electronic music. The article is both a reflection on my past research and a presentation of ongoing explorations, particularly focusing on the interpretation of Éliane Radigue’s Usral (1969). I aim to offer new perspectives on the interpretation of electronic music, highlighting the complexities and opportunities that arise when dealing with non-traditional, often opaque musical tools and methods.

We have all made poor decisions, and some such questionable decisions are artistic in nature. When looking back on one’s early work, it is easy to have tinges of embarrassment that are counterbalanced by nostalgia. John Baldessari made this dynamic tangible in 1970 through his Cremation Project, an undertaking in which he burned all of his paintings and baked some of the resulting ashes into cookies. Viewing some of these cookies/ex-paintings several years ago, I felt that Baldessari’s approach to his previous work, simultaneously embracing, annihilating and remaking, was a fitting way to let go of one’s artistic past. My user-driven installation Confessional provides the opportunity for composers to briefly take pleasure in and (symbolically) destroy one of their dubious creations. This process is accomplished with a computer running Max and a user-provided recording that is processed live. The audio processing unfolds in stages that mirror the phases of animal decomposition. Through this series of transformations, the user’s piece transitions from its original state to nearly imperceptible bits of noise. In this article, I examine Confessional, focusing on the work’s conceptual background, related issues such as memory and hierarchy, and the structure of the Max patch that is used for processing.

In his Epistola de harmonica institutione (c.900 CE), Regino of Prüm names fourteen antiphons that he calls nothae – that is, ‘degenerate and illegitimate – that begin in one mode, are yet another in the middle, and end in a third’. These antiphons represent two different types of modulation: one diatonic, the other resulting from systemic transposition brought about by chromatic alteration. A rationale for both types of modulation is offered by the Musica and Scolica enchiriadis, respectively, both dating to the second half of the ninth century, with the Scolica providing a theory of vitia, or ‘corruptions’, to accommodate chants modulating by means of chromatic alteration. Modulation likewise played an important role in Eastern chant. Gerda Wolfram has shown that both diatonic and chromatic modulation can be documented in the earliest manuscripts of Byzantine chant, namely those dating to the tenth century. Indeed, the Hagiopolites, the oldest preserved Byzantine treatise on music (twelfth century CE), discusses chromatic modulation via what are called phthoraí (‘corruptions’), like the vitia in the West, and the papadikaí, or singers’ manuals, explicate the theory of diatonic modulation called ‘parallagḗ’. This article illustrates both phthorá and parallagḗ with an exercise from the treatise on church music by Akakios Chalkeopulos (c.1500 CE), and concludes that not just the nomenclature and intonation formulas of the Byzantine modes, but also the technique of modulating within a single chant were features shared by both Eastern and Western chant already in the earliest stages of their respective written traditions.

Auditory-based illusions and effects are fascinating fields for both psychoacoustic research and sound installations. While such illusions and effects are usually researched in isolated scientific studies, they can also be applied as compositional tools in sound installations. This article addresses the suspenseful connection between psychoacoustic research and sound installations. After defining terms relevant to auditory-based illusions and effects, various aspects of sound installations are described. In that light, auditory-based illusions and effects are described and categorised and examples are provided for their scientific investigation by means of references to key experiments. Further, examples of applications are included that showcase the use of auditory-based illusions and effects in compositions and sound installations. Finally, in order to foster future artistic applications, the connections between illusions and effects are visualised, and sound-installation aspects are provided in a table. Such a combined consideration of psychoacoustic fundamentals and sound-installation aspects aims not only at deepening the methodological knowledge of sound artists, but also inspiring innovative compositional perspectives.

This article examines the work of the composer Michelle Lou through its affective and formal mechanisms. I propose that Lou’s work has consistently retained a fundamental and specific orientation towards the listener, which I describe as distance or proximity. In addressing three works spanning eight years – Opening (2008), untitled three-part construction (2014) and HoneyDripper (2016) – I show how the idea of distance informs and is articulated through orchestration, gestural and phrasal construction, scenography and form, and thus frames one’s experience of sound, spatiality, memory, time and perception. While the sounds and materials employed by Lou are often formally cold and sonically abrasive, I argue that her work ultimately implicates and invites the listener in as a crucial element of its sonic ecology, even enacting a sort of phenomenological care over the listener.

Egon Wellesz’s Eastern Elements in Western Chant (1947, repr. 1967) is outdated but topical in that the resemblances he adduced between Eastern and Western chant continue to invite explanations. An assessment of his book and research since then on the topics of simple vs. complex melody, melodic resemblance, historical frameworks, musical communities and Semitic antecedents of Christian chant lead to the conclusion that the comparative study of medieval Christian chant repertories and of Jewish melodies from post-medieval sources cannot be shaped by simplistic assumptions, such as that simpler melodies are earlier or more primitive than more complicated ones, or that Christian practices must have had Jewish origins. Nor can melodies that resemble each other be assumed to be historically related. Studies of oral traditions show that what is transmitted is often a more abstract contour that can be realised in more than one way. Most importantly, no music can be studied apart from the community that makes or made it, and musical evidence must be interpreted within a framework of verifiable historical fact, especially when contacts between different communities are alleged.

This re-evaluation of the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen is presented as a dialogue between its authors, conducted by email between July and October 2024. The dialogue takes as its starting point a consideration of the continuing relevance of Stockhausen’s music to music today, but begins by tracing the authors’ engagement with this music over the last five decades. The dialogue moves on to the discussion of a series of key aspects of Stockhausen’s work across his creative life, from Kreuzspiel to KLANG: the relationship between his electronic music and his compositional practice for acoustic instruments; form-schemes in his music and, in particular, the development of moment form; and his use of synthesisers. In conclusion, the authors assess Stockhausen’s influence on their own work and the extent of his significance for younger generations of musicians.

The widespread deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools has created a shift in knowledge culture. The marginalisation of slower, more traditional modes of engagement for quantifiable data easily parsed by mathematical algorithms has resulted in prioritising proprietary or opaque datasets (knowledge) explicitly constructed with measurable parameters. Well-documented concerns persist regarding the narrow range of human data used by algorithmic tools, data that arguably encapsulates the many failures of human society. The inevitable result of the use and priority of this data, alongside very particular notions of value and what is valuable, is a replication of many of the foibles of our history as a species.

Cultural practice in general necessitates the communication of what drives our hopes and underlies our experiences. In algorithmic times we can see that this kind of communication supports some of the many critiques of AI and machine learning already extant in activist circles. Through investigating some of the theoretical backgrounds of this resistance, this article uses the first iteration of HEXORCISMOS’S SEMILLA AI project and the resulting album release as one of the many possible ways in which we might use machine learning and AI tools alongside very deliberate and uplifting models of community and community building.

The tropologion is considered the earliest known extant chant book that has preserved layers of Jerusalem hymnography and liturgy from the fifth or sixth century and was in use until about the twelfth century. Recent study has shown its very wide dissemination: in Byzantium it was known as a tropologion, in Syria as a tropligin and in Armenia as a šaraknoc. Arguments are given that the book was probably known in Bulgaria in the Glagolitic alphabet. Three issues are studied for the purpose of revealing the entire history of this book: the content of the repertory, its arrangement and the liturgical calendar. Their study unquestionably confirms the earlier stage of the compilation of the book, possibly in Jerusalem or its outlying region, and it outlines its uninterrupted development of the book from Jerusalem to the Studios monastery and beyond in different languages. In all probability, John of Damascus rearranged this book, editing the yearly and weekly cycles for the liturgical purposes of his time and arranging the Resurrection repertory for eight consecutive Sundays and for the Common Offices in a consecutive modal order. This rearranged book might be the tropologion we know from its version in the Georgian iadgari, the Syriac tropligin and the Armenian šaraknoc: it contains chants presented in a single succession for the fixed and movable feasts and, at the end of the book, the cycles arranged in the eight modes. The latter cycles constitute the earliest known oktoechos as a chapter of a book.

Crux de Telcz (Crux of Telč, or Kříž z Telče) was one of the most prolific scribes of late medieval Bohemia, active in the second half of the fifteenth century. In various roles, Crux contributed to several dozen manuscripts, which present an extraordinarily broad range of contents in various genres. This study analyses items with musical notation and the texts of sacred and secular songs in manuscripts copied or used by Crux. These are chiefly notated records of monophonic and polyphonic cantiones with texts in Latin and Czech, and to a lesser extent plainchant melodies belonging to the realm of Latin liturgical repertoire. Yet one of Crux’s manuscripts (Třeboň A 4) also bears witness to an early use of white mensural notation in Bohemia. In recent years, it has been possible to refine Crux’s biography substantially, with the result that most of his musical copying activities can be shown to have been made in the period while he was active as a teacher. His manuscripts thus offer important insights into ways in which sacred songs and new polyphonic works were disseminated in the fifteenth century, chiefly within literate and pedagogical circles.