Plenty of commemorations are taking place this year, in remembrance of the many 1968 revolutionary movements from Paris to Prague to Mexico City. In the modest scale of our particular field, many pieces could be spotlighted from that tumultuous year. One that strikes me as particularly significant is Helmut Lachenmann’s temA. That was the first piece
What hope can I have for my own work as a composer, if the artistic voices that I look up to remain largely unknown around me? How could I establish a meaningful communication with performers, curators or audiences if we don’t share some important cultural references? How can I avoid creative asphyxiation if the artistic
In 2014, I spent three months in Vienna as Artist-in-Residence, hosted by KulturKontakt Austria and the Bundeskanzleramt Österreich. Besides working on several musical projects as a composer and improviser, I had the chance to present a work at the end-of-residency exhibition. The space available for this at the Federal Government’s Exhibition Hall in Concordiaplatz had
After leaving a collection of several hundred CDs behind in my last intercontinental move, I’m little by little building a new one. Amongst recent additions, I’d like to highlight three 2017 releases from Germany, Australia and the UK that I’ve been fortunate to receive from friends, and which I cannot recommend highly enough to anyone
The battle is lost before even fighting if we accept the arts to be reduced to the concept of ‘industries’, people to ‘users’, and societies to ‘economies’. © Pedro Alvarez, 2017 Image credit: Loren Holmes, 2015
I believe that Luigi Nono’s ideas deserve a new reading, especially in view of recent developments in world politics and the eternal question about how can artists engage with it. It seems to me that Nono’s ideas are often disregarded in today’s English-speaking academia for its ideological alignment, or is it perhaps due to lack
Being multilingual is not just about competency in different languages, but about the everyday understanding of things and phenomena in a manifold way. It’s about the different cultural connotations things have in different contexts, about finding adequate communication styles to suit the circumstances, and the skill to navigate these multiplicities. This is not so much
I’ve recently come across one of those silly articles that list like “50 musical masterpieces of the 21st Century”. It’s not my aim here to point everything that’s wrong with those, but it often baffles me how, just like that article, most programming of contemporary music festivals and ensembles in the Northern Hemisphere tend to
As a bourgeois commodity, Western Art Music (or whatever you prefer to call it) is not worth ‘preserving’. It is up to us, musicians, both in performing that of the past and in creating new one –with or without the help of promoters, curators and institutions– to make it more than just a complacent aesthetic
I recently caught up with Eduardo Cossio in this interview for Cool Perth Nights. We had a nice chat about musical influences, ‘becoming a composer’ and some current projects: http://www.coolperthnights.com/eduardo-cossio/2016/9/22/interview-with-pedro-alvarez
