Al Hansen
(b New York, 5 Oct 1927; d Cologne, 22 June 1995),composer and collagist. Hansen was a New York-based artist and a key figure in the founding of Happenings. He ...
Aleatoric Processes
The Latin root for alea is a dice game: it represents an act of introducing elements of uncertainty in outcome with a predefined set of conditions. Chance, indeterminacy, and randomness ...
aleatory music
(from Lat. alea, dice; hence the throw of the dice for chance).Synonym for indeterminacy, i.e. mus. that cannot be predicted before perf. or mus. which was comp. through chance procedures ...
Alex Maguire
B. 6 January 1959, Croydon, Surrey, England. Maguire remembers improvising at the piano before he received any lessons, which began at the age of eight. He studied music at the ...
Alfred Wolfsohn
(b. Berlin, 23 Sept. 1896; d. London, 5 Feb. 1962)Medic who suffered aural hallucinations after witnessing horrifying cries of the wounded and dying in the First World War, and ...
Allan Kaprow
(b Atlantic City, NJ, 23 Aug. 1927; d Encinitas, California, 5 Apr. 2006).American artist and art theorist, best known as the main creator of happenings. His studies included a period with the ...
Anthony Braxton
B. 4 June 1945, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Braxton began playing clarinet in high school, studied music for one semester at Wilson Junior College, then joined the US Army, where he ...
anti-art
A loosely used term associated with art which debunks the traditional categories or concepts of art. It was supposedly coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1914. Dada was considered the first anti-art ...
Arnold Schoenberg
(b Vienna, 1874; d Los Angeles, 1951).Austrian‐born composer, conductor, and teacher (Amer. cit. 1941). One of most influential figures in history of mus. Learned vn. and vc. as boy. Mainly ...
Arvo Pärt
(b Paide, 1935).Estonian composer. Worked for Estonian radio 1958–67. Emigrated in 1980, settling in (West) Berlin 1982. Early works influenced by Shostakovich, but later adopted strict serialism and ...
avant-garde
(Fr. ‘vanguard’).Term used in the arts to denote those who make a radical departure from tradition. In 20th‐cent. mus., Stockhausen may be regarded as avant‐garde, but not Shostakovich.
Balanescu Quartet
Alexander Balanescu (b. 11 June 1954, Bucharest, Romania), the son of a university professor, was raised in Romania before his family moved to Israel in 1969. After two years he ...
Beat Movement
A bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956 and had its centers in San Francisco and New York. The term “Beat” expressed both exhaustion and beatification in ...
Black Mountain College
American art educational establishment at Black Mountain, North Carolina, founded by a group of progressive academics in 1933 and closed after long-standing financial problems in 1957. It was run by ...
Brian Eno
B. Brian Peter George St. Baptiste de la Salle Eno, 15 May 1948, Woodbridge, Suffolk, England. While studying at art schools in Ipswich and Winchester, Eno fell under the influence ...
Calvin Tomkins
(1925– )American writer and editor who has had a distinguished career in art journalism. He was born in Orange, New Jersey, and studied at Princeton University, graduating in 1948. From 1955 to 1959 ...
Ciccone Youth
A satirical offshoot from New York rock innovators Sonic Youth, Ciccone Youth comprise essentially the same personnel: Thurston Moore (guitar, vocals), Kim Gordon (bass, vocals), Lee Ranaldo ...
composition
In music, a piece to be played or sung. The one who composes is a composer. The term has a slightly different meaning in the Western and Indian context. In ...
Conceptual art
A type of art in which the idea or ideas that a work represents are considered its essential component and the finished ‘product’, if it exists at all, is regarded primarily as a form of ...
concrete poetry
A term used to describe a kind of experimental poetry developed in the 1950s and flourishing in the 1960s, which dwells primarily on the visual aspects of the poem. Concrete poets experiment with ...
