Listening to Now. New Phonic Art

European jazz has roots not just in American jazz, but also in European classical music, especially the experimental music from the turn of the century.

New Phonic Art can stand as one example. It consisted of four avant-garde musicians:

Carlos Roqu Alsina. Born in Buenos Aires in 1941. Composer and pianist; studied composition with Luciano Berio; has been a freelance composer in Berlin since 1964.

Jean-Pierre Drouet. Born in Bordeaux in 1935. Premier Prix du Conservatoire de Paris for percussion.

Vinko Globokar. Born in Anderny, France, in 1934. Premier Prix du Conservatoire de Paris for trombone and chamber music; studied composition with Luciano Berio and Ren Leibowitz.

Michel Portal. Born in Bayonne in 1935. Premier Prix du Conservatoire de Paris for clarinet. Laurat des Concours internationaux in Geneva in 1963 and in Budapest in 1965.


from an Interview with Michel Portal:

"New Phonic Art was something else altogether; improvisation became a fashion and a formula, and it seemed like composers and musicians were afraid of losing control over what was played. So this was a test. Of course, there is the fact that we wanted to improvise, and improvisation has a quality of bringing together very good things and very bad things, but the will to improvisation is nevertheless very strong. For me, it was a conflict between the written tradition and what was "spoken," if you will. New Phonic Art was a tool of two composers who were trying to go in this direction [Stockhausen and Kagel], and also of performance.

<snip>

"But eventually we had to stop the group, because we had reached the limits of what could happen with the personalities of the players and with the ensemble. As it was pure improvisation, one could tell what the others were going to do before they did it. One of the musicians was a sad guy, and he'd always start his improvisations with a lament: "oooh, oooh, mmm... and I always thought "I know who's doing that!" No matter what he was doing or what anybody else did, that's always how it went. So, it was done. Also, it had become common to incorporate freedom into some sort of written form, as a tool, and that made more sense to us."

--http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=18096