Composer origins and context
This Soviet-era Russian composer's spirituality got her in trouble with authorities; her duo sonata premiered in Finland 7 years after composition.
Gubaidulina
Composed in 1952, this piece's premiere at a piano required the performer to do absolutely nothing intentional for its entire duration.
4'33" (Cage)
This technique by Pärt pairs a stepwise melody in one voice with notes of the tonic triad in another, evoking the ringing of bells.
Tintinnabuli
Caroline Shaw's Partita is performed entirely by voices belonging to this a cappella group she sings with, founded in 2009.
Roomful of Teeth
John Adams uses this term — borrowed from electrical engineering — for the sudden switches in pitch collection that create harmonic motion in Short Ride.
Gates
A Korean-born composer arrested and tortured by his own government in 1967; spent the rest of his life in West Germany.
Isang Yun
This 1956 work, made at WDR Cologne, was among the first to combine a human voice with purely electronic sounds across five speakers.
Gesang der Jünglinge (Stockhausen)
Schnittke's approach of deliberately clashing Baroque, Galant, hymnlike, and 12-tone styles in a single work.
Polystylism
Wendy Carlos performed this synthesizer on A Clockwork Orange — at the time it was largely monophonic and required overdubbing for polyphony.
Moog Synthesizer
Feldman's Intersection 3 uses a grid score that tells the pianist only register (high/mid/low) and note count — never this.
Specific pitches
This Estonian composer fled to Berlin in 1980 seeking artistic freedom and dedicated his first major German-language choral work to a Berlin radio choir.
Arvo Pärt
Written in 1973, this minimalist piece with a groovy riff predated Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians by three years.
Stay on It (Eastman)
Oliveros's compositional practice: attending to ALL surrounding sound — acoustic space, noise, internal thought — not just the musical notes.
Deep Listening
Raven Chacon's Voiceless Mass uses this unusual electronic element that blurs with the pipe organ so listeners can't tell them apart.
Sine tones
Pamela Z performs BREATHING by looping her own breath in real time using this software and sensor controllers worn on her body
Max/MSP
A Black gay American composer whose manuscripts were lost when he was evicted; died in poverty in 1990 and has only recently entered the canon.
Julius Eastman
This 1975 track, over 16 minutes long, was one of the first major disco songs released in extended form for DJ/club play.
Love to Love You Baby (Summer/Moroder)
Isang Yun's technique of sustaining a central pitch while ornamenting it with microtonal trills, glissandos, and neighboring tones.
Hauptton / Umspielung
Pauline Oliveros recorded 'Lear' with trombone and voice in a decommissioned underground water tank that had this extreme acoustic property.
~45-second reverb
Daphne Oram invented her own synthesis system where drawing shapes on 35mm film strips directly controlled pitch, timbre, and amplitude.
Oramics
A Diné (Navajo Nation) composer and installation artist based in Albuquerque who became the first of his heritage to win the Pulitzer for music.
Raven Chacon
Premiered November 21, 2021 and winner of the 2022 Pulitzer — composed during COVID lockdown specifically for a Milwaukee cathedral organ.
Voiceless Mass (Chacon)
Used by Unsuk Chin in Akrostichon-Wortspiel: retuning instruments by a quarter to a sixth of a tone to create in-between pitches.
Microtonality
In his Double Concerto, Yun assigns the harp to represent a princess because it corresponds to this Korean plucked string instrument.
Gayageum
In Gubaidulina's Rejoice! mvt. 5, the final transition to natural harmonics was described by the composer as a metaphor for this.
Transfiguration (moving to another plane of existence)