zorn
::the game pieces, a review, with quotes from jz, like: "The content of the piece is improvised according to complex instructions. The rules establish structures without dictating outcomes, much as the rules of baseball determine the conduct of the game but not its final score."

::from Ugly Beauty:
John Zorn and the Politics of Postmodern Music by Kevin McNeilly:
"Zorn's music does something palpable to its listeners, or at least incites them to a form of action, of awakening; it activates the listener...

eventually it came back to using genre as musical notes and moving these blocks of genre around....

the well-worn, commercially-exploited genres remain intact. Zorn himself exploits the expectations of a repetition-hungry consumer culture, turning those expectations, so to speak, on their ears. Zorn's organization of noise consists not in the dismantling or disabling of genre by noise, but rather in the stream of cross-talk between noise and genre....

Zorn disrupts all forms of contemplation (especially the listener-passivity encouraged by electronic reproduction and anaesthetic stereo background), and calls instead for an active, deliberate, offensive engagement with the world, a praxis,...

when he composes for his "family" of players, he writes in such a way as not to limit the potentials of those players, while providing a structure within which they can work; the tension between noises--intentional and chaotic, parodic and expressive--which we have been examining in Zorn's music is thus reproduced on a compositional level, as Zorn seeks to balance improvisational freedom with the parameters of a notated structure, a balance discovered, for that matter, within structurality itself....

The "score" of _Cobra_ illustrates this push toward engagement. It consists of a series of hand signals, each of which corresponds to a type of interaction ranging from quickly-traded bursts of sound to aggressive competitions. Any one of the players may choose at any time to change the direction of the piece and to alter the type of interaction; Zorn's function as conductor is merely to relay that change to the rest of the players, through a hand signal, and to offer a downbeat. Players may also, individually or in groups, engage in "guerrilla tactics," for which there exists a whole new set of signals, by which they attempt to wrest control of the group from the conductor and to conduct their own series of interactions. The game itself is thus antagonistic and collaborative, at once reproducing the composer-conductor hierarchy of traditional "classical" music and subverting that hierarchy from within the "composition" itself. No two performances are the same, as the recent double-edition release of the piece indicates, but all performances exist within the same parameters, as collective communal works."
- posted by ...lg... @ 15:14