Spatial music
Spatial music, music in space, or space music uses the localization of sounds in physical space as a compositional element in music, in sound art, and in sound editing for audio recordings, film, and video. Though present in Western music from Biblical times in the form of the antiphon, as a component specific to new musical techniques the concept of "space music" (Raummusik) was introduced as early as 1928 in Germany. The term is connected especially with electroacoustic music to denote the projection and localization of sound sources in physical or virtual space or sound's spatial movement in space. The term "spatial music" indicates music in which the location and movement of sound sources is a primary compositional parameter and a central feature for the listener. It may involve a single, mobile sound source, or multiple, simultaneous, stationary or mobile sound events in different locations. There are at least three distinct categories when plural events are treated spatially:
- essentially independent events separated in space, like simultaneous concerts, each with a strong signaling character
- one or several such signaling events, separated from more "passive" reverberating background complexes
- separated but coordinated performing groups.
Examples of spatiality include more than seventy works by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (canticles, litanies, masses, Marian antiphons, psalm- and sequence-motets), Charles Ives's Fourth Symphony (1912–18), Henryk Górecki's Scontri, op. 17 (1960), which unleashes a volume of sound with a "tremendous orchestra" for which the composer precisely dictates the placement of each player onstage, including fifty-two percussion instruments, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Helicopter String Quartet (1992–93/95), which is "arguably the most extreme experiment involving the spatial motility of live performers", and Henry Brant's Ice Field, a "'spatial narrative,'" or "spatial organ concerto," awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
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