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Themesicon: navigation pathSound and Imageicon: navigation pathAudiovisions
 
 
 
 
 

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setting or in a lounge situation, in which one can regularly withdraw one's visual attention from the stage and allow it to wander through the room and turn it towards what is occurring in it. Other solutions are visualizations of musical contexts in installation settings or visuals shown parallel to the music and whose content or aesthetics can also be independent of the music. A further solution is the interactive inclusion of the audience. All three solutions are based on intermediality.

However, the inclusion of visual media in musical practice does not only feed itself on the lack of visual stimuli in electronic music, but rather it is an aesthetic tendency that is bound to the dissolution symptoms of the concert format and the evaluation criteria associated with it. The reception situation in concert halls—the elevated stage located at the front of the hall—which developed in the nineteenth century and which was coupled with strict behavioral norms such as sitting still or clearly defined applause rituals, is to a large extent subordinate to visual criteria. The listener with closed eyes may be highly respected by a musicology fixated on abstract form and structure,

 

however, s/he is a minority in the audience. [8] The majority of concert visitors intensely follow the conductor and the musicians with their eyes. Frontal orientation in concert halls has been declining since the mid-twentieth century. So-called concert installations frequently integrate multimedia elements in which not only the instrumentalists, but also the members of the audience are distributed throughout the space, and the musicians are seated in the center.

Intermedial Instrumental Playing

The emphasis of the body and of the physical production of sound, which is often accentuated through the use of media, seems almost antithetical to the bodiless performances of electronic music and laptop concerts. In the twentieth century, the fine-motor virtuosity of instrumental musicians, a central criterion in the nineteenth century, has experienced a shift towards emphasizing overall physicality in the production of music. In the 1980s, Helmut Lachenmann made the physical instrumental production of music the content of his works (for example, «Pression,» 1969/70). The pieces composed

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