counter-melody: Articulate Silences reborn

by tacet

The Articulate Silences team is delighted to announce the launch of our new website counter-melody.

As I’m sure any of our more regular readers will have come to realise over the past year, Articulate Silences is no more. Being run by a small team of writers, the blog gradually ground to a halt as other commitments increasingly colonised our spare time. As time went on, we also began to feel that Articulate Silences hadn’t quite lived up to its stated ambition to “provide an accessible introduction to 20th and 21st century classical music”. And, perhaps most importantly, we began to question quite what the words “accessible introduction” meant and represented in this context.

But times and situations have changed, and the team behind Articulate Silences is again writing about contemporary classical music in our new home counter-melody. Our subject remains the same, though our stance – our orientation towards our subject – has changed, if only subtly: less “accessible introduction” with all its overtones of didacticism and more exploratory of, and receptive to, the intersections between music, ourselves, and the world. We hope, anyway.

We’d love for you to check out the new site, and to let us know what you think in the comment sections. So far we’ve published posts on Galina Ustvolskaya’s 6th piano sonata, Harrison Birtwistle’s The Axe Manual, and Glenn Branca’s 3rd symphony for guitar orchestra “Gloria”. We’ve also started a series of playlists to explore connections, conversations, and, perhaps, counter-melodies between composers and pieces: the series starts with an examination of unhuman composition and China’s volatile relationship to contemporary classical music.

Enjoy and happy listening!