Talk:John Pfeiffer

Untitled

everyone abandoned me on this one, but i got back to it...

and... i tried to change the pic and it wouldn't take...??? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Paradise coyote (talk • contribs) 02:07, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

I have copyedited the page and removed some of the purple prose. Parts of it were lifted verbatim from the NYT obit.THD3 (talk) 21:16, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Electronomusic CD?

Has the Electronomusic record ever been released on CD? If so, the article should say. TheScotch (talk) 05:34, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Instruments?

Re: "The instruments used on his 1968 LP are his own inventions, and include an Inharmonic Side-Band, Contraformer, Programmer, Sines, Parametric Blocks, Metric Transperformer, Alphormer, Set, Duotonic Transform, Sequential Sines and an Ordered Simpliformer."

Pfeiffer does subtitle his pieces with "for..." followed by each of these terms (more or less, that is--the above list is a bit jumbled), but I don't think he means to imply in all cases that they describe actual instruments he invented. After all, inharmonic side-band is simply the conventional name for a well-known acoustical phenomenon. Neither did Pfeiffer invent the sine wave. Pfeiffer himself, in fact, in his liner notes explains that the "the names [he has] applied to the 'instrumentation' of these works are shorthand descriptions of the technical methods of producing the various sounds"--and it's my impression that these shorthand descriptions tend at times toward the whimsical. TheScotch (talk) 09:45, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Avant-garde tradition?

Re: "It is a very avant-garde record in the tradition of Morton Subotnick and Karlheinz Stockhausen."

The "avant-garde" bit strikes me as POV and, anyway, directly in conflict with how Pfeiffer himself describes the record in his liner notes. I don't see how it could be in the tradition of Subotnick when Subotnick was creating his early famous works very close to the same time. As for Stockhausen, I think Pfeiffer was pointedly repudiating the kind of avant-gardism with which Stockhausen was popularly associated at the time.

Pfeiffer: "Perhaps the logical, transitional step into fallaciously implied antiseptic world of electronic music satisfaction is one which balances liberation with orientation--head-in-the-stars-feet-on-the-ground idea. And in this age of radical avant-gardism, that's not a very popular idea....The concept of holding onto some familiar feature of musical orientation while exploring totally new ideas in other features is the basic aesthetic of 'electronomusic'." TheScotch (talk) 09:54, 29 March 2013 (UTC)