No Sounds Are Forbidden

In the eleventh episode of No Sounds Are Forbidden, “Among the Ruins: The Rebirth of Europe’s Avant-Garde,” host Matthew Friedman explores how European composers built a new avant-garde, virtually out of nothing after the Second World War. Growing out of the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, this transnational community of composers sought to build a new music for a new, united Europe, although they could never escape the shadow of Europe’s traumatic past

This episode features music by Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Hans Werner Henze, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyorgy Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Krzysztof Penderecki, Wolfgang Rihm, and J.S. Bach.

No Sounds Are Forbidden - Episode 11 - Among the Ruins: The Rebirth of Europe’s Avant-Garde

No Sounds Are Forbidden is back with its tenth episode. Musicologist Jill Rogers (University College Cork) joins host Matthew Friedman for a holiday special exploring how modernist and avant-garde composers have marked Christmas in their music since the early 20th century. Whether mobilizing patriotic sentiment in 1914, or trying to find a space for the sacred in the rubble of war, and the shadow of the Holocaust, modernist and avant-garde composers of the 20th century reflected the often dark, always complicated spirit of their times, while marking a season of contemplation and the promise of redemption.

No Sounds Are Forbidden - Episode 10 – Soir d’Hiver: The Spectacular Modernist Christmas Spectacular!

In the ninth episode of No Sounds Are Forbidden, “The Death of Europa: The Rise and Fall of the Inter-War Avant-Garde,” host Matthew Friedman explores the adventurous, and often chaotic street-level avant garde of Central Europe between the World Wars. In Berlin, Prague, and Vienna, radical composers, writers, and critics promoted a new vision of European culture that rejected the "immutable truths" of the Anciens Regimes. For a brief moment in the 1920s and 1930s, Central Europe's opera houses and cabarets swung to the pulsing rhythms of unrestrained experimentation, revolution, and jazz. But the rise of the Third Reich, and the Nazis' campaign to cleanse Europe of "Bolshevism, modernism, and Judaism," snuffed out avant-garde music and art -- and the artists who created it -- in exile, and in the camps.

This episode features music by Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Stefan Wolpe, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, Viktor Ullmann, and Erwin Schulhoff.

No Sounds Are Forbidden - Episode 9 - The Death of Europa: The Rise and Fall of the Inter-War Avant-Garde

In the eighth episode of No Sounds Are Forbidden, “In Phase/Out of Phase: The Radical Simplicity of Minimalism,” host Matthew Friedman explores the American avant-garde's turn to minimalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Launched as a critique of modernist intentionality, and the complexity of 20th century music, minimalist pioneers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich drew on diverse sources, from Asian and African music, and earlier experiments by the European avant-garde, to the ideas of the hippie counterculture, in order to craft a musical aesthetic that was, itself, the process of making music. And in the process, they innovated the inevitable soundtrack of post-industrial, networked society.

This episode features music by Riley, Reich, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, John Adams, Ravi Shankar, Erik Satie, and Gabriel Faure.

No Sounds Are Forbidden - Episode 8 - In Phase/Out of Phase: The Radical Simplicity of Minimalism

In the seventh episode of No Sounds Are Forbidden, “Music of Changes: Cage, Chance Operations, and Indeterminacy,” host Matthew Friedman explores the profound impact of the work and ideas of John Cage on the American avant-garde. Seeking to liberate sound from the restraints of conventional music, Cage introduced new compositional practice based on chance, and nurtured a generation of composers whose music was in a state of continual change.

This episode features an interview with the composer Christain Wolff, and music by Cage, Wolff, Henry Cowell, Morton Feldman, and Sonic Youth.

No Sounds Are Forbidden - Episode 7 - Music of Changes: Cage, Chance Operations, and Indeterminacy