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The Open Space reopens

…Though it never really closed… Started around 1998 in upstate New York by a small group of musicians including Benjamin Boretz, Mary Lee Roberts and Arthur Margolin, The Open Space was conceived as print and online magazine venture and CD publisher dealing with contemporary music as “…output from a community for people who need to explore or expand the limits of their expressive worlds, to extend or dissolve the boundaries among their expressive-language practices, to experiment with the forms or subjects of thinking or making or performing in the context of creative phenomena. We want to create a hospitable space for texts which, in one way or another, might feel somewhat marginal — or too ‘under construction’ — for other, kindred publications.”

Given that they may have jumped into the pool just a tad early web-wise, and given the loose nature of of the project along with the busy and evolving schedules of the editors, The Open Space has tended to offer up things in spurts; the print magazine’s last issue was from late 2009, and the website languished for quite a while. Still, as befits an “open space” there has always been a very interesting accumulation of various article, scores, recordings and sound files available on their site, well worth a contemporary musician’s time to sift through. You can order CD recordings and back copies of the print magazine right from the site, as well.

Just last year, composer Dean Rosenthal signed on to get the purely digital webmagazine up and running again, and Dean’s happy to announce the first “issue” is online and available. The current form is a collection of contributions from various composers, of streaming recordings/video of selected works, some coupled with notes and scores of the piece. First offerings include such outside-the-mainstream luminaries as Michael Pisaro, Henry Gwiazda, Richard Coldman and Howard Skempton and others. And of course Dean is always happy to recieve submissions from you composers/performers out there, so why not give it a shot and help populate that open space with even more art and exploration!

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Magazines, Online, Publications, Websites

Meeting in the Open (web) Space

open space

Some years back I stumbled across The Open Space website, a creation of Perspectives of New Music stalwart Benjamin Boretz. PoNM was one of those forbidding obstacles every composition student of the 60s, 70s and 80s had to traverse and come to terms with; a journal more like a fair-sized paperback book, seemingly filled with discussions of Babbitt, Boulez, Webern, Carter, terrifyingly dense theories of pitch-class, set theory & etc. — many of us felt like we budding composers were suddenly expected to be quantum physicists rather than simply artists… Yet tucked into many issues might also be some nugget from the likes of Roger Reynolds or J.K. Randall, that read more like pure poetry; conceptual play that seemed light-years removed from the normal run of PoNM article.

Being up there on the masthead most of the journal’s life, Boretz’s name seemed to put him firmly in the “uptown theory” group. But what our young eyes couldn’t see for the forest was that his influence was one of the main reasons those other, more intuitive and free-form articles were studded amongst the hard theory. Boretz the artist has always nurtured a deep interest in a more purely “humanistic” brand of musical thinking and creation, which only became more pronounced as the years have passed.

As a more personal outlet for these interests Boretz, along with fellow composers J.K Randall and Elaine Barkin, in 1999 began The Open Space. Not only to get their own works to a wider audience, but to offer a diverse group of contributors a place and publication to run parallel or even counter to the standard PoNM fare. A glance through the contents of current and back issues of The Open Space Magazine will show a nicely bewildering variety of both contributors and subjects.

While The Open Space has had a web presence for ten years, it’s really been an afterthought to the physical magazine, CDs & etc.  But that’s changing starting now: composer Dean Rosenthal is taking over the helm of  the semi-languishing The Open Space Webmagazine, a fully online and independent branch of the larger Open Space. In Dean’s own words, the webmagazine will be “devoted to interaction and community that extends the breadth and reach of our print journal. The web magazine is a forum for actualizing content like interactive web art, experimental video, articles including audio, video, or other supplements, and related endeavors to encourage a multivalent culture that is possible only beyond print.”

The call for submissions is out; to learn more you only need to e-mail Dean (contact@deanrosenthal.org) with your idea or to receive more information.

by Steve Layton