About
What do you mean when you say contemporary, alternative, or avant-garde music? What do you mean when you say sound art? What kind of sound does it contain and why? How is it structured? How is this sound interrelated with our culture, society, politics, philosophy, architecture, science…? Where does it come from? How do we listen to sounds?? Glissando tries to provide as many answers to these questions as possible.
We are not devoted to any specific school of thought or musical genre. From the very beginning our aim was to combine in-depth essays written by artists and music listeners with advanced interdisciplinary academic thought. We are trying to find a suitable language to describe various aspects of contemporary music. In our search for new forms of expression in music theory and critique we mix musicological analysis with free form writings, profound historical essays with vivid interviews, and subjective intuitions with systematic studies.
Today, several years and over forty issues later, we are introducing a new initiative to Glissando. We would like to take an interdisciplinary look at new music in Eastern Europe. Our aim is to create an international network of contemporary music theorists journalists, performers and composers from the entire region in order to make our magazine a forum for exchange of ideas and a reliable source of knowledge about contemporary music from the eastern part of Europe.
As Glissando has been published in the experimental bilingual (English-Polish) form since 2014, we are searching for new authors from the countries of Eastern Europe. At the same time we keep publishing thematic issues exploring universal topics such as Cassette Tape (#23), Manifestos (#25), Soundscape (#26), Child (#27) or Central and Eeastern Europe (#30). In the experimental Glissando issue #24 we analyze the concept of Avant AvantGarde – pre-avant-garde trends before the 20th century.
Our lates and planned issues are:
– #A (2020), audio-paper on Indonesia‘s soundscapes and music
– #40 (2021), Kinshasa–Nairobi–Maputo [PL only]
– #B (2021), audio-paper on Sound ecology
– #41 (2021), X-tradition unveiled and dissected, paper [PL only]
– #42 (2022), New Polish generation of composers [PL only]
– #C (2022), audio-paper Voice and membrane (phones, loudspeakers)
– #43 (2023), New trends in music/sound curating [EN only]