Siri also works as a writer and journalist. Her main areas of interest are composers and new music, but she has written broadly on music history, pop culture, and on the unexpected connections between music and other areas of life (such as coffee)!
She is a regular contributor to the classical music publication Interlude. Find her contributor profile and articles here.
"It was December 1950: composer Morton Feldman was doodling on a napkin, waiting for John Cage to finish cooking some wild rice. What Feldman had been drawing on this scrap of paper stuck with him and eventually became his landmark composition, Projection I for solo cello.
Over the subsequent two years, Feldman’s correspondent and colleague Earle Brown experimented with new forms of graphic notation, culminating in his Folio, 1952. In 1958, composers Christian Wolff and John Cage published their own experimentally notated works. These innovations in notation were sufficiently important and exciting that Karlheinz Stockhausen gave six lectures on the subject at the famous Darmstadt Summer Courses, as a series called “Music and Graphics.” These composers, and many others of their time, were open-minded radicals seeking to find groundbreaking ways of conceptualising and organising their music, performances, and interactions with instrumentalists and audiences. They sought to take accepted philosophical underpinnings of composing and interrogate them through discussion and experimentation. No longer was a score a standardised, hyper-accurate representation of what a piece should sound like according to the infallible and omniscient imagination of the composer."
Photo: Kit McCarthy