Miguel Molina Alarcón: Baku: Symphony of Sirens: Sound Experiments in The Russian Avant-Garde. Original Documents and Reconstructions of 72 Key Works of Music, Poetry and Agitprop from the Russian Avantgardes (1908-1942) (2008) [EN, MP3]
Filed under book, sound recording | Tags: · art history, avant-garde, constructivism, futurism, history, history of music, music, politics, proletkult, radioart, russia, sound, sound art
A comprehensive overview of the complexity and breadth of the many early 20th-century Russian avantgarde movements, followed by detailed notes and contexts for the individual recordings – including summary biographies of the main actors; additional work notes about the process of the extraordinary Baku reconstruction; a bibliography, rare photographs, web research links, artwork, facsimiles of contemporary documents, a comparative timeline of European and Russian Avantgardes and the first English translation of an article by Avraamov about the symphony. This is a definitive library collection, some seven years in the making and possibly our most important release of recent years.
Publisher: ReR Megacorp, London, 2008
ISBN 9780956018403
72 pages
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John Grayson (ed.): Sound Sculpture: A Collection of Essays by Artists Surveying the Techniques, Applications, and Future Directions of Sound Sculpture (1975)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, history of music, kinetic art, music, sculpture, sound art, sound recording
Sound Sculpture is the first publication to deal completely with this new art form. It’s a collection of over 30 articles and essays by an international cross section of Sound Sculptors who define and outline the field. It’s also a definitive introduction to the history of Sound Sculpturing. Included are over 150 photographs and drawings illustrating the construction of such unusual projects as: how to build a Western Gamelan (Balanese ‘orchestra’), examples of giant environmental Sound Sculptures, Sound Sculpture designed for a new ‘people’s music,’ and so on.
Contributing artists include Harry Partch, Bernard Baschet, François Baschet, Stephan Von Huene, David Jacobs, John Chowning, Walter Wright, David Rothenberg, Lou Harrison, David Rosenboom, Bill Colvig, Corey Fischer, R. Murray Schafer, and others.
Publisher A.R.C. Publications, Aesthetic Research Centre of Canada, Vancouver, 1975
ISBN 0889850003
196 pages
Alan Licht: Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · history of music, music, sound art, sound recording
Over the past century, an art form has emerged that draws from the worlds of visual art and music. Sound art’s roots can be found in the experimental work of Italian Futurism, Dada, and later the Fluxus group and the pioneering efforts of the American composer and artist John Cage. In the wake of this groundbreaking work, sound art began to mature into a movement, and artists explored the interactive possibilities of sound and in turn created entirely new modes of experiencing and engaging with art. In this volume, the complete story of sound art is told by one of the country’s leading critics and scholars. The author traces the history of this form of art–highlighting the convergence of the indie world bands such as Sonic Youth with the art world–looking at the critical cross-pollination that has led to some of the most important and challenging art being produced today, including work by Christian Marclay, LaMonte Young, Janet Cardiff, Rodney Graham, and Laurie Anderson, among many others.
Foreword by Jim O’Rourke
Publisher Rizzoli, New York, 2007
ISBN 0847829693, 9780847829699
304 pages
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Comment (1)John F Cline: Permanent Underground: Radical Sounds and Social Formations in 20th Century American Musicking (2012)
Filed under thesis | Tags: · 1960s, history of music, music, music theory, musicking, noise
Musical labor entered a new phase of alienation following the advent of recording technology in the late 19th century. Whereas prior to recording musicians had a relatively direct relationship with their audience—the sum of the two groups constituting “musicking”—sound reproduction created a spatial and temporal dislocation between them. Most narratives of American popular music trace out a particular genre formation, and relate it to the culture from whence it emerged. By contrast, this dissertation begins from the point where musicking began to disengage from commodification, both at the level of social formation and of the creation of sound itself. Drawing on anthropologist Pierre Clastres’ notion of “Anti-State” modes of organization and cultural critic Ivan Illich’s concept of “conviviality,” or a human-centered rather than mass productionoriented use of tools—in this case musical instruments both handmade and modified—each chapter of this project tackles a different dimension of the quest for autonomous musicking, or a “permanent underground.” Chapter 1 examines the organizational principles that have run in parallel to the bureaucratic, capitalist manifestation of a “music industry” in the 20th century. Beginning with a critique of either/or fallacy of the opposition posited between “modernism” and “nostalgia,” the reminder of the chapter demonstrates the reconciliation between these two aesthetic and political positions; topics include the seizure of public space by itinerant blues musicians in the rural-industrial prewar South, the self-released recordings of gospel artists after WWII, the formation of experimental jazz collectives in the 1960s, and the relationship between psychedelic music and cults/communes in the 1960s. Chapter 2 critiques the function of genre in musicking as means to a reproducible sonic commodity, and argues for “noise” as an aesthetic intervention that disrupts the saleable nature of music—a political act in itself. Chapter 3 suggests several strategies for achieving “noise.” These include the repurposing of industrial machines as musical instruments, the incorporation of foreign musical traditions, and the use of collage as a formal principle. The final chapter profiles six collectives that have emerged since the late 1960s that adhere to the aesthetic and political values established throughout this dissertation.
Dissertation
Faculty of the Graduate School, The University of Texas at Austin, May 2012
Supervisor: Mark C. Smith
520 pages
René Leibowitz: Schoenberg and His School: The Contemporary Stage of the Language of Music (1947/1949)
Filed under book | Tags: · composing, composition, history of music, music, sound recording
Founder of the atonal school of composition, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) single-handedly revolutionized the whole of 20th century music. Recognizing that the tonal system of the past 250 years had outlived its usefulness, Schoenberg developed an entirely new system for organizing pitch, dividing the scale into 12 equal tones and eliminating the tonal center which had already reached its vanishing point in the chromaticism of Richard Wagner His twelve-tone scale set composers free from the strictures of the seven-tone scale, allowing them to explore in full the expanded tonal materials of the chromatic scale.
In this now-historic study of Schoenberg’s music and its impact on 20th-century composition, composer/conductor René Leibowitz–a student of both Schoenberg and Webern–traces the history of musical thought from the Renaissance through the early part of the 20th century, thus setting the stage for Schoenberg’s revolutionary abandonment of tonality. He also assesses the works of Schoenberg’s two star pupils. Alban Berg and Anton Webern He shows how Schoenberg’s methods were assimilated–conservatively by Berg and radically by Webern–maintaining throughout that theory was handmaiden to compositional artistry and not the other way around.
Originally published in 1949, Schoenberg and His School was in many ways a musical polemic, an artistic manifesto aimed at focusing public attention on the then neglected works of the atonal composers. Today, with the 1974 Centenary Celebration of Schoenberg’s birth, Leibowitz’ work has assumed renewed importance. Considered one of the most influential interpretations ever published of Schoenberg’s musicat aesthetics and philosophy, it remains the touchstone for future considerations of Schoenberg’s contributions to 20th century music.
Originally published as Schoenberg et son école, 1947
This is an unabridged republication of the first edition published by Philosophical Library, New York, 1949.
Translated by Dika Newlin
Publisher Da Capo Press, New York, 1975/1979
ISBN 0306800209
305 pages
Simon Reynolds: Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · history of music, music, music criticism, punk
Rip It Up and Start Again is the first book-length exploration of the wildly adventurous music created in the years after punk. Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style and continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth-pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell, whose success coincided with the rise of MTV. Full of insight and anecdotes and populated by charismatic characters, Rip It Up and Start Again re-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.
Publisher Penguin Books, 2006
ISBN 0143036726, 9780143036722
416 pages
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F. C. Weiland: Elektronische Muziek. Muzikale en historische aspecten (1982/2008) [Dutch]
Filed under book | Tags: · electroacoustic music, electronic music, history of music, music, netherlands, radioart
Het boek Elektronische muziek werd in 1981/82 geschreven door F. C. Weiland en C.A.G.M. Tempelaars op verzoek van de uitgeverij Bohn, Scheltema en Holkema. Beide auteurs doceerden aan het Instituut voor Sonologie van de Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, maar het boek was gericht op de belangstellende en professionele buitenwereld in het Nederlandse taalgebied. Het eerste deel, van Frits Weiland, beschrijft de muzikale en historische aspecten van de elektronische muziek, met bijzondere aandacht voor de Nederlandse situatie. Het tweede deel, van Stan Tempelaars, behandelt de signaaltheoretische aspecten. Het boek was destijds uitverkocht en niet herdrukt, en is dus al lange tijd niet meer verkrijgbaar.
Inmiddels heeft de elektronische muziek een grote ontwikkeling doorgemaakt, en is er hernieuwde belangstelling voor de geschiedenis van dit genre. Frits Weiland en NEAR/MCN wilden daarom deze historische tekst in digitale vorm toegankelijk maken. Hiermee wordt deze geschiedenis van de Nederlandse elektronische muziek voor een nieuwe generatie ontsloten. Wij hopen dat dit als inspiratie kan dienen voor nieuwe historische overzichten en verschillende interpretaties van oude en nieuwe Nederlandse elektro-akoestische muziek.
Voor deze digitale versie is zoveel mogelijk de oorspronkelijke tekst van het boek aangehouden; bij de tekstopmaak zijn kleine veranderingen aangebracht, met een nieuwe paginering. Deze tekst wordt ter inzage aangeboden; het is niet toegestaan om deze te vermenigvuldigen of in andere vormen openbaar te maken.
Voor citaten en verwijzingen moet de oorspronkelijke uitgave van Bohn, Scheltema en Holkema gebruikt worden (ISBN 90 313 0531 6); deze is te raadplegen bij Muziek Centrum Nederland (Amsterdam) of bij (universiteits-)bibliotheken.
Originally published by Bohn, Scheltema & Holkema, Utrecht/Antwerpen, 1982
Publisher Muziek Centrum Nederland, Amsterdam, 2008
120 pages
