Kyle Gann: Robert Ashley (2012)

“This book explores the life and works of Robert Ashley, one of the leading American composers of the post-Cage generation. Ashley’s innovations began in the 1960s when he, along with Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman, formed the Sonic Arts Union, a group that turned conceptualism toward electronics. He was also instrumental in the influential ONCE Group, a theatrical ensemble that toured extensively in the 1960s. During his tenure as its director, the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor presented most of the decade’s pioneers of the performing arts. Particularly known for his development of television operas beginning with Perfect Lives, Ashley spun a long series of similar text/music works, sometimes termed “performance novels.” These massive pieces have been compared with Wagner’s Ring Cycle for the vastness of their vision, though the materials are completely different, often incorporating noise backgrounds, vernacular music, and highly structured, even serialized, musical configurations.

Drawing on extensive research into Ashley’s early years in Ann Arbor and interviews with Ashley and his collaborators, Kyle Gann chronicles the life and work of this musical innovator and provides an overview of the avant-garde milieu of the 1960s and 1970s to which he was so central. Gann examines all nine of Ashley’s major operas to date in detail, along with many minor works, revealing the fanatical structures that underlie Ashley’s music as well as private references hidden in his opera librettos.”

Publisher University of Illinois Press, 2012
American Composers series
ISBN 025207887X, 9780252078873
184 pages

Reviews: Devin King (Make, 2013), New Music Buff (2013).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (updated on 2021-7-6)
Accompanying website

See also Perfect Lives and other works of Ashley on UbuWeb.

Aristotle: Poetics (c347-335 BCE–)

Aristotle’s Poetics is the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory.

The Monoskop wiki hosts passages from the Poetics selected to highlight the ambiguity of the terms central to theory of art and literature, particularly poiêsis, mimêsis and technê (in two Greek versions and three English translations), and an annotated source bibliography of editions and translations of this work into various languages.

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Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar, 1919-1923 (1923) [German]

This work was published on the occasion of the major Bauhaus exhibition in August and September 1923 in 2,000 copies (another 300 were printed in English and 300 in Russian). The colour plates include nine original lithographs by Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, L. Hirschfeld-Mack (2), R. Paris, P. Keler and W. Molar, K. Schmidt (2), and F. Schleifer. The texts are by Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Gertrud Grunow, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer, Johannes Itten, Georg Muche, Lothar Schreyer, Gerhard Marcks, Adolf Meyer and others.

Publisher Bauhausverlag, Weimar and Munich, 1923
Typography L. Moholy-Nagy
Cover design Herbert Mayer
Print F. Bruckmann, Munich (texts), V. Lübecke, Erfurt (printing blocks for the 4-color prints), and Dietsch & Brückner, Weimar (colour plates)
225 pages, 20 colour plates, 147 halftone ills., 25 × 26 cm
via Bibliothèque Kandinsky

PDF (325 MB, updated on 2018-3-6)
See also Bauhaus publications on Monoskop wiki.