Leonardo Music Journal, vols. 9-14 (1999-2004)

LMJ 9: “Power and Responsibility: Politics, Identity and Technology in Music” (1999)
Contributors include: Nicolas Collins, Krystyna Bobrowski, Sergi Jordá. William Duckworth, Mark Trayle, Chris Brown, Justin Bennett, Lowell Cross, Daniel Goode, Fred Ho, Rajmil Fischman, David Dunn, René van Peer, William Osborne, Frederic Rzewski, David Cope, Roger Alsop, Ann Warde, Dante Tanzi, Greg Schiemer, Suguru Goto, Peter Manning, David Ryan, Sasan Rahmatian, John Bischoff, Guy van Belle. Plus notes by CD Contributors. Includes CD: “Power and Responsibility: Converted to Streaming Between Machines,” curated by Guy van Belle.

LMJ 10: “Southern Cones: Music out of Africa and South America” (2000)
Contributors include: Coriún Aharonián, Lucio Edilberto Cuellar Camargo, Carlos Palombini, Daniel Velasco, O’dyke Nzewi, George Lewis, Lukas Ligeti, Artemis Moroni, Jônatas Manzolli, Fernando Von Zuben and Ricardo Gudwin, Damián Keller, Neil McLachlan. Plus notes by CD Contributors. Includes CD: “Southern Cones: Music out of Africa and South America,” curated by Jürgen Bräuninger.

LMJ 11: “Not Necessarily ‘English Music’: Britain’s Second ‘Golden Age'” (2001)
After the first installment of Cool Britannia beguiled the 1960s with its peculiar conflation of Pop, Art, Fashion and Politics, musical experimentation flourished in the U.K. Styles of improvisation, minimalism, electronic music, performance art, political music and “amateur” music grew out of British art schools, universities and urban villages; styles neither as self-important as those of Europe nor as blithely technocratic as those of North America — a peculiarly “English Music” (and Scottish and Welsh). Includes Two-CD Set: “Not Necessarily ‘English Music,'” curated by David Toop.

LMJ 12: “Pleasure” (2002)
From its naughty lyric content to the pounding physicality of its sound, Pop music is unabashedly driven by the pleasure principle. “Serious” music, however, is usually perceived as more refined, genteel, or to put it another way, repressed. And the avant-garde has traditionally found itself in the peculiar position of accompanying bohemian, hedonistic lifestyles with defiantly itchy and uncomfortable music. But are pleasure and thoughtful invention necessarily at odds? Can there be no “bump and mind”? … LMJ 12 includes articles and personal reflections on the role of pleasure in all genres of music. Includes CD: “From Gdansk till Dawn: Contemporary Experimental Music from Eastern Europe,” curated by Christian Scheib and Susanna Niedermayr.

LMJ 13: “Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music” (2003)
Sound is encoded in grooves on vinyl, particles on tape and pits in plastic; it travels as acoustic pressure, electromagnetic waves and pulses of light. The rise of the DJ in the last two decades has signaled the arrival of the medium as the instrument — the crowning achievement of a generation for whom tapping the remote control is as instinctive as tapping two sticks together. Turntables, CD players, radios, tape recorders (and their digital emulations) are played, not merely heard; scratching, groove noise, CD glitches, tape hiss and radio interference are the sound of music, not sound effects. John Cage’s 1960 “Cartridge Music” has yet to enter the charts, but its sounds are growing more familiar. In LMJ13 authors contribute their thoughts on the role of recording and/or transmission in the creation, performance and distribution of music: Includes CD: “Splitting Bits, Closing Loops: Recording, Transmission and Music,” curated by Philip Sherburne.

LMJ 14: “Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor” (2004)
Inspired by David Tudor and others, the experimental music community in the 1970s adopted a new working method based on seat-of-the-pants electronic engineering. The circuit — whether homemade, self-hacked or store-bought but scrutinized to death — became the score. A generation later, aspects of the Tudor aesthetic have spread well beyond the avant-garde: hip-hop, house and other forms of dance music and electronica share a similar obsession with the quirks intrinsic to specific pieces of audio gear. In this special volume of Leonardo Music Journal, authors consider all aspects of the work of David Tudor, the influence of Tudor’s ideas on their own work and/or the role of technological idiosyncrasies in their composition, performance or production. Includes CD: “David Tudor: Live Electronic Music,” curated by Ron Kuivila.

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Download (removed on 2013-12-17 upon request of the publisher)

Michel Chion: Guide To Sound Objects: Pierre Schaeffer and Musical Research (1983–) [FR, EN]

This work is an introductory guide to the monumental Traité des objets musicaux. An index lists each Schaeferian term. Discussions of each of the terms include a combination of Pierre Schaeffer’s key ideas, includinga short definition, and the inclusion of reference pages within the Traité des objets musicaux.

Publisher Buchet/Chastel, Paris, and Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, Bry-sur-Marne, 1983/1995
ISBN 2702014399
187 pages

English edition
Translated by John Dack and Christine North
London, 2009
212 pages

More information

Guide des objets sonores: Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche musicale (French, 1983/1995, added on 2014-3-8)
Guide To Sound Objects: Pierre Schaeffer and Musical Research (English, trans. John Dack and Christine North, updated on 2012-8-3), Chapters (on EARS, added on 2014-11-16), Scribd (updated on 2012-8-3)

Michal Rataj: Electroacoustic Music and Selected Concepts of Radio Art (2007/2010) [Czech, English]

The main purpose of the present thesis is to search for ways of methodological orientation within reflection of electroacoustic music, seen through the prism of what has been recently called acoustic arts. The way we try to formulate such positioning deals with particular methodological tasks: we try to generate space in which it is possible to think of “artistic discourses” within acoustic arts; subsequently, the thesis describes the specific discourse of electroacoustic music/radio art, explaining it from the viewpoint of the Czech radio-art producer.

English edition
With a Foreword by Miloš Vojtěchovský
Publisher PFAU, Saarbrücken, 2010
100 pages

Review (Tereza Havelková, Hudební věda, in Czech)

Publisher (CZ)

Elektroakustická hudba a vybrané koncepty radioartu (Czech, 2007, Ph.D. Dissertation), Alt link
Electroacoustic Music and Selected Concepts of Radio Art (English, undated)
Electroacoustic Music and Selected Concepts of Radio Art (English, 2010, added on 2013-12-31)