Robert Adlington (ed.): Sound Commitments: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties (2009)

The role of popular music is widely recognized in giving voice to radical political views, the plight of the oppressed, and the desire for social change. Avant-garde music, by contrast, is often thought to prioritize the pursuit of new technical or conceptual territory over issues of human and social concern. Yet throughout the activist 1960s, many avant-garde musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Intensely involved in the era’s social and political upheavals, they often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. Yet how could avant-garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny, initiated clique? In answer, Sound Commitments, examines the encounter of avant-garde music and “the Sixties” across a range of genres, aesthetic positions and geographical locations. Through music for the concert hall, tape and electronic music, jazz and improvisation, participatory “events,” performance art, and experimental popular music, the essays in this volume explore developments in the United States, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan and parts of the “Third World,” delving into the deep richness of avant-garde musicians’ response to the decade’s defining cultural shifts.

Featuring new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period in each chapter, Sound Commitments will appeal to researchers and advanced students in the fields of post-war music, cultures of the 1960s, and the avant-garde, as well as to an informed general readership.

The book
* Explores the rich and complex encounter between avant-garde music and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s
* Draws on new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period
* Explores the relevance of avant-garde music to implementing social change

Publisher Oxford University Press US, 2009
ISBN 019533664X, 9780195336641
292 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)

Michael Bakunin: God and the State (1882/1970)

A colorful, charismatic personality, violent, ebullient, and energetic, Bakunin was one of two poles between which 19th and early 20th-century anarchism was formed. Although it was never finished, God and the State, his only major work, is the torso of a giant. A basic anarchist and radical document for generations, this book makes one of the clearest statements of the anarchist philosophy of history: religion by its nature is an impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity.

With a New Introduction and Index of Persons by Paul Avrich
Publisher Dover Publications, 1970
This Dover edition, first published in 1970, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the edition published in 1916 by Mother Earth Publishing Association, New York.
ISBN 048622483X, 9780486224831
89 pages

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PDF (updated on 2014-9-5)

This Is Tomorrow (1956)

“This Is Tomorrow was a seminal art exhibition in August 1956 at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, facilitated by curator Bryan Robertson. The core of the exhibition was the ICA Independent Group.

It has become an iconic exhibition notable not only for the arrival of the naming of Pop Art but also as a captured moment for the multi-disciplinary merging of the disciplines of art and architecture.

The exhibition included artists, architects, musicians and graphic designers working together in 12 teams—an example of multi-disciplinary collaboration that was still unusual. Each group took as their starting point the human senses and the theme of habitation.

The exhibition catalogue featured essays by Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway. McHale wrote the text for the page Are they Cultured? and it was intended to be featured with the McHale designed collage that got mispaginated in the catalogue.”

Edited by Theo Grosby
Designed by Edward Wright

Commentary: this is tomorrow 2 (2008), James Lingwood (2009).
Reinterpretation (2019)
Wikipedia

HTML (the website is down as of 2019-3-15)