Martin Campbell-Kelly: From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (2003)

moved

George Russell: Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, 4th ed. (1953/2001)

George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, first described in a self-published pamphlet in 1953, marks a radical expansion of the harmonic language for both composition and analysis and also marks an abandonment of the major-minor system which dominated Western music for over 350 years. Radical as it may be, the theory is more than one person’s eccentricity, having considerable precedent in the work of Ravel, Scriabin, Debussy and in some of the learned works of Bach. The word “Lydian” is here derived from one of the classical Greek scale modes. Russell’s root scale follows the natural overtone series and runs from C to C with F sharp, rather than the customary F natural of the major scale.

For searchers like Miles and Coltrane and Bill Evans, and many in the generations that followed them, Russell’s theory provided a harmonic background and a path for further exploration. It also gave rise to the “modal” jazz movement that enjoyed great popularity in the 70’s and 80’s for better and for worse. We should not underestimate the extent of Russell’s enterprise. His work stands head-to-head with Arnold Schoenberg’s “liberation” of the twelve-tone scale, the polytonal work of Stravinsky, and the ethnic scale explorations of Bartok and Kodaly. If you’ve listened to jazz during the last fifty years, you’ve heard a good deal of George Russell’s ideas; he is one of the 20th century’s great originals and one of its bravest innovators.

Having finished this work, Russell is completing another volume on related elements which he has been simultaneously developing over the last several decades.

The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization was expanded several times over the years, and has grown greatly since its first appearance in 1953.

Volume One: The Art and Science of Tonal Gravity
First published in 1953
Publisher Concept Publishing Co., Brookline/MA, 2001
ISBN 0970373902, 9780970373908
252 pages

Book website
Wikipedia
Google books

Download (removed on 2014-5-12 upon request of the publisher)

Thomas Doherty: Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (2003)

Conventional wisdom holds that television was a co-conspirator in the repressions of Cold War America, that it was a facilitator to the blacklist and handmaiden to McCarthyism. But Thomas Doherty argues that, through the influence of television, America actually became a more open and tolerant place. Although many books have been written about this period, Cold War, Cool Medium is the only one to examine it through the lens of television programming.

To the unjaded viewership of Cold War America, the television set was not a harbinger of intellectual degradation and moral decay, but a thrilling new household appliance capable of bringing the wonders of the world directly into the home. The “cool medium” permeated the lives of every American, quickly becoming one of the most powerful cultural forces of the twentieth century. While television has frequently been blamed for spurring the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, it was also the national stage upon which America witnessed—and ultimately welcomed—his downfall. In this provocative and nuanced cultural history, Doherty chronicles some of the most fascinating and ideologically charged episodes in television history: the warm-hearted Jewish sitcom The Goldbergs; the subversive threat from I Love Lucy; the sermons of Fulton J. Sheen on Life Is Worth Living; the anticommunist series I Led 3 Lives; the legendary jousts between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy on See It Now; and the hypnotic, 188-hour political spectacle that was the Army-McCarthy hearings.

By rerunning the programs, freezing the frames, and reading between the lines, Cold War, Cool Medium paints a picture of Cold War America that belies many black-and-white clichés. Doherty not only details how the blacklist operated within the television industry but also how the shows themselves struggled to defy it, arguing that television was preprogrammed to reinforce the very freedoms that McCarthyism attempted to curtail.

Publisher Columbia University Press, 2003
ISBN 0231129521, 9780231129527
305 pages

Publisher
Google books

PDF (updated on 2014-9-5)