John Cage: A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (1967)

Collection of John Cage‘s essays, lectures and journal entries from 1961–1967. Includes “How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” and “Juilliard Lecture”.

Publisher Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 1967
ISBN 0819560022, 9780819560025
167 pages

Review: Virgil Thomson (New York Review of Books, 1970).

Wikipedia

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Joanna Demers: Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (2010)

“Contemporary electronic music has splintered into a dizzying assortment of genres and subgenres, communities and subcultures. Given the ideological differences among academic, popular and avant-garde electronic musicians, is it possible to derive an aesthetic theory that accounts for this variety? And is there even a place for aesthetics in twenty-first-century culture?

Listening through the Noise explores genres ranging from techno to electroacoustic music, from glitch to drone music, and from dub to drones, and maintains that culturally and historically informed aesthetic theory is not only possible but indispensable for understanding electronic music. The abilities of electronic music to use preexisting sounds and to create new sounds are widely known. Author Joanna Demers proceeds from this starting point to consider how electronic music is changing the way we listen not only to music, but to sound itself. The common trait among all variants of recent experimental electronic music is a concern with whether sound, in itself, bears meaning. The use in recent works of previously undesirable materials like noise, field recordings, and extremely quiet sounds has contributed to electronic music’s destruction of the “musical frame,” the conventions that used to set apart music from the outside world. In the void created by the disappearance of the musical frame, different philosophies for listening have emerged. Some electronic music genres insist upon the inscrutability and abstraction of sound. Others maintain that sound functions as a sign pointing to concepts or places beyond the work. But all share an approach towards listening that departs fundamentally from the expectations that have governed music listening in the West for the previous five centuries.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2010
ISBN 0195387651, 9780195387650
248 pages

Publisher

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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

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)