Reginald Smith Brindle: The New Music: The Avant-garde since 1945, 2nd ed (1975/1987)

This guide to the more adventurous evolutions of music since 1945–pointillism, post-Webernism, integral serialism, free dodecaphony, aleatory and indeterminate music, graphics, musique concrète, electronic music, and theatre music–was first published in 1975 and has been reprinted several times. For this second edition, Smith Brindle has added a new chapter reviewing developments over the decade since first publication. He discusses the decline of experimentalism and the reaction against increasing cerebralism and complexity as variously illustrated by the more recent works of Stockhausen, the minimalist works of Reich and Glass, and the partial return to romanticism. He also reviews the technological revolution which has taken place in computer music and concludes that the future of music will for the time being be most closely associated with technological change and development, rather than with radical changes in compositional techniques.

First edition published 1975
Publisher Oxford University Press, 1987
ISBN 0193154714, 9780193154711
222 pages

publisher
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PDF (DJVU)

Jozef Cseres: Hudobné simulakrá (2001) [Slovak]

“Známy estetik sa vo svojej knihe zaoberá vplyvnými svetovými umelcami, pre ktorých technológie nie sú nástrojom, zjednodušujúcim prácu, ale predovšetkým tvorivou výzvou.”

“We may not be aware of the fact that much of today’s music is created with the help of electronics. In his book, Cseres focuses on influential artists who do not use technology to facilitate their task, they rather consider it a creative challenge. With philosophical insight he pinpoints the relation between today’s music and intermedia and science, between the possibilities and constraints of technology, and most of all between human imagination and creativity in the post-modern era.”

Publisher Hudobné centrum, Bratislava, 2001
ISBN 8088884306, 9788088884309
192 pages

Reviews: Július Fujak (aluze.cz, 2002), Michal Rataj (Hudební věda, 2005).

Publisher

PDF (no OCR)

Miguel Molina Alarcón: Baku: Symphony of Sirens: Sound Experiments in The Russian Avant-Garde. Original Documents and Reconstructions of 72 Key Works of Music, Poetry and Agitprop from the Russian Avantgardes (1908-1942) (2008) [EN, MP3]

“A comprehensive overview of the complexity and breadth of the many early 20th-century Russian avantgarde movements, followed by detailed notes and contexts for the individual recordings – including summary biographies of the main actors; additional work notes about the process of the extraordinary Baku reconstruction; a bibliography, rare photographs, web research links, artwork, facsimiles of contemporary documents, a comparative timeline of European and Russian Avantgardes and the first English translation of an article by Avraamov about the symphony. This is a definitive library collection, some seven years in the making and possibly our most important release of recent years.”

Publisher: ReR Megacorp, London, 2008
ISBN 9780956018403
72 pages

Publisher

PDF and MP3s (removed on 2018-8-21 upon request from publisher)