George Lewis: A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (2008)

Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images.

Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from founding member Steve McCall’s kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, A Power Stronger Than Itself uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings to light a major piece of the history of avant-garde music and art.

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2008
The Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr. , Lectures in the History of Cartography Series
ISBN 0226476952, 9780226476957
Length 676 pages

Publisher
Google books

PDF, PDF (updated on 2014-12-22)

Renee Levine Packer: This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo (2010)

This Life of Sounds portrays an important and previously unexplored corner of the history of new music in America: the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo. Composers Lukas Foss (the Center’s founder), Lejaren Hiller, and Morton Feldman were the music directors over the life of “the Buffalo group,” during the years 1964-1980. Based on Foss’s plan, the Rockefeller Foundation provided annual fellowships for young composers and virtuoso instrumentalists to live in Buffalo for up to two years, thus creating a cadre of like-minded musicians who would spend their time studying, creating, and performing difficult – often controversial – new work. The new legendary group of musicians (some would say “musical outlows”) who participated in the Buffalo group included Pulitzer Prize winner George Crumb, Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Maryanne Amacher, Frederic Rzewski, David Tudor, Julius Eastman, and many more. Composers John Cage, Jim Tenney, Iannis Xenakis and others all figure int he story as well. The book provides valuable accounts of the Center’s influential concert series, Evenings for New Music, performed in Buffalo, New York and throughout Europe; its famous recording of Terry Riley’s In C; the political activism of the time; and the intersection of academic, private, and institutional funding for the arts. Life magazine declared in an article about the 1965 Fest of the Arts Today titled, “Can This Be Buffalo?”, “Buffalo exploded last month in a two-week avant garde festival that was bigger and hipper than anything ever held in Paris or New York…” The concerts, the festivals, and the adventurous musical climate attracted filmmakers and young visual arts resulting in what one person called “one of those kinds of places the way people talk about Vienna in 1900-1910.”

– Chronicles an exuberant period of artistic exploration and experimentation in America from an insider’s perspective
– Provides the first full-length study of the Buffalo new music group, the Creative Associates
– Features international leaders in contemporary music such as Morton Feldman, John Cage, Julius Eastman, and Cornelius Cardew
– Portrays the growth of the avant-garde during the 1960s and 1970s through previously unexplored terrain

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2010
ISBN 0199730776, 9780199730773
244 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-22)

Rob Young: Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music (2010)

In this groundbreaking survey of more than a century of music making in the British Isles, Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations – song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators.

In a sweeping panorama of Albion’s soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd; the folk-rock of Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Shirley Collins, John Martyn and Pentangle; the bucolic psychedelia of The Incredible String Band, The Beatles and Pink Floyd; the acid folk of Comus, Forest, Mr Fox and Trees; The Wicker Man and occult folklore; the early Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals; and the visionary pop of Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk, Electric Eden maps out a native British musical voice that reflects the complex relationships between town and country, progress and nostalgia, radicalism and conservatism.

An attempt to isolate the ‘Britishness’ of British music – a wild combination of pagan echoes, spiritual quest, imaginative time-travel, pastoral innocence and electrified creativity – Electric Eden will be treasured by anyone interested in the tangled story of Britain’s folk music and Arcadian dreams.

Publisher Faber and Faber, 2010
ISBN 0571237525, 9780571237524
664 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (EPUB; updated on 2012-7-16)