Geir Egil Bergjord: Pierre Henry’s House of Sounds (2010)

“I met French composer and founder of Musique Concrète, Pierre Henry, for the first time during a performance in Stavanger (Norway) in September 2006. Four years later, after numerous travels back and forth between Stavanger and Paris, my joint project with Henry was launched. The book, a seemingly endless flow of photos, moving room by room, from macro close-ups to overviews, is like a visit in the house, accompanied by a CD containing previously unreleased pieces by Pierre Henry: Capriccio, Phrases de Quatuor, Miroirs de Temps and Envol.” (from the author)

The book contains texts by Pierre Henry, François Weyergans, Maurice Fleuret, Yves Bigot, Tommy Olsson, Geir Egil Bergjord, Tor Åge Bringsværd, and Isabelle Warnier.

Publisher Gilka, Norway, 2010
ISBN 9788292829028
224 pages

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James Tenney: META⌿HODOS and META Meta⌿Hodos: A Phenomenology of 20th Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form (1964/1988)

One of the great music theory books of the 20th century, by a thought-provoking composer. One of earliest applications of gestalt theory and cognitive science to music.

Originally published by the Inter-American Institute for Musical Research, Tulane University, New Orleans, 1964 (META-HODOS), and the Journal of Experimental Aesthetics 1.1, 1977 (“META Meta-Hodos”)
Edited by Larry Polansky
Second edition
Publisher Frog Peak Music, Oakland/CA, 1988
ISBN 0945996004, 9780945996002
116 pages

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Seth Kim-Cohen: In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (2009)

“An ear-opening reassessment of sonic art from World War II to the present.

Marcel Duchamp famously championed a “non-retinal” visual art, rejecting judgments of taste and beauty. In the Blink of an Ear is the first book to ask why the sonic arts did not experience a parallel turn toward a non-cochlear sonic art, imagined as both a response and a complement to Duchamp’s conceptualism. Rather than treat sound art as an artistic practice unto itself—or as the unwanted child of music—artist and theorist Seth Kim-Cohen relates the post-War sonic arts to contemporaneous movements in the gallery arts. Applying key ideas from poststructuralism, deconstruction, and art history, In the Blink of an Ear suggests that the sonic arts have been subject to the same cultural pressures that have shaped minimalism, conceptualism, appropriation, and relational aesthetics. Sonic practice and theory have downplayed – or, in many cases, completely rejected – the de-formalization of the artwork and its simultaneous animation in the conceptual realm.

Starting in 1948, the simultaneous examples of John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer initiated a sonic theory-in-practice, fusing clement Greenberg’s media-specificity with a phenomenological emphasis on perception. Subsequently, the “sound-in-itself” tendency has become the dominant paradigm for the production and reception of sound art. Engaged with critical texts by Jacques Derrida, Rosalind Krauss, Friedrich Kittler, Jean François Lyotard, and Jacques Attali, among others, Seth Kim-Cohen convincingly argues for a reassessment of the short history of sound art, rejecting sound-in-itself in favor of a reading of sound’s expanded situation and its uncontainable textuality. At the same time, this important book establishes the principles for a nascent non-cochlear sonic practice, embracing the inevitable interaction of sound with the social, the linguistic, the philosophical, the political, and the technological.

Artists discussed include: George Brecht, John Cage, Janet Cardiff, Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan, Valie Export, Luc Ferrari, Jarrod Fowler, Jacob Kirkegaard, Alvin Lucier, Robert Morris, Muddy Waters, John Oswald, Marina Rosenfeld, Pierre Schaeffer, Stephen Vitiello, La Monte Young.”

Publisher Continuum, New York/London, 2009
ISBN 082642970X, 9780826429704
296 pages

Reviews: Laura Paolini (MusicWorks, 2010), Will Scrimshaw (2010), Brian Kane (NonSite, 2013).

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