Albrecht Betz: Hanns Eisler, Political Musician (1976/1982)

Eisler’s role in German music is similar to that of Brecht in German literature and the two men worked together for nearly thirty years. Together with Webern and Berg, Eisler is considered one of the three great pupils of Schoenberg. Albrecht Betz divides Eisler’s life and music into four periods. The early formative period as student of Schoenberg includes compositions written in Vienna up to 1925. From 1926 to 1933, the second period, Eisler lived in Berlin and made his greatest impact with his political vocal music. The third phase of Eisler’s life, fifteen years of exile, was spent principally in the USA, and the fourth (from 1948) in East Germany. The author shows how Eisler is distinguished from other great twentieth-century composers in his belief that music had a social function, and how he liberated modern music from what he and others felt was its isolation. Originally published in German in 1976, this English edition is illustrated with music examples and includes a complete list of works, and a bibliography which has been adapted for the English-speaking reader.

Originally published in German as Hanns Eisler, Musik einer Zeit, die sich eben bildet by Edition text und kritik GmbH, Munich 1976
Translated by Bill Hopkins
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1982
ISBN 0521240220, 9780521240222
326 pages

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M. Mitchell Waldrop: The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (2001)

While most people may not be familiar with the name J. C. R. Licklider, he was the guiding spirit behind the greatest revolution of the modern era. At a time when most computers were big, ponderous mainframes, he envisioned them as desktop tools that could empower individuals, foster creativity, and allow the sharing of information all over the world. Working from an obscure office in the depths of the Pentagon, he set in motion the forces that could make his vision real. Writing with the same novelistic flair that made his Complexity “the most exciting intellectual adventure story of the year” (The Washington Post), Waldrop presents the history of this great enterprise and the first full-scale portrait of the man whose dream of a “human-computer symbiosis” changed the course of science and culture, gave us the modern world of computing, and laid the foundation for the Internet age.

Publisher Viking, 2001
Sloan Technology series
ISBN 0670899763, 9780670899760
502 pages

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Peter Dickinson (ed.): CageTalk. Dialogues with & about John Cage (2006)

John Cage was one of America’s most renowned composers from the 1940s until his death in 1992. But he was also a much-admired writer and artist, and a uniquely attractive personality able to present his ideas engagingly wherever he went. As an interview subject he was a consummate professional.

The main source of CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage is a panoply of vivid and compulsively readable interviews given to Peter Dickinson in the late 1980s for a BBC Radio 3 documentary. The original BBC program lasted an hour but the full discussions with Cage and many of the main figures connected with him have remained unpublished until now.

CageTalk also includes earlier BBC interviews with Cage, including ones by the renowned literary critic Frank Kermode and art critic David Sylvester. And the editor Peter Dickinson contributes little-known source material about Cage’s Musicircus and Roaratorio as well as a substantial introduction exploring the multiple roles that Cage’s varied and challenging output played during much of the twentieth century and continues to play in the early twenty-first.

Apart from the long interview with Cage himself, there are discussions with Bonnie Bird, Earle Brown, Merce Cunningham, Minna Lederman, Otto Luening, Jackson Mac Low, Peadar Mercier, Pauline Oliveros, John Rockwell, Kurt Schwertsik, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Virgil Thomson, David Tudor, La Monte Young, and Paul Zukovsky. Most of the interviews were given to Peter Dickinson but there are others involving Rebecca Boyle, Anthony Cheevers, Michael Oliver, and Roger Smalley.

Published by University of Rochester Press, 2006
Volume 38 of Eastman studies in music
ISBN 1580462375, 9781580462372
294 pages

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