Alvin Lucier: Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · avant-garde, composition, electronic music, experimental music, music, music history, notation
“Composer and peformer Alvin Lucier brings clarity to the world of experimental music as he takes the reader through more than a hundred groundbreaking musical works, including those of Robert Ashley, John Cage, Charles Ives, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. Lucier explains in detail how each piece is made, unlocking secrets of the composers’ style and technique. The book as a whole charts the progress of American experimental music from the 1950s to the present, covering such topics as indeterminacy, electronics, and minimalism, as well as radical innovations in music for the piano, string quartet, and opera. Clear, approachable and lively, Music 109 is Lucier’s indispensable guide to late 20th-century composition.”
With a Foreword by Robert Ashley
Publisher Wesleyan University Press, 2012
ISBN 0819572977, 9780819572974
236 pages
via Sorin
Reviews: Richard Kade (Leonardo, 2013), Dave Mandl (LA Review of Books, 2013), Michael Waugh (Popular Music, 2013).
PDF, PDF (updated on 2017-11-25)
EPUB (added on 2017-11-25)
Douglas Kahn: Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · acoustics, art, art history, cold war, computer music, earth, electromagnetism, electronic music, energy, experimental music, geophysics, hearing, history of science, light, media history, music history, nature, noise, perception, radio, science, sound, sound art, sun, technology, telegraphy, telephone
“Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Douglas Kahn begins by evoking the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing along telegraph lines and the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard through the first telephone; he then traces the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s and beyond. Earth Sound Earth Signal rethinks energy at a global scale, from brainwaves to outer space, through detailed discussions of musicians, artists and scientists such as Alvin Lucier, Edmond Dewan, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, James Turrell, Robert Barry, Joyce Hinterding, and many others.”
Publisher University of California Press, 2013
ISBN 0520956834, 9780520956834
343 pages
Reviews: Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2013), Christopher Haworth (Organised Sound, 2015), Adam Trainer (Continuum, 2015).
PDF (removed on 2014-3-19 upon request of the publisher)
Comment (0)Benjamin Piekut: Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · avant-garde, experimental music, jazz, music, music history, new york, performance
“In Experimental Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut takes the reader into the heart of what we mean by “experimental” in avant-garde music. Focusing on one place and time–New York City, 1964–Piekut examines five disparate events: the New York Philharmonic’s disastrous performance of John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis; Henry Flynt’s demonstrations against the downtown avant-garde; Charlotte Moorman’s Avant Garde Festival; the founding of the Jazz Composers Guild; and the emergence of Iggy Pop. Drawing together a colorful array of personalities, Piekut argues that each of these examples points to a failure and marks a limit or boundary of canonical experimentalism. What emerges from these marginal moments is an accurate picture of the avant-garde, not as a style or genre, but as a network defined by disagreements, struggles, and exclusions.”
Publisher University of California Press, 2011
ISBN 0520948424, 9780520948426
296 pages
Reviews: Thomas Fogg (Current Musicology, 2011), Clemens Gresser (Notes, 2012), Molly McGlone (Twentieth-Century Music, 2013), Jeremy Grimshaw (American Music, 2014).
PDF (updated on 2020-5-3)
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