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
google books

PDF (DJVU)

Joanna Demers: Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (2006)

Is music property? Under what circumstances can music be stolen? Such questions lie at the heart of Joanna Demers’s timely look at how overzealous intellectual property (IP) litigation both stifles and stimulates musical creativity. A musicologist, industry consultant, and musician, Demers dissects works that have brought IP issues into the mainstream culture, such as DJ Danger Mouse’s “Grey Album” and Mike Batt’s homage-gone-wrong to John Cage’s silent composition “4’33.” Demers also discusses such artists as Ice Cube, DJ Spooky, and John Oswald, whose creativity is sparked by their defiant circumvention of licensing and copyright issues.
Demers is concerned about the fate of transformative appropriation—the creative process by which artists and composers borrow from, and respond to, other musical works. In the United States, only two elements of music are eligible for copyright protection: the master recording and the composition (lyrics and melody) itself. Harmony, rhythm, timbre, and other qualities that make a piece distinctive are virtually unregulated. This two-tiered system had long facilitated transformative appropriation while prohibiting blatant forms of theft. The advent of digital file sharing and the specter of global piracy changed everything, says Demers. Now, record labels and publishers are broadening the scope of IP “infringement” to include allusive borrowing in all forms: sampling, celebrity impersonation—even Girl Scout campfire sing-alongs.

Paying exorbitant licensing fees or risking even harsher penalties for unauthorized borrowing have become the only options for some musicians. Others, however, creatively sidestep not only the law but also the very infrastructure of the music industry. Moving easily between techno and classical, between corporate boardrooms and basement recording studios, Demers gives us new ways to look at the tension between IP law, musical meaning and appropriation, and artistic freedom.

Publisher University of Georgia Press, 2006
ISBN 0820327778, 9780820327778
178 pages

publisher
google books

PDF

Julian Cope: Japrocksampler. How the Post-war Japanese Blew Their Minds on Rock’n’Roll (2007)

In the 1960s rock ‘n’ roll music began crossing the Atlantic Ocean—with The Beatles and The Who leading the British Invasion of the United States—and the Pacific Ocean, as American and European rock slowly began to take hold in Japan. This insightful study from visionary rock musician Julian Cope explores what really happened when Western music met Eastern shores. The clash between traditional Japanese values and the wild renegades of 1960s and 1970s rock ‘n’ roll is examined, and the seminal artists in Japanese post-World War II culture are all covered. From itinerate art-house poets to violent refusenik bands with penchants for plane hijacking, this is the story of the Japanese youths and musicians who simultaneously revolutionized a musical genre and the culture of a nation.

Publisher Bloomsbury, 2007
ISBN 0747589453, 9780747589457
302 pages

author (includes artists and groups A-Z overview)
publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-16)