Studio International, 984: Art & Experimental Music (1976)

This special issue of Studio International on art and experimental music features texts by Michael Nyman, Cornelius Cardew, Germano Celant, Gavin Bryars, Brian Eno, Stuart Marshall, Jeffrey Steele, Paul Burwell, and David Toop, and interviews with Steve Reich (Michael Nyman), Tom Phillips (Fred Orton and Gavin Bryars), and Morton Feldman (Gavin Bryars and Fred Orton).

The issue is accompanied by a cassette featuring contributions from Howard Skempton, Christopher Hobbs, Gavin Bryars, John White, Michael Parsons, James Lampard, and Michael Nyman (see page 329).

Editorial assistance: Michael Nyman
Publisher Studio International Journal, London, November-December 1976
xvi+99 pages

PDF (63 MB, updated on 2020-5-7 via Goran V)
Cassette supplement: Audio Arts 3(2): “Recent English Experimental Music”: Info & MP3s

Curtis Roads: Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic (2015)

“Electronic music evokes new sensations, feelings, and thoughts in both composers and listeners. Opening the door to an unlimited universe of sound, it engages spatialization as an integral aspect of composition and focuses on sound transformation as a core structural strategy. In this new domain, pitch occurs as a flowing and ephemeral substance that can be bent, modulated, or dissolved into noise. Similarly, time occurs not merely as a fixed duration subdivided by ratios, but as a plastic medium that can be generated, modulated, reversed, warped, scrambled, and granulated. Envelope and waveform undulations on all time scales interweave to generate form. The power of algorithmic methods amplify the capabilities of music technology. Taken together, these constitute game-changing possibilities.

This convergence of technical and aesthetic trends prompts the need for a new text focused on the opportunities of a sound oriented, multiscale approach to composition of electronic music. Sound oriented means a practice that takes place in the presence of sound. Multiscale means an approach that takes into account the perceptual and physical reality of multiple, interacting time scales-each of which can be composed. After more than a century of research and development, now is an appropriate moment to step back and reevaluate all that has changed under the ground of artistic practice.

Composing Electronic Music outlines a new theory of composition based on the toolkit of electronic music techniques. The theory consists of a framework of concepts and a vocabulary of terms describing musical materials, their transformation, and their organization. Central to this discourse is the notion of narrative structure in composition-how sounds are born, interact, transform, and die. It presents a guidebook: a tour of facts, history, commentary, opinions, and pointers to interesting ideas and new possibilities to consider and explore.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2015
ISBN 9780195373233, 0195373235
xxvii+480 pages

Reviews: Nick Collins (Music and Letters, 2016), Gregory Taylor (Cycling74, 2016), Warren Burt (SoundBytes, 2016).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (24 MB)
Companion website

Richard Kostelanetz (ed.): Text–Sound Texts (1980)

Anthology of scores, scripts, instructions, diagrams and documentation of art works that are meant to be heard. With more than one hundred pieces from a broad range of the 1960’s and 1970’s experimental artists from the music, art, literature, theater, and film worlds, including: John Cage, Guy de Coinet, Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, Philip Glass, Glenn Gould, Dick Higgins, Jack Kerouac, Annea Lockwood, Alvin Lucier, Jackson Mac Low, bp Nichol, Claes Oldenburg, Mary Ellen Solt, Gertrude Stein, Emmett Williams, and Robert Wilson, among others.

Publisher William Morrow, New York, 1980
ISBN 0688036163, 9780688036164
441 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm

WorldCat

PDF (100 MB)