Jozef Cseres: Hudobné simulakrá (2001) [Slovak]

“Známy estetik sa vo svojej knihe zaoberá vplyvnými svetovými umelcami, pre ktorých technológie nie sú nástrojom, zjednodušujúcim prácu, ale predovšetkým tvorivou výzvou.”

“We may not be aware of the fact that much of today’s music is created with the help of electronics. In his book, Cseres focuses on influential artists who do not use technology to facilitate their task, they rather consider it a creative challenge. With philosophical insight he pinpoints the relation between today’s music and intermedia and science, between the possibilities and constraints of technology, and most of all between human imagination and creativity in the post-modern era.”

Publisher Hudobné centrum, Bratislava, 2001
ISBN 8088884306, 9788088884309
192 pages

Reviews: Július Fujak (aluze.cz, 2002), Michal Rataj (Hudební věda, 2005).

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Larry Austin, Douglas Kahn (eds.): Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966-1973 (2011)

“The journal Source: Music of the Avant-garde was and remains a seminal source for materials on the heyday of experimental music and arts. Conceived in 1966 and published to 1973, it included some of the most important composers and artists of the time: John Cage, Harry Partch, David Tudor, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, and many others. A pathbreaking publication, Source documented crucial changes in performance practice and live electronics, computer music, notation and event scores, theater and installations, intermedia and technology, politics and the social roles of composers and performers, and innovations in the sound of music.”

Publisher University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2011
Roth Family Foundation Music in America Books series
ISBN 0520267451, 9780520267459
382 pages

Reviews: Continuo (2011), Michael Boyd (Computer Music Journal, 2013).

Wikipedia (about the journal)
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John F Cline: Permanent Underground: Radical Sounds and Social Formations in 20th Century American Musicking (2012)

Musical labor entered a new phase of alienation following the advent of recording technology in the late 19th century. Whereas prior to recording musicians had a relatively direct relationship with their audience—the sum of the two groups constituting “musicking”—sound reproduction created a spatial and temporal dislocation between them. Most narratives of American popular music trace out a particular genre formation, and relate it to the culture from whence it emerged. By contrast, this dissertation begins from the point where musicking began to disengage from commodification, both at the level of social formation and of the creation of sound itself. Drawing on anthropologist Pierre Clastres’ notion of “Anti-State” modes of organization and cultural critic Ivan Illich’s concept of “conviviality,” or a human-centered rather than mass productionoriented use of tools—in this case musical instruments both handmade and modified—each chapter of this project tackles a different dimension of the quest for autonomous musicking, or a “permanent underground.” Chapter 1 examines the organizational principles that have run in parallel to the bureaucratic, capitalist manifestation of a “music industry” in the 20th century. Beginning with a critique of either/or fallacy of the opposition posited between “modernism” and “nostalgia,” the reminder of the chapter demonstrates the reconciliation between these two aesthetic and political positions; topics include the seizure of public space by itinerant blues musicians in the rural-industrial prewar South, the self-released recordings of gospel artists after WWII, the formation of experimental jazz collectives in the 1960s, and the relationship between psychedelic music and cults/communes in the 1960s. Chapter 2 critiques the function of genre in musicking as means to a reproducible sonic commodity, and argues for “noise” as an aesthetic intervention that disrupts the saleable nature of music—a political act in itself. Chapter 3 suggests several strategies for achieving “noise.” These include the repurposing of industrial machines as musical instruments, the incorporation of foreign musical traditions, and the use of collage as a formal principle. The final chapter profiles six collectives that have emerged since the late 1960s that adhere to the aesthetic and political values established throughout this dissertation.

Dissertation
Faculty of the Graduate School, The University of Texas at Austin, May 2012
Supervisor: Mark C. Smith
520 pages

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