Paul Griffiths: Modern Music and After, 3rd ed (2011)

Over three decades, Paul Griffiths’s survey has remained the definitive study of music since the Second World War; this fully revised and updated edition re-establishes Modern Music and After as the preeminent introduction to the music of our time. The disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez’s radical reformation of compositional technique and in John Cage’s development of zen music; in Milton Babbitt’s settling of the serial system and in Dmitry Shostakovich’s unsettling symphonies; in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s development of electronic music and in Luigi Nono’s pursuit of the universally human, in Iannis Xenakis’s view of music as sounding mathematics and in Luciano Berio’s consideration of it as language. The initiatives of these composers and their contemporaries opened prospects that haven’t yet stopped unfolding.

This constant expansion of musical thinking since 1945 has left us with no singular history of music; Griffiths’s study accordingly follows several different paths, showing how and why they converge and diverge. This new edition of Modern Music and After discusses not only the music of the fifteen years that have passed since the previous edition, but also the recent explosion of scholarly interest in the latter half of the twentieth century. In particular, the book has been expanded to incorporate the variety of responses to the modernist impasse experienced by composers of the 1980s and 1990s. Griffiths then moves the book into the twenty-first century as he examines such highly influential composers as Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino.

For its breadth, wealth of detail, and characteristic wit and clarity, the third edition of Modern Music and After is required reading for the student and the enquiring listener.

– Provides the most comprehensive study in English of musical composition from 1945 on
– Offers a keen examination of how important composers have responded to the constant flux of their cultural environs, both socially and technically
– Griffiths is considered by many in the field the finest writer on modern “classical” music in the English language today

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2011
ISBN 0199792828, 9780199792825
480 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)

Terence Dwyer: Composing With Tape Recorders: Musique Concrète For Beginners (1971)

Publisher Oxford University Press, 1971
ISBN 0193119129
74 pages

Review: Tony Herrington (The Wire, 2010).

PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)

Leigh Landy: What’s the Matter with Today’s Experimental Music? Organized Sound Too Rarely Heard (1991)

What’s the Matter with Today’s Experimental Music? is based on the premise that contemporary music is suffering from a distinct lack of attention. It inspects and evaluates what is happening to musical experimentation, where things might have gone wrong and what can be done to resolve the problem. Intended as a supplement to surveys of music of the last forty years, it discusses not only the problems of musical content, but also problems of an extra-musical nature. Today’s education and communications media are seen to be the main cause of the anonymity of contemporary music and suggestions are made to improve this situation. Leigh Landy investigates audio-visual applications that have hardly been explored, new timbres and sound sources, the discovery of musical space, new notations, musical politics, and the ‘musical community’ in an attempt to incite more composers, musicians and musicologists to get this music out into the works and to stimulate the creation of new experimental works.

Publisher Routledge, 1991
ISBN 3718651688, 9783718651689
308 pages

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PDF (no OCR; some pages missing; updated on 2012-11-4)