David Byrne: How Music Works (2012)

“How Music Works is David Byrne’s buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about.

Equal parts historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, Byrne draws on his own work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and his myriad collaborators – along with journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists – to show that music-making is not just the act of a solitary composer in a studio, but rather a logical, populist, and beautiful result of cultural circumstance.

A brainy, irresistible adventure, How Music Works is an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.”

Publisher Canongate Books, 2012
ISBN 0857862510, 9780857862518
348 pages

review (Mark Ellen, The Guardian)
review (Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing)
review (Geeta Dayal, Wired)
review (John Rockwell, The New York Times)
interview with the author (Vice)

publisher

EPUB

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).

Publisher

PDF (no OCR)

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)
Publisher

PDF (removed on 2013-7-18 upon request of the publisher)