Joanna Demers: Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (2010)

“Contemporary electronic music has splintered into a dizzying assortment of genres and subgenres, communities and subcultures. Given the ideological differences among academic, popular and avant-garde electronic musicians, is it possible to derive an aesthetic theory that accounts for this variety? And is there even a place for aesthetics in twenty-first-century culture?

Listening through the Noise explores genres ranging from techno to electroacoustic music, from glitch to drone music, and from dub to drones, and maintains that culturally and historically informed aesthetic theory is not only possible but indispensable for understanding electronic music. The abilities of electronic music to use preexisting sounds and to create new sounds are widely known. Author Joanna Demers proceeds from this starting point to consider how electronic music is changing the way we listen not only to music, but to sound itself. The common trait among all variants of recent experimental electronic music is a concern with whether sound, in itself, bears meaning. The use in recent works of previously undesirable materials like noise, field recordings, and extremely quiet sounds has contributed to electronic music’s destruction of the “musical frame,” the conventions that used to set apart music from the outside world. In the void created by the disappearance of the musical frame, different philosophies for listening have emerged. Some electronic music genres insist upon the inscrutability and abstraction of sound. Others maintain that sound functions as a sign pointing to concepts or places beyond the work. But all share an approach towards listening that departs fundamentally from the expectations that have governed music listening in the West for the previous five centuries.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2010
ISBN 0195387651, 9780195387650
248 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)

Peter Dickinson (ed.): CageTalk. Dialogues with & about John Cage (2006)

John Cage was one of America’s most renowned composers from the 1940s until his death in 1992. But he was also a much-admired writer and artist, and a uniquely attractive personality able to present his ideas engagingly wherever he went. As an interview subject he was a consummate professional.

The main source of CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage is a panoply of vivid and compulsively readable interviews given to Peter Dickinson in the late 1980s for a BBC Radio 3 documentary. The original BBC program lasted an hour but the full discussions with Cage and many of the main figures connected with him have remained unpublished until now.

CageTalk also includes earlier BBC interviews with Cage, including ones by the renowned literary critic Frank Kermode and art critic David Sylvester. And the editor Peter Dickinson contributes little-known source material about Cage’s Musicircus and Roaratorio as well as a substantial introduction exploring the multiple roles that Cage’s varied and challenging output played during much of the twentieth century and continues to play in the early twenty-first.

Apart from the long interview with Cage himself, there are discussions with Bonnie Bird, Earle Brown, Merce Cunningham, Minna Lederman, Otto Luening, Jackson Mac Low, Peadar Mercier, Pauline Oliveros, John Rockwell, Kurt Schwertsik, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Virgil Thomson, David Tudor, La Monte Young, and Paul Zukovsky. Most of the interviews were given to Peter Dickinson but there are others involving Rebecca Boyle, Anthony Cheevers, Michael Oliver, and Roger Smalley.

Published by University of Rochester Press, 2006
Volume 38 of Eastman studies in music
ISBN 1580462375, 9781580462372
294 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)

Paul Griffiths: The Substance of Things Heard. Writings about Music (2005)

Paul Griffiths offers his own personal selection of some of his most substantial and imaginative articles and concert reviews from over three decades of indefatigable concertgoing around the world. He reports on premieres and other important performancesof works by such composers as Elliott Carter, Sofia Gubaidulina, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Steve Reich, as well as Harrison Birtwistle and other important British figures.

Griffiths vividly conveys the vision, aura, and idiosyncrasies of prominent pianists, singers, and conductors (such as Herbert von Karajan), and debates changing styles of performing Monteverdi and Purcell. A particular delight is his response to the world of opera, including Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (sting productions), Pavarotti and Domingo in Verdi at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron, and two wildly different Jonathan Miller versions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

From the author’s preface: “We cannot say what music is. Yet we are verbal creatures, and strive with words to cast a net around it, knowing most of this immaterial stuff will evade capture. The stories that follow cover a wide range of events over a period of great change. Yet the net’s aim was always the same, to catch the substance of things heard.

“Criticism has to work largely by analogy and metaphor. This is no limitation. It is largely through such verbal ties that music is linked to other sorts of experience, not least the naturalworld and the orchestra of our feelings.”

Publisher University of Rochester Press, 2005
Volume 31 of Eastman studies in music
ISBN 1580462065, 9781580462068
378 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)