Larry Polansky: The Early Works of James Tenney (1983)

“James Tenney was a composer and influential music theorist. He studied piano with Eduard Steuermann and composition with Chou Wen-chung, Lionel Nowak, Paul Boepple, Henry Brant, Carl Ruggles, Kenneth Gaburo, Lejaren Hiller, John Cage, Harry Partch, and Edgard Varèse. He also studied information theory under Lejaren Hiller, and composed stochastic early computer music before turning almost completely to writing for instruments with the occasional tape delay, often using just intonation and alternative tunings. Tenney’s notable students include John Luther Adams, John Bischoff, Peter Garland, Larry Polansky, Charlemagne Palestine, and Marc Sabat. He performed with John Cage, as well as with the ensembles of Harry Partch, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass.” (source)

Published in Soundings #13, edited by Peter Garland
181 pages

via Larry Polansky

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Peter J Schmelz: Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music During the Thaw (2009)

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, during the period now known as the Thaw, Nikita Khrushchev opened up greater freedoms in cultural and intellectual life. A broad group of intellectuals and artists in Soviet Russia were able to take advantage of this, and in no realm of the arts was this perhaps more true than in music. Students at Soviet conservatories were at last able to use various channels–many of questionable legality–to acquire and hear music that had previously been forbidden, and visiting performers and composers brought young Soviets new sounds and new compositions. In the 1960s, composers such as Andrey Volkonsky, Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Pärt, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Valentin Silvestrov experimented with a wide variety of then new and unfamiliar techniques ranging from serialism to aleatory devices, and audiences eager to escape the music of predictable sameness typical to socialist realism were attracted to performances of their new and unfamiliar creations.

This “unofficial” music by young Soviet composers inhabited the gray space between legal and illegal. Such Freedom, If Only Musical traces the changing compositional styles and politically charged reception of this music, and brings to life the paradoxical freedoms and sense of resistance or opposition that it suggested to Soviet listeners. Author Peter J. Schmelz draws upon interviews conducted with many of the most important composers and performers of the musical Thaw, and supplements this first-hand testimony with careful archival research and detailed musical analyses. The first book to explore this period in detail, Such Freedom, If Only Musical will appeal to musicologists and theorists interested in post-war arts movements, the Cold War, and Soviet music, as well as historians of Russian culture and society.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2009
ISBN 0195341937, 9780195341935
408 pages

review (Pauline Fairclough, Notes)
review (Kiril Tomoff, The American Historical Review)
review (Solomon Volkov, Radio Svoboda, in Russian)

publisher
google books

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Pauline Oliveros: Software for People: Collected Writings 1963-80 (1984)

Collected writings of an acclaimed composer, performer and humanitarian. The book includes articles on new music, women as composers, sonic meditation, attention and awareness, and technique.

Publisher Smith Publications, Baltimore, MD, 1984
ISBN 0914162608, 9780914162605
276 pages

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