Alvin Lucier: Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music (2012)

“Composer and peformer Alvin Lucier brings clarity to the world of experimental music as he takes the reader through more than a hundred groundbreaking musical works, including those of Robert Ashley, John Cage, Charles Ives, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. Lucier explains in detail how each piece is made, unlocking secrets of the composers’ style and technique. The book as a whole charts the progress of American experimental music from the 1950s to the present, covering such topics as indeterminacy, electronics, and minimalism, as well as radical innovations in music for the piano, string quartet, and opera. Clear, approachable and lively, Music 109 is Lucier’s indispensable guide to late 20th-century composition.”

With a Foreword by Robert Ashley
Publisher Wesleyan University Press, 2012
ISBN 0819572977, 9780819572974
236 pages
via Sorin

Reviews: Richard Kade (Leonardo, 2013), Dave Mandl (LA Review of Books, 2013), Michael Waugh (Popular Music, 2013).

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2017-11-25)
EPUB (added on 2017-11-25)

Iannis Xenakis: Music and Architecture: Architectural Projects, Texts, and Realizations (2008)

“This work fills a major lacuna in the literature by bringing together for the first time all of the projects, realizations and texts related to architecture by the multi-faceted Iannis Xenakis who worked with Le Corbusier for 12 years. Sharon Kanach assisted the composer in gathering the texts for this his last ambitious project.

The material in the book is presented under four main headings: “The Le Corbusier Years”, “Xenakis as Independent Architect”, “Writings on Architecture”, and “The Polytopes”. Three annexes include a commented bibliography of writings by and on Xenakis compiled by Makis Solomo, a critical index of Xenakis’s architecture by Sven Sterken, and a comparative chronology of Xenakis’s life and work by Sharon Kanach. The latter’s commentary throughout the book strives to bridge the reciprocal influences between music and architecture in the Xenakis oeuvre.”

Compiled, Translated and Commented by Sharon Kanach
Publisher Pendragon Press, Hillsdale/NY, 2008
The Iannis Xenakis Series, 1
ISBN 9781576471074
337 pages
via philip

Reviews: M.J. Grant (Music & Letters, 2010), James Harley (MusicWorks, 2010).

Publisher

PDF (84 MB, no OCR, updated on 2020-9-23)

Trevor Pinch, Karin Bijsterveld (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2011)

“Written by the leading scholars and researchers in the emerging field of sound studies, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies offers new and fully engaging perspectives on the significance of sound in its material and cultural forms. The book considers sounds and music as experienced in such diverse settings as shop floors, laboratories, clinics, design studios, homes, and clubs, across an impressively broad range of historical periods and national and cultural contexts.

Science has traditionally been understood as a visual matter, a study which has historically been undertaken with optical technologies such as slides, graphs, and telescopes. This book questions that notion powerfully by showing how listening has contributed to scientific practice. Sounds have always been a part of human experience, shaping and transforming the world in which we live in ways that often go unnoticed. Sounds and music, the authors argue, are embedded in the fabric of everyday life, art, commerce, and politics in ways which impact our perception of the world. Through an extraordinarily diverse set of case studies, authors illustrate how sounds — from the sounds of industrialization, to the sounds of automobiles, to sounds in underwater music and hip-hop, to the sounds of nanotechnology — give rise to new forms listening practices. In addition, the book discusses the rise of new public problems such as noise pollution, hearing loss, and the “end” of the amateur musician that stem from the spread and appropriation of new sound- and music-related technologies, analog and digital, in many domains of life.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2011
ISBN 0199995818, 9780195388947
624 pages

Reviews: John F. Barber (Leonardo, 2012), Bruce Johnson (Popular Music, 2013), William Cheng (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2014).

Companion website
Publisher

PDF, PDF (56 MB)