Richard Kostelanetz: Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (1993–)

“This book elucidates, celebrates, enumerates, and sometimes obliterates achievers and achievements in the avant-garde arts. Although it runs from A to Z, it could as easily have been written from Z to A (or in any other order you might imagine) and may be read from front to back, back to front, or point to point. It is opinionated, as all good dictionaries should be, but it is also inclusive, because there can never be just one avant-garde.

Blake • Rimbaud • Apollinaire • Stein • Cage • Lichtenstein • Tatlin • Keaton • Captain Beefheart • Hologram • Text-Sound Texts • Strobe Light • Grotowski • Soho • Micropress • Electronic Music • Reinhardt • Pound • Performance • Postmodern • Duchamp • Fuller • Oldenberg • Paik • Armory Show • Reich • Cunningham • Copy Culture • Pattern Poetry • Bread and Puppet Theatre” (from the back cover)

With contributions by Richard Carlin, Geof Huth, Gerald Janecek, Katy Matheson, H.R. Brittain, John Robert Colombo, Ulrike Michal Dorda, Charles Doria, and Robert Haller.

Publisher A Capella Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press, 1993
ISBN 1556522029
246 pages

PDF
2nd edition (2000, 47 MB, added on 2020-3-18)
New additions (2011) selected for Soanyway by Derek Horton (HTML)

Douglas Kahn: Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (2013)

“Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Douglas Kahn begins by evoking the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing along telegraph lines and the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard through the first telephone; he then traces the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s and beyond. Earth Sound Earth Signal rethinks energy at a global scale, from brainwaves to outer space, through detailed discussions of musicians, artists and scientists such as Alvin Lucier, Edmond Dewan, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, James Turrell, Robert Barry, Joyce Hinterding, and many others.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2013
ISBN 0520956834, 9780520956834
343 pages

Reviews: Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2013), Christopher Haworth (Organised Sound, 2015), Adam Trainer (Continuum, 2015).

Publisher

PDF (removed on 2014-3-19 upon request of the publisher)

Tara Rodgers: Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (2010)

Pink Noises brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures, including club and radio DJs, remixers, composers, improvisers, instrument builders, and installation and performance artists. The collection is an extension of Pinknoises.com, the critically-acclaimed website founded by musician and scholar Tara Rodgers in 2000 to promote women in electronic music and make information about music production more accessible to women and girls. That site featured interviews that Rodgers conducted with women artists, exploring their personal histories, their creative methods, and the roles of gender in their work. This book offers new and lengthier interviews, a critical introduction, and resources for further research and technological engagement.

Contemporary electronic music practices are illuminated through the stories of women artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds. They include the creators of ambient soundscapes, “performance novels,” sound sculptures, and custom software, as well as the developer of the Deep Listening philosophy and the founders of the Liquid Sound Lounge radio show and the monthly Basement Bhangra parties in New York. These and many other artists open up about topics such as their conflicted relationships to formal music training and mainstream media representations of women in electronic music. They discuss using sound to work creatively with structures of time and space, and voice and language; challenge distinctions of nature and culture; question norms of technological practice; and balance their needs for productive solitude with collaboration and community. Whether designing and building modular synthesizers with analog circuits or performing with a wearable apparatus that translates muscle movements into electronic sound, these artists expand notions of who and what counts in matters of invention, production, and noisemaking. Pink Noises is a powerful testimony to the presence and vitality of women in electronic music cultures, and to the relevance of sound to feminist concerns.

Interviewees: Maria Chavez, Beth Coleman (M. Singe), Antye Greie (AGF), Jeannie Hopper, Bevin Kelley (Blevin Blectum), Christina Kubisch, Le Tigre, Annea Lockwood, Giulia Loli (DJ Mutamassik), Rekha Malhotra (DJ Rekha), Riz Maslen (Neotropic), Kaffe Matthews, Susan Morabito, Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Pamela Z, Chantal Passamonte (Mira Calix), Maggi Payne, Eliane Radigue, Jessica Rylan, Carla Scaletti, Laetitia Sonami, Bev Stanton (Arthur Loves Plastic), Keiko Uenishi (o.blaat)

Publisher Duke University Press, 2010
ISBN 0822346737, 9780822346739
322 pages

Review (Tiffany Naiman, Ethnomusicology Review)
Review (Mary Simoni, Computer Music Journal)
Review (Betsey Biggs, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture)

Publisher
Google books

Download (removed on 2013-12-13 upon request of the publisher)
View online (partial version, HTML, added on 2014-1-14)