Author: Jennie Gottschalk
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628922478
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
What is experimental music today? Recent attempts to define or identify examples of experimental music have been cautious and subjective, offering very little guidance to anyone with an interest in this field of activity. Is experimental music a historical event that refers only to John Cage and his influence, or does it have a greater spread and longevity? The development of this musical practice over the last 45 years merits a fresh definition and discussion. An experimental approach is not identifiable in specific sounds or techniques, and its scope would be drastically limited if it were judged on the basis of social or aesthetic groupings or self-identifications of composers.
Author: Christophe Levaux
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520968085
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Rising out of the American art music movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, minimalism shook the foundations of the traditional constructs of classical music, becoming one of the most important and influential trends of the twentieth century. The emergence of minimalism sparked an active writing culture around the controversies, philosophies, and forms represented in the music’s style and performance, and its defenders faced a relentless struggle within the music establishment and beyond. Focusing on how facts about music are constructed, negotiated, and continually remodeled, We Have Always Been Minimalist retraces the story of these battles that—from pure fiction to proven truth—led to the triumph of minimalism. Christophe Levaux’s critical analysis of literature surrounding the origins and transformations of the stylistic movement offers radical insights and a unique new history.
Author: Gianmario Borio
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317091450
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 430
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Book Description
It is undeniable that technology has made a tangible impact on the nature of musical listening. The new media have changed our relationship with music in a myriad of ways, not least because the experience of listening can now be prolonged at will and repeated at any time and in any space. Moreover, among the more striking social phenomena ushered in by the technological revolution, one cannot fail to mention music’s current status as a commodity and popular music’s unprecedented global reach. In response to these new social and perceptual conditions, the act of listening has diversified into a wide range of patterns of behaviour which seem to resist any attempt at unification. Concentrated listening, the form of musical reception fostered by Western art music, now appears to be but one of the many ways in which audiences respond to organized sound. Cinema, for example, has developed specific ways of combining images and sounds; and, more recently, digital technology has redefined the standard forms of mass communication. Information is aestheticized, and music in turn is incorporated into pre-existing symbolic fields. This volume - the first in the series Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century - offers a wide-ranging exploration of the relations between sound, technology and listening practices, considered from the complementary perspectives of art music and popular music, music theatre and multimedia, composition and performance, ethnographic and anthropological research.
Author: Rebecca Krafft
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Government publications
Languages : en
Pages : 268
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Book Description
Author: Christoph Cox
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501318381
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 664
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Book Description
The groundbreaking Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum; September 2004; paperback original) maps the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard music today. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, Audio Culture traces the genealogy of current musical practices and theoretical concerns, drawing lines of connection between recent musical production and earlier moments of sonic experimentation. It aims to foreground the various rewirings of musical composition and performance that have taken place in the past few decades and to provide a critical and theoretical language for this new audio culture. This new and expanded edition of the Audio Culture contains twenty-five additional essays, including four newly-commissioned pieces. Taken as a whole, the book explores the interconnections among such forms as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrète, free improvisation, experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, ambient music, hip hop, and techno via writings by philosophers, cultural theorists, and composers. Instead of focusing on some "crossover" between "high art" and "popular culture," Audio Culture takes all these musics as experimental practices on par with, and linked to, one another. While cultural studies has tended to look at music (primarily popular music) from a sociological perspective, the concern here is philosophical, musical, and historical. Audio Culture includes writing by some of the most important musical thinkers of the past half-century, among them John Cage, Brian Eno, Ornette Coleman, Pauline Oliveros, Maryanne Amacher, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco, Jacques Attali, Simon Reynolds, Eliane Radigue, David Toop, John Zorn, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. Each essay has its own short introduction, helping the reader to place the essay within musical, historical, and conceptual contexts, and the volume concludes with a glossary, a timeline, and an extensive discography.
Author: Kyle Gann
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252094565
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
This book explores the life and works of the pioneering opera composer Robert Ashley, one of the leading American composers of the post-Cage generation. Ashley's innovations began in the 1960s when he, along with Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman, formed the Sonic Arts Union, a group that turned conceptualism toward electronics. He was also instrumental in the influential ONCE Group, a theatrical ensemble that toured extensively in the 1960s.During his tenure as its director, the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor presented most of the decade's pioneers of the performing arts. Particularly known for his development of television operas beginning with Perfect Lives, Ashley spun a long series of similar text/music works, sometimes termed "performance novels." These massive pieces have been compared with Wagner's Ring Cycle for the vastness of their vision, though the materials are completely different, often incorporating noise backgrounds, vernacular music, and highly structured, even serialized, musical structures. Drawing on extensive research into Ashley's early years in Ann Arbor and interviews with Ashley and his collaborators, Kyle Gann chronicles the life and work of this musical innovator and provides an overview of the avant-garde milieu of the 1960s and 1970s to which he was so central. Gann examines all nine of Ashley's major operas to date in detail, along with many minor works, revealing the fanatical structures that underlie Ashley's music as well as private references hidden in his opera librettos.
Author: Daniel Belgrad
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022665267X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
When we want advice from others, we often casually speak of “getting some feedback.” But how many of us give a thought to what this phrase means? The idea of feedback actually dates to World War II, when the term was developed to describe the dynamics of self-regulating systems, which correct their actions by feeding their effects back into themselves. By the early 1970s, feedback had become the governing trope for a counterculture that was reoriented and reinvigorated by ecological thinking. The Culture of Feedback digs deep into a dazzling variety of left-of-center experiences and attitudes from this misunderstood period, bringing us a new look at the wild side of the 1970s. Belgrad shows us how ideas from systems theory were taken up by the counterculture and the environmental movement, eventually influencing a wide range of beliefs and behaviors, particularly related to the question of what is and is not intelligence. He tells the story of a generation of Americans who were struck by a newfound interest in—and respect for—plants, animals, indigenous populations, and the very sounds around them, threading his tapestry with cogent insights on environmentalism, feminism, systems theory, and psychedelics. The Culture of Feedback repaints the familiar image of the ’70s as a time of Me Generation malaise to reveal an era of revolutionary and hopeful social currents, driven by desires to radically improve—and feed back into—the systems that had come before.
Author: Robert Carl
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199717133
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
Setting the stage for a most intriguing journey into the world of minimalism, Robert Carl's Terry Riley's In C argues that the work holds its place in the canon because of the very challenges it presents to "classical" music. Carl examines In C in the context of its era, its grounding in aesthetic practices and assumptions, its process of composition, presentation, recording, and dissemination.
Author: Kerry O'Brien
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520382072
Category : Ambient music
Languages : en
Pages : 469
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Book Description
"Minimalism changed everything. When composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich began creating hypnotically repetitive music in the 1960s, it upended the world of American composition. Hip, young listeners flocked to a genre that had long been insular and academic, packing concert halls and buying millions of records. But minimalism wasn't just a classical phenomenon: its static harmonies and groovy pulses swept through the avant-garde landscape, shaping the work of experimental mavens Yoko Ono and Brian Eno, radical improvisers John and Alice Coltrane, outre innovators Pauline Oliveros and Julius Eastman, and many others. This book provides a comprehensive, revisionist retelling of minimalism's transformative rise, through the voices of the musicians who created it. Featuring more than a hundred rare historical sources, On Minimalism moves from the style's origins in psychedelic counterculture through its arrival in the mainstream and into its present-day manifestations in doom metal and ambient jazz. O'Brien and Robin curate minimalism's history anew, documenting one of the most important musical movements of our time"--
Author: Christoph Cox
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826416155
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
Contributions : Brian Eno, John Cage, Jacques Attali, Umberto Eco, Christian Marclay, Simon Reynolds, Pierre Schaeffer, Marshall MCLuhan, Derek Bailey, Pauline Oliveros, Tony Conrad, David Toop... etc.
