Records Ruin the Landscape

Records Ruin the Landscape PDF Author: David Grubbs
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377101
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP? In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.

Records Ruin the Landscape

Records Ruin the Landscape PDF Author: David Grubbs
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822377101
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Get Book

Book Description
John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP? In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.

Now that the audience is assembled

Now that the audience is assembled PDF Author: David Grubbs
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9780822371380
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Following his investigation into experimental music and sound recording in Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs turns his attention to the live performance of improvised music with an altogether different form of writing. Now that the audience is assembled is a book-length prose poem that describes a fictional musical performance during which an unnamed musician improvises the construction of a series of invented instruments before an audience that is alternately contemplative, participatory, disputatious, and asleep. Over the course of this phantasmagorical all-night concert, repeated interruptions take the form of in-depth discussions and musical demonstrations. Both a work of literature and a study of music, Now that the audience is assembled explores the categories of improvised music, solo performance, text scores, instrument building, aesthetic deskilling and reskilling, and the odd fate of the composer in experimental music.

The Voice in the Headphones

The Voice in the Headphones PDF Author: David Grubbs
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478009098
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
The voice in the headphones says, “you’re rolling” . . . The Voice in the Headphones is an experiment in music writing in the form of a long poem centered on the culture of the recording studio. It describes in intricate, prismatic detail one marathon day in a recording studio during which an unnamed musician struggles to complete a film soundtrack. The book extends the form of Grubbs's previous volume Now that the audience is assembled, sharing its goal of musicalizing the language of writing about music. Mulling the insight that “studio is the absence of pushback”—now that no audience is assembled—The Voice in the Headphones details one musician's strategies for applying the requisite pressure to the proceedings, for making it count. The Voice in the Headphones is both a literary work and a meditation on sound recording, delivered at a moment in which the commercial recording studio shades into oblivion. It draws upon Grubbs's own history of several decades as a recording artist, and its location could be described as every studio in which he has set foot.

Good Night the Pleasure Was Ours

Good Night the Pleasure Was Ours PDF Author: David Grubbs
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781478015543
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
In this book-length poem David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour, capturing the daily life of touring as a world unto itself.

Extended Play

Extended Play PDF Author: John Corbett
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822314738
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
In Extended Play, one of the country's most innovative music writers conducts a wide-ranging tour through the outer limits of contemporary music. Over the course of more than twenty-five portraits, interviews, and essays, John Corbett engages artists from lands as distant as Sweden, Siberia, and Saturn. With a special emphasis on African American and European improvisers, the book explores the famous and the little known, from John Cage and George Clinton to Anthony Braxton and Sun Ra. Employing approaches as diverse as the music he celebrates, Corbett illuminates the sound and theory of funk and rap, blues and jazz, contemporary classical, free improvisation, rock, and reggae. Using cultural critique and textual theory, Corbett addresses a broad spectrum of issues, such as the status of recorded music in postmodern culture, the politics of self-censorship, experimentation, and alternativism in the music industry, and the use of metaphors of space and madness in the work of African American musicians. He follows these more theoretically oriented essays with a series of extensive profiles and in-depth interviews that offer contrasting and complementary perspectives on some of the world's most creative musicians and their work. Included here are more than twenty original photographs as well as a meticulously annotated discography. The result is one of the most thoughtful, and most entertaining, investigations of contemporary music available today.

A Listener's Guide to Free Improvisation

A Listener's Guide to Free Improvisation PDF Author: John Corbett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022635380X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
In the first book of its kind, John Corbett's A Listener's Guide to Free Improvisation provides a how-to manual for the most extreme example of spontaneous improvising: music with no pre-planned material at all. Drawing on over three decades of writing about, presenting, playing, teaching, and studying freely improvised music, Corbett offers an enriching set of tools that show any curious listener how to really listen, and he encourages them to enjoy the human impulse-- found all around the world-- to make up music on the spot.

Simultaneous Soloists

Simultaneous Soloists PDF Author: David Grubbs
Publisher: Pioneer Works Press
ISBN: 9781945711091
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Simultaneous Soloists is a compilation emerging from British installation artist Anthony McCall's (born 1946) Solid Light Works exhibition at Pioneer Works (2018), based on the accompanying performance series Four Simultaneous Soloists organized by composer David Grubbs. Referring to four soloist performers witnessed individually or as an ensemble alongside McCall's sculptural volumes of light, the editors recount these events through a dialogue discussing a decade of working together in intersecting practices. Also included in the book are writings by art historians Branden W. Joseph and Swagato Chakravorty, reproductions from McCall's archival materials and drawings paired with photo documentation of the exhibition, and interviews with the 16 participating musicians. As told to Grubbs, these interviews invite an expanded audience to consider the in-situ performances by Susan Alcorn, MV Carbon, Maria Chávez, Che Chen, Jules Gimbrone, Sarah Hennies, Eli Keszler, Okkyung Lee, Miya Masaoka, Christopher McIntyre, Tomeka Reid, Ben Vida, Yoshi Wada, Nate Wooley and C. Spencer Yeh.

Hold On to Your Dreams

Hold On to Your Dreams PDF Author: Tim Lawrence
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822390855
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Hold On to Your Dreams is the first biography of the musician and composer Arthur Russell, one of the most important but least known contributors to New York’s downtown music scene during the 1970s and 1980s. With the exception of a few dance recordings, including “Is It All Over My Face?” and “Go Bang! #5,” Russell’s pioneering music was largely forgotten until 2004, when the posthumous release of two albums brought new attention to the artist. This revival of interest gained momentum with the issue of additional albums and the documentary film Wild Combination. Based on interviews with more than seventy of his collaborators, family members, and friends, Hold On to Your Dreams provides vital new information about this singular, eccentric musician and his role in the boundary-breaking downtown music scene. Tim Lawrence traces Russell’s odyssey from his hometown of Oskaloosa, Iowa, to countercultural San Francisco, and eventually to New York, where he lived from 1973 until his death from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Resisting definition while dreaming of commercial success, Russell wrote and performed new wave and disco as well as quirky rock, twisted folk, voice-cello dub, and hip-hop-inflected pop. “He was way ahead of other people in understanding that the walls between concert music and popular music and avant-garde music were illusory,” comments the composer Philip Glass. “He lived in a world in which those walls weren’t there.” Lawrence follows Russell across musical genres and through such vital downtown music spaces as the Kitchen, the Loft, the Gallery, the Paradise Garage, and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Along the way, he captures Russell’s openness to sound, his commitment to collaboration, and his uncompromising idealism.

Now that the audience is assembled

Now that the audience is assembled PDF Author: David Grubbs
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822371588
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Following his investigation into experimental music and sound recording in Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs turns his attention to the live performance of improvised music with an altogether different form of writing. Now that the audience is assembled is a book-length prose poem that describes a fictional musical performance during which an unnamed musician improvises the construction of a series of invented instruments before an audience that is alternately contemplative, participatory, disputatious, and asleep. Over the course of this phantasmagorical all-night concert, repeated interruptions take the form of in-depth discussions and musical demonstrations. Both a work of literature and a study of music, Now that the audience is assembled explores the categories of improvised music, solo performance, text scores, instrument building, aesthetic deskilling and reskilling, and the odd fate of the composer in experimental music.

Detroit Disassembled

Detroit Disassembled PDF Author: Philip Levine
Publisher: Grafiche Damiani
ISBN: 9788862081184
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
A visual tribute to the degradation of Detroit in the wake of the American auto industry's decline reveals regional dignity and tragedy as reflected in scenes ranging from windowless grand hotels and barren factory floors to collapsing churches and prairie-grass covered blocks.