Paul Griffiths: The Substance of Things Heard. Writings about Music (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · criticism, history of music, music, sound
Paul Griffiths offers his own personal selection of some of his most substantial and imaginative articles and concert reviews from over three decades of indefatigable concertgoing around the world. He reports on premieres and other important performancesof works by such composers as Elliott Carter, Sofia Gubaidulina, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Steve Reich, as well as Harrison Birtwistle and other important British figures.
Griffiths vividly conveys the vision, aura, and idiosyncrasies of prominent pianists, singers, and conductors (such as Herbert von Karajan), and debates changing styles of performing Monteverdi and Purcell. A particular delight is his response to the world of opera, including Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (sting productions), Pavarotti and Domingo in Verdi at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron, and two wildly different Jonathan Miller versions of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
From the author’s preface: “We cannot say what music is. Yet we are verbal creatures, and strive with words to cast a net around it, knowing most of this immaterial stuff will evade capture. The stories that follow cover a wide range of events over a period of great change. Yet the net’s aim was always the same, to catch the substance of things heard.
“Criticism has to work largely by analogy and metaphor. This is no limitation. It is largely through such verbal ties that music is linked to other sorts of experience, not least the naturalworld and the orchestra of our feelings.”
Publisher University of Rochester Press, 2005
Volume 31 of Eastman studies in music
ISBN 1580462065, 9781580462068
Length 378 pages
Joscelyn Godwin: Music and the Occult: French Musical Philosophies, 1750-1950 (1995)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, esotericism, france, history of music, music, occultism, philosophy, philosophy of music
This book is an adventure into the unexplored territory of French esoteric philosophies and their relation to music. Occultism and esotericism flourished in nineteenth-century France as they did nowhere else. Many philosophers sought the key to the universe, some claimed to have found it, and, in the unitive vision that resulted, music invariably played an important part. These modern Pythagoreans all believed in the Harmony of the Spheres and in the powerful effects of music on the human soul and body. Faced with the challenge of the rationalist Enlightenment, then with that of modern scientism, they adapted their occultism to the prevailing style. A widely published musicologist and authority on esotericism, Godwin is able to give a clear and concise context for these philosophers’ often surprising beliefs, and he demonstrates how this “speculative music” influenced composers such as Satie and Debussy, who were familiar with occultism. His long study of music and the Western esoteric tradition makes him uniquely qualified to unravel the strange story of these forgotten sages.
Publisher University of Rochester Press, 1995
Volume 3 of Eastman studies in music
ISBN 1878822535, 9781878822536
Length 261 pages
Robert Adlington (ed.): Sound Commitments. Avant-garde Music and the Sixties (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1960s, aesthetics, avantgarde, electronic music, fluxus, history of music, music, sound
The role of popular music is widely recognized in giving voice to radical political views, the plight of the oppressed, and the desire for social change. Avant-garde music, by contrast, is often thought to prioritize the pursuit of new technical or conceptual territory over issues of human and social concern. Yet throughout the activist 1960s, many avant-garde musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Intensely involved in the era’s social and political upheavals, they often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. Yet how could avant-garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny, initiated clique? In answer, Sound Commitments, examines the encounter of avant-garde music and “the Sixties” across a range of genres, aesthetic positions and geographical locations. Through music for the concert hall, tape and electronic music, jazz and improvisation, participatory “events,” performance art, and experimental popular music, the essays in this volume explore developments in the United States, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan and parts of the “Third World,” delving into the deep richness of avant-garde musicians’ response to the decade’s defining cultural shifts.
Featuring new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period in each chapter, Sound Commitments will appeal to researchers and advanced students in the fields of post-war music, cultures of the 1960s, and the avant-garde, as well as to an informed general readership.
The book
* Explores the rich and complex encounter between avant-garde music and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s
* Draws on new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period
* Explores the relevance of avant-garde music to implementing social change
Publisher Oxford University Press US, 2009
ISBN 019533664X, 9780195336641
Length 292 pages
Trevor Pinch, Frank Trocco: Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · electronic music, history of music, music, sound
Though ubiquitous today, available as a single microchip and found in any electronic device requiring sound, the synthesizer when it first appeared was truly revolutionary. Something radically new–an extraordinary rarity in musical culture–it was an instrument that used a genuinely new source of sound: electronics. How this came to be–how an engineering student at Cornell and an avant-garde musician working out of a storefront in California set this revolution in motion–is the story told for the first time in Analog Days, a book that explores the invention of the synthesizer and its impact on popular culture.
The authors take us back to the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the technology was analog, the synthesizer was an experimental instrument, and synthesizer concerts could and did turn into happenings. Interviews with the pioneers who determined what the synthesizer would be and how it would be used–from inventors Robert Moog and Don Buchla to musicians like Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, and Keith Emerson–recapture their visions of the future of electronic music and a new world of sound.
Tracing the development of the Moog synthesizer from its initial conception to its ascension to stardom in Switched-On Bach, from its contribution to the San Francisco psychedelic sound, to its wholesale adoption by the worlds of film and advertising, Analog Days conveys the excitement, uncertainties, and unexpected consequences of a new technology that would provide the soundtrack for a critical chapter of our cultural history.
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2004
ISBN 0674016173, 9780674016170
Length 368 pages
John Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961)
Filed under book | Tags: · composing, composition, experimental music, history of music, music, poetry, sound
Silence, A Year from Monday, M, Empty Words and X (in this order) form the five parts of a series of books in which Cage tries, as he says, “to find a way of writing which comes from ideas, is not about them, but which produces them.” Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching (what Cage called “writing through”).
Publisher Wesleyan University Press, 1961
ISBN 0819560286, 9780819560285
Length 276 pages
Rainey, Poggi, Wittman (eds.): Futurism: An Anthology (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, art, art history, avantgarde, futurism, history of music, literature, music
In 1909, F.T. Marinetti published his incendiary Futurist Manifesto, proclaiming, “We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!!” and “There, on the earth, the earliest dawn!” Intent on delivering Italy from “its fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, tour guides, and antiquarians,” the Futurists imagined that art, architecture, literature, and music would function like a machine, transforming the world rather than merely reflecting it. But within a decade, Futurism’s utopian ambitions were being wedded to Fascist politics, an alliance that would tragically mar its reputation in the century to follow.
Published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of Futurism, this is the most complete anthology of Futurist manifestos, poems, plays, and images ever to bepublished in English, spanning from 1909 to 1944. Now, amidst another era of unprecedented technological change and cultural crisis, is a pivotal moment to reevaluate Futurism and its haunting legacy for Western civilization.
Editors Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, Laura Wittman
Publisher Yale University Press, 2009
Henry McBride Series in Modernism and Modernity
ISBN 0300088752, 9780300088755
Length 604 pages
Peter Burke: Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, cultural history, history of music, modern europe, popular culture
Long neglected by historians, the concept of cultural history has in the last few decades come to the fore of historical research into early modern Europe. Due in no small part to the pioneering work of Peter Burke, the tools of the cultural historian are now routinely brought to bear on every aspect of history, and have transformed our understanding of the past.First published in 1978, this study examines the broad sweep of pre-industrial Europe’s popular culture. From the world of the professional entertainer to the songs, stories, rituals and plays of ordinary people, it shows how the attitudes and values of the otherwise inarticulate shaped – and were shaped by – the shifting social, religious and political conditions of European society between 1500 and 1800.
Publisher Harper & Row, 1978
ISBN 0-06-131928-7
366 pages
Dalibor Davidović, Ksenija Stevanović (eds.): Archipelagos of Sound. Music and Its History Within the Imperial World Order (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · globalisation, history of music, music, sound
In this booklet we will focus on two general aspects that are to be singled out from a wide range of the possibilities suggested by subtitle Music and its History Within the Imperial World Order: What could be a definition of the historicity of music/sound-material that reflects the basic determinants of the digital age? The question is centered on multiplicity of the present in the past, i.e. how a contemporary view rediscovers the musical history. Post-globalized world, the one after first cycle of globalization, is just the one aspect of taking-place of the world, unable to completely consume up all the potentials of worldliness. Borrowing here Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of mondialisation, which designates a powerful reassessment of the notions of world and creation, we’re interested what such a concept – mondialisation – could mean for the music. What does it mean to make (create) music after the globalization?
With texts by Peter Szendy, DJ Spooky and Stevanović & Davidović
Translation: Irena Ajdinović, Dalibor Davidović, Ksenija Stevanović
Publisher: Croatian Composers’ Society – Cantus d.o.o., 2005
Joint-production of Music Biennale Zagreb and Multimedia Institute
80 pages
Joseph Henry Auner: A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · criticism, history of music, music, music theory, performance
Arnold Schoenberg’s close involvement with many of the principal developments of twentieth-century music, most importantly the break with tonality and the creation of twelve-tone composition, generated controversy from the time of his earliest works to the present day. This authoritative new collection of Schoenberg’s essays, letters, literary writings, musical sketches, paintings, and drawings offers fresh insights into the composer’s life, work, and thought.
The documents, many previously unpublished or untranslated, reveal the relationships between various aspects of Schoenberg’s activities in composition, music theory, criticism, painting, performance, and teaching. They also show the significance of events in his personal and family life, his evolving Jewish identity, his political concerns, and his close interactions with such figures as Gustav and Alma Mahler, Alban Berg, Wassily Kandinsky, and Thomas Mann. Extensive commentary by Joseph Auner places the documents and materials in context and traces important themes throughout Schoenberg’s career from turn-of-century Vienna to Weimar Berlin to nineteen-fifties Los Angeles.
Publisher Yale University Press, 2003
ISBN 0300095406, 9780300095401
Length 428 pages
Michel Chion: Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1990/1994)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, cinema, film, history of cinema, history of music, music, music video, sound, television, video art
In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception.
Chion argues that sound film qualitatively produces a new form of perception: we don’t see images and hear sounds as separate channels, we audio-view a trans-sensory whole. Expanding on arguments made in his influential books The Voice in Cinema and Sound in Cinema, Chion provides lapidary insight into the functions and aesthetics of sound in film and television. He considers the effects of such evolving technologies as widescreen, multitrack, and Dolby; the influences of sound on the perception of space and time; and the impact of such contemporary forms of audio-vision as music videos, video art, and commercial television. Chion concludes with an original and useful model for the audiovisual analysis of film.
Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman
Foreword by Walter Murch
Publisher Columbia University Press, 1994
ISBN 0231078986, 9780231078986
Length 239 pages
Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (eds.): Western Music and Its Others. Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · ethnomusicology, history of music, music, popular culture, sociology of music
This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to Western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a sociocultural kind.
The essays scrutinize a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant examples, among them musical modernism’s idealizing or ambivalent relations with popular, ethnic, and non-Western music; exoticism and orientalism in the experimental music tradition; the representation of others in Hollywood film music; music’s role in the formation and contestation of collective identities, with reference to Jewish and Turkish popular music; and issues of representation and difference in jazz, world music, hip hop, and electronic dance music.
Written by leading scholars from disciplines including historical musicology, sociology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and film studies, the essays provide unprecedented insights into how cultural identities and differences are constructed in music.
Publisher University of California Press, 2000
ISBN 0520220846, 9780520220843
Length 360 pages
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Curtis Roads: Microsound (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · computer music, electronic music, history of music, music, sound, sound art, synthesis
Below the level of the musical note lies the realm of microsound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of music—notes and their intervals—into a more fluid and supple medium. The sensations of point, pulse (series of points), line (tone), and surface (texture) emerge as particle density increases. Sounds coalesce, evaporate, and mutate into other sounds.
Composers have used theories of microsound in computer music since the 1950s. Distinguished practitioners include Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis. Today, with the increased interest in computer and electronic music, many young composers and software synthesis developers are exploring its advantages. Covering all aspects of composition with sound particles, Microsound offers composition theory, historical accounts, technical overviews, acoustical experiments, descriptions of musical works, and aesthetic reflections.
Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262681544, 9780262681544
Length 409 pages
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Tia DeNora: After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · history of music, listening, music, music sociology, music therapy, popular culture, sociology
Theodor W. Adorno placed music at the centre of his critique of modernity and broached some of the most important questions about the role of music in contemporary society. One of his central arguments was that music, through the manner of its composition, affected consciousness and was a means of social management and control. His work was primarily theoretical however, and because these issues were never explored empirically his work has become sidelined in current music sociology. This book argues that music sociology can be greatly enriched by a return to Adorno’s concerns, in particular his focus on music as a dynamic medium of social life. Intended as a guide to ‘how to do music sociology’ this book deals with critical topics too often sidelined such as aesthetic ordering, cognition, the emotions and music as a management device and reworks Adorno’s focus through a series of grounded examples.
•Hands on guide to how to do music sociology • First book to explore Adorno’s work within context of empirical music sociology and reassess his legacy • Develops a new approach to music sociology drawing on current musicological and sociology concerns
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2003
ISBN 052153724X, 9780521537247
Length 176 pages
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Michael Nyman: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (1974/1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · electronic music, experimental music, history of music, music, performance
Michael Nyman’s book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing which developed alongside, and partly in opposition to, the post-war modernist tradition of composers such as Boulez, Berio, or Stockhausen. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4’ 33’’ consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence to be performed on any instrument. Such pieces have a conceptual rather than purely musical starting point and radically challenge conventional notions of the musical work. Nyman’s book traces the revolutionary attitudes that were developed towards concepts of time, space, sound, and composer/performer responsibility. It was within the experimental tradition that the seeds of musical minimalism were sown and the book contains reference to the early works of Reich, Riley, Young, and Glass.
Second edition
Foreword by Brian Eno
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2002
ISBN 0521653835, 9780521653831
Length 196 pages
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Comment (1)Leigh Landy: What’s the Matter with Today’s Experimental Music? Organized Sound Too Rarely Heard (1991)
Filed under book | Tags: · electroacoustic music, electronic music, experimental music, history of music, music, musique concrète
“What’s the Matter with Today’s Experimental Music?” is based on the premise that contemporary music is suffering from a distinct lack of attention. It inspects and evaluates what is happening to musical experimentation, where things might have gone wrong and what can be done to resolve the problem. Intended as a supplement to surveys of music of the last forty years, it discusses not only the problems of musical content, but also problems of an extra-musical nature. Today’s education and communications media are seen to be the main cause of the anonymity of contemporary music and suggestions are made to improve this situation. Leigh Landy investigates audio-visual applications that have hardly been explored, new timbres and sound sources, the discovery of musical space, new notations, musical politics, and the ‘musical community’ in an attempt to incite more composers, musicians and musicologists to get this music out into the works and to stimulate the creation of new experimental works.
Publisher Routledge, 1991
ISBN 3718651688, 9783718651689
Length 308 pages
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