Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music

Front Cover
Christoph Cox, Daniel Warner
A&C Black, Sep 1, 2004 - Social Science - 454 pages
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.

Via writings by philosophers, cultural theorists, and composers, Audio Culture explores the interconnections among such forms as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrète, free improvisation, experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, Ambient music, HipHop, and Techno. Instead of focusing on the putative "crossover" between "high art" and "popular culture," Audio Culture takes all of 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, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco, Ornette Coleman, Jacques Attali, Simon Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, Paul D. Miller, David Toop, John Zorn, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. The book is divided into nine thematically-organized sections, each with its own introduction. Section headings include topics such as "Modes of Listening," "Minimalisms," and "DJ Culture." In addition, each essay has its own short introduction, helping the reader to place the essay within musical, historical, and conceptual contexts. The book concludes with a glossary, a timeline, and an extensive discography.
 

Contents

Edgard Varèse The Liberation of Sound
4
Simon Reynolds Noise
55
Modes of Listening
65
Hanns Eisler Theodor Adorno The Politics of Hearing
73
Pauline Oliveros Some Sound Observations
102
Music in the Age of Electronic Reproduction
113
Brian Eno The Studio as Compositional Tool
127
Chris Cutler Plunderphonia
138
Kyle Gann Thankless Attempts at a Definition of Minimalism
299
Wim Mertens Basic Concepts of Minimal Music
307
Francisco López Profound Listening and Environmental Sound
308
On Four Violins
313
Minimalism in House
319
DJ Culture
329
Christian Marclay Yasunao Tone Record CD Analog Digital
341
Erasures and the Art of Memory
348

Kodwo Eshun Operating System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality
157
The Open Work
165
Indeterminacy
176
On Graphic Scores
187
John Zorn The Game Pieces
196
Experimental Musics
207
John Cage Introduction to Themes Variations
221
Draft Constitution
234
Improvised Musics
251
A Nihilist Theory of Improvisation
266
Afrological
272
Minimalisms
287
On Dub
355
Electronic Music and Electronica
365
Karlheinz Stockhausen et al Stockhausen vs the Technocrats
381
PostDigital Tendencies
392
Chronology
399
Glossary
409
Selected Discography
419
Selected Bibliography
427
Ola Stockfelt Adequate Modes of Listening
441
Notes for Quotations
445
Brian Eno Ambient Music
449
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About the author (2004)

Christoph Cox is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College, in Massachusetts. He writes regularly on contemporary art and music for Artforum, The Wire, Cabinet, and other magazines. Daniel Warner is a Professor of Music at Hampshire College, MA, where he teaches electronic and computer music

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