Audio Culture: Readings in Modern MusicChristoph Cox, Daniel Warner 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 |
427 | |
441 | |
Notes for Quotations | 445 |
449 | |
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acoustic aesthetic art music artists audience avant-garde bass beat become Brian Eno Cage's Cardew chord classical composers composition concept contemporary Cornelius Cardew create creative dance music developed disc DJ Culture drum early electronic music electronica elements ensemble Eurological European experience experimental music free improvisation free jazz genre guitar harmonic hear HipHop idea improvised music indeterminacy indeterminate instruments John Cage John Zorn kind La Monte Young listening loop machine MARCLAY material means ment minimalism minimalist Morton Feldman musicians musique concrète noise notation object orchestra original performance piano piece pitch playback players playing plunderphonics possible post-rock produce radio Reich releases repetition repetitive music rhythm rhythmic rock sampling score Scratch Orchestra sense silence solo sonic sound soundscape space Steve Reich Stockhausen structure studio tape recorder techniques Techno term things timbre tion tones track traditional turntables Varèse voice York