Download or read book Records Ruin the Landscape written by David Grubbs and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-03 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Voice in the Headphones written by David Grubbs and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Now that the audience is assembled written by David Grubbs and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-13 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Simultaneous Soloists written by David Grubbs and published by Pioneer Works Press. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Extended Play written by John Corbett and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Listener s Guide to Free Improvisation written by John Corbett and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-03-13 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Hold On to Your Dreams written by Tim Lawrence and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Detroit Disassembled written by Philip Levine and published by Grafiche Damiani. This book was released on 2010 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Voice in the Headphones written by David Grubbs and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-20 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Avant Garde on Record written by Jonathan Goldman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-09 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative contribution to music history, cultural studies, and sound studies, Avant-garde on Record revisits post-war composers and their technologically oriented brand of musical modernism. It describes how a broad range of figures (including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Toshirō Mayuzumi, Claire Schapira, Anthony Braxton and Gunther Schuller) engaged with avant-garde aesthetics while responding to a rapidly changing, technologically fuelled, spatialized audio culture. Jonathan Goldman focuses on how contemporary listeners understood these composers' works in the golden age of LPs and explores how this reception was mediated through consumer-oriented sound technology that formed a prism through which listeners processed the 'music of their time'. His account reveals unexpected aspects of twentieth-century audio culture: from sonic ping-pong to son et lumière shows, from Venetian choral music by Stravinsky to the soundscape of Niagara Falls, from a Buddhist Cantata to an LP box set cast as a parlour game.
Download or read book Good Night the Pleasure Was Ours written by David Grubbs and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Econophonia written by Gavin Steingo and published by . This book was released on 2016-01-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture, volume 43, number 1, February 2016." -- Cover.
Download or read book John Cage written by Sara Haefeli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-06 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This annotated bibliography uncovers the wealth of resources available on the life and music of John Cage, one of the most influential and fascinating composers of the twentieth-century. The guide will focus on documentary studies, archival resources, scholarly research, and autobiographical materials, and place the composer and his work in a larger context of postmodern philosophy, art and theater movements, and contemporary politics. It will support emerging scholarship and inquiry for future research on Cage, with carefully selected sources and useful annotations.
Download or read book Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age written by Justin St. Clair and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering both a short history and a theoretical framework, this book is the first extended study of the soundtracked book as a media form. A soundtracked book is a print or digital publication for which a recorded, musical complement has been produced. Early examples were primarily developed for the children's market, but by the middle of the twentieth century, ethnographers had begun producing book-and-record combinations that used print to contextualize musical artifacts. The last half-century has witnessed the rapid expansion of the adult market, including soundtracked novels from celebrated writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Kathy Acker, and Mark Z. Danielewski. While often dismissed as gimmicks, this volume argues that soundtracked books represent an interesting case study in media consumption. Unlike synchronous multimedia forms, the vast majority of soundtracked books require that audience activity be split between reading and listening, thus defining the user experience and often shaping the content of singing books as well. Mapping the form's material evolution, this book charts a previously unconsidered pathway through more than a century of recording formats and packaging strategies, emphasizing the synergies and symbioses that characterize the marriage of sound and print. As such, it will be of value to scholars and postgraduate students working in media studies, literary studies, and sound studies.
Download or read book Mediterranean Winter written by Robert D. Kaplan and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-11-23 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Mediterranean Winter, Robert D. Kaplan, the bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts and Eastward to Tartary, relives an austere, haunting journey he took as a youth through the off-season Mediterranean. The awnings are rolled up and the other tourists are gone, so the damp, cold weather takes him back to the 1950s and earlier—a golden, intensely personal age of tourism. Decades ago, Kaplan voyaged from North Africa to Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece, luxuriating in the radical freedom of youth, unaccountable to time because there was always time to make up for a mistake. He recalls that journey in this Persian miniature of a book, less to look inward into his own past than to look outward in order to dissect the process of learning through travel, in which a succession of new landscapes can lead to books and artwork never before encountered. Kaplan first imagines Tunis as the glow of gypsum lamps shimmering against lime-washed mosques; the city he actually discovers is even more intoxicating. He takes the reader to the ramparts of a Turkish kasbah where Carthaginian, Roman, and Byzantine forts once stood: “I could see deep into Algeria over a rib-work of hills so gaunt it seemed the wind had torn the flesh off them.” In these austere and aromatic surroundings he discovers Saint Augustine; the courtyards of Tunis lead him to the historical writings of Ibn Khaldun. Kaplan takes us to the fifth-century Greek temple at Segesta, where he reflects on the ill-fated Athenian invasion of Sicily. At Hadrian’s villa, “Shattered domes revealed clouds moving overhead in countless visions of eternity. It was a place made for silence and for contemplation, where you wanted a book handy. Every corner was a cloister. No view was panoramic: each seemed deliberately composed.” Kaplan’s bus and train travels, his nighttime boat voyages, and his long walks in one archaeological site after another lead him to subjects as varied as the Berber threat to Carthage; the Roman army’s hunt for the warlord Jugurtha; the legacy of Byzantine art; the medieval Greek philosopher Georgios Gemistos Plethon, who helped kindle the Italian Renaissance; twentieth-century British literary writing about Greece; and the links between Rodin and the Croa- tian sculptor Ivan Mestrovic. Within these pages are smells, tastes, and the profundity of chance encounters. Mediterranean Winter begins in Rodin’s sculpture garden in Paris, passes through the gritty streets of Marseilles, and ends with a moving epiphany about Greece as the world prepares for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. Mediterranean Winter is the story of an education. It is filled with memories and history, not the author’s alone, but humanity’s as well.
Download or read book Tokyo Listening written by Lorraine Plourde and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethnographic analysis of urban music in Japan Tokyo Listening examines how the sensory experience of the city informs how people listen to both music and everyday, ubiquitous sounds. Drawing on recent scholarship in the fields of sound studies, anthropology, and ethnomusicology and over fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, Lorraine Plourde traces the linkages between sound and urban space. She examines listening cultures via four main ethnographic sites in Tokyo—an experimental music venue, classical music cafes, office workspaces, and department stores—looking specifically at how such auditory sensibilities are cultivated. The book brings together two different types of spaces into the same frame of reference: places people go to specifically for the music, and spaces where the music comes to them. Tokyo Listening examines the sensory experience of urban listening as a planned and multifaceted dimension of everyday city life, ultimately exploring the relationship between sound, comfort, happiness, and productivity.
Download or read book Vinyl Freak written by John Corbett and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-12 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From scouring flea markets and eBay to maxing out their credit cards, record collectors will do just about anything to score a long-sought-after album. In Vinyl Freak, music writer, curator, and collector John Corbett burrows deep inside the record fiend’s mind, documenting and reflecting on his decades-long love affair with vinyl. Discussing more than 200 rare and out-of-print LPs, Vinyl Freak is composed in part of Corbett's long-running DownBeat magazine column of the same name, which was devoted to records that had not appeared on CD. In other essays where he combines memoir and criticism, Corbett considers the current vinyl boom, explains why vinyl is his preferred medium, profiles collector subcultures, and recounts his adventures assembling the Alton Abraham Sun Ra Archive, an event so all-consuming that he claims it cured his record-collecting addiction. Perfect for vinyl newbies and veteran crate diggers alike, Vinyl Freak plumbs the motivations that drive Corbett and collectors everywhere.
