Download or read book No Such Thing as Silence written by Kyle Gann and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-23 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First performed at the midpoint of the twentieth century, John Cage’s 4'33", a composition conceived of without a single musical note, is among the most celebrated and ballyhooed cultural gestures in the history of modern music. A meditation on the act of listening and the nature of performance, Cage’s controversial piece became the iconic statement of the meaning of silence in art and is a landmark work of American music. In this book, Kyle Gann, one of the nation’s leading music critics, explains 4'33" as a unique moment in American culture and musical composition. Finding resemblances and resonances of 4'33" in artworks as wide-ranging as the paintings of the Hudson River School and the music of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, he provides much-needed cultural context for this fundamentally challenging and often misunderstood piece. Gann also explores Cage’s craft, describing in illuminating detail the musical, philosophical, and even environmental influences that informed this groundbreaking piece of music. Having performed 4'33" himself and as a composer in his own right, Gann offers the reader both an expert’s analysis and a highly personal interpretation of Cage’s most divisive work.

Download or read book Silence written by John Cage and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Cage is the outstanding composer of avant-garde music today. The Saturday Review said of him: "Cage possesses one of the rarest qualities of the true creator- that of an original mind- and whether that originality pleases, irritates, amuses or outrages is irrelevant." "He refuses to sermonize or pontificate. What John Cage offers is more refreshing, more spirited, much more fun-a kind of carefree skinny-dipping in the infinite. It's what's happening now." –The American Record Guide "There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away."

Download or read book Shouting Won t Help written by Katherine Bouton and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2013-02-19 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For twenty-two years, Katherine Bouton had a secret that grew harder to keep every day. An editor at The New York Times, at daily editorial meetings she couldn't hear what her colleagues were saying. She had gone profoundly deaf in her left ear; her right was getting worse. As she once put it, she was "the kind of person who might have used an ear trumpet in the nineteenth century." Audiologists agree that we're experiencing a national epidemic of hearing impairment. At present, 50 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing loss—17 percent of the population. And hearing loss is not exclusively a product of growing old. The usual onset is between the ages of nineteen and forty-four, and in many cases the cause is unknown. Shouting Won't Help is a deftly written, deeply felt look at a widespread and misunderstood phenomenon. In the style of Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, and using her experience as a guide, Bouton examines the problem personally, psychologically, and physiologically. She speaks with doctors, audiologists, and neurobiologists, and with a variety of people afflicted with midlife hearing loss, braiding their stories with her own to illuminate the startling effects of the condition. The result is a surprisingly engaging account of what it's like to live with an invisible disability—and a robust prescription for our nation's increasing problem with deafness. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

Download or read book Sounds Like Silence written by Dieter Daniels and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we hear when there is nothing to hear? John Cages 4'33'' (four minutes,

Download or read book In Pursuit of Silence written by George Prochnik and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An "elegant and eloquent" (New York Times) exploration of the frontiers of noise and silence, and the growing war between them. Between iPods, music-blasting restaurants, earsplitting sports stadiums, and endless air and road traffic, the place for quiet in our lives grows smaller by the day. In Pursuit of Silence gives context to our increasingly desperate sense that noise pollution is, in a very real way, an environmental catastrophe. Traveling across the country and meeting and listening to a host of incredible characters, including doctors, neuroscientists, acoustical engineers, monks, activists, educators, marketers, and aggrieved citizens, George Prochnik examines why we began to be so loud as a society, and what it is that gets lost when we can no longer find quiet.

Download or read book The Sound of Silence written by Sumedho and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-07-26 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ajahn Sumedho gives insights into some key Buddhist themes like awareness, consciousness, identity, relief from suffering, and mindfulness of the body.

Download or read book The Sound of Silence written by Michael G. Ankerich and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2011-03-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marion Shilling began her career as a silent film ingenue for MGM and went on to play heroines in Westerns of the 1930s. Stage actress Esther Muir made the transition from Broadway to Hollywood just as talkies became popular. Hugh Allan was a leading man in the last years of the silents only to leave the film business in 1930 because of the uncertainty surrounding his transition to sound films and his disgust with studio politics. These three performers and thirteen others (Barbara Barondess, Thomas Beck, Mary Brian, Pauline Curley, Billie Dove, Edith Fellows, Rose Hobart, William Janney, Marcia Mae Jones, Barbara Kent, Anita Page, Lupita Tovar, and Barbara Weeks) reminisce here about Hollywood and the movie business as it made the transition.

Download or read book Silence written by Erling Kagge and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is silence? Where can it be found? Why is it now more important than ever? In 1993, Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge spent fifty days walking solo across Antarctica, becoming the first person to reach the South Pole alone, accompanied only by a radio whose batteries he had removed before setting out. In this book. an astonishing and transformative meditation, Kagge explores the silence around us, the silence within us, and the silence we must create. By recounting his own experiences and discussing the observations of poets, artists, and explorers, Kagge shows us why silence is essential to sanity and happiness—and how it can open doors to wonder and gratitude. (With full-color photographs throughout.)

Download or read book Listening to Noise and Silence written by Salome Voegelin and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh, bold study of the emerging field of Sound Art, informed by the ideas of Adorno, Merleau-Ponty and others.

Download or read book Silence written by John Cage and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1961-06 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Cage is the outstanding composer of avant-garde music today. The Saturday Review said of him: “Cage possesses one of the rarest qualities of the true creator- that of an original mind- and whether that originality pleases, irritates, amuses or outrages is irrelevant.” “He refuses to sermonize or pontificate. What John Cage offers is more refreshing, more spirited, much more fun-a kind of carefree skinny-dipping in the infinite. It’s what’s happening now.” –The American Record Guide “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away.”

Download or read book Rediscovering Silence written by Will Gray and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an increasingly noisy, distracting world, the idea of enjoying silence-healthy silence-has become for many people just a mirage. We talk about ""a little peace and quiet"" not because we experience it regularly, but because it's a joke we tell ourselves when we're overwhelmed. Silence is on the endangered experiences list. Today, if you're lik.

Download or read book Total Jazz written by Blutch and published by Fantagraphics Books. This book was released on 2018-02-14 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blutch riffs on two quintessentially American art forms in this collection of jazz-themed comics. In this freewheeling collection of short stories and vignettes, the famed French cartoonist examines not only the music, but the nature of the jazz sub-culture. The grumpy festival goer, the curmudgeonly collector, and many other fan “types” are the targets of his unerring gimlet eye. Drawn in a range of styles as improvisational as Coltrane and Mingus ― everything from loose linework to tight pen and ink to gestural pencils ― Blutch captures the excitement of live performance, the lovelorn, and the Great Jazz Detective, who is out but not down.

Download or read book Sounds from Silence written by Robert Krell and published by . This book was released on 2021-08 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The autobiography of Dr Robert Krell who was born in Holland and survived the Holocaust in hiding. Krell founded the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and dedicates his life to Holocaust education.

Download or read book Seeing Silence written by Pete McBride and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world ever more congested and polluted with both toxins and noise, award-winning photographer Pete McBride takes readers on a once-in-a-lifetime escape to find places of peace and quiet—a pole-to-pole, continent-by-continent quest for the soul. We tend to think of silence as the absence of sound, but it is actually the void where we can hear the sublime notes of nature. In this National Outdoor Book Award winning work, photographer Pete McBride reveals the wonders of these hushed places in spectacular imagery—from the thin-air flanks of Mount Everest to the depths of the Grand Canyon, from the high-altitude vistas of the Atacama to the African savannah, and from the Antarctic Peninsula to the flowing waters of the Ganges and Nile. These places remind us of the magic of being “truly away” and how such places are vanishing. Often showing beauty from vantages where no other photographer has ever stood, this is a seven-continent visual tour of global quietude—and the power in nature’s own sounds—that will both inspire and calm.

Download or read book One Square Inch of Silence written by Gordon Hempton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the visionary tradition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, One Square Inch of Silence alerts us to beauty that we take for granted and sounds an urgent environmental alarm. Natural silence is our nation’s fastest-disappearing resource, warns Emmy-winning acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who has made it his mission to record and preserve it in all its variety—before these soul-soothing terrestrial soundscapes vanish completely in the ever-rising din of man-made noise. Recalling the great works on nature written by John Muir, John McPhee, and Peter Matthiessen, this beautifully written narrative, co-authored with John Grossmann, is also a quintessentially American story—a road trip across the continent from west to east in a 1964 VW bus. But no one has crossed America like this. Armed with his recording equipment and a decibel-measuring sound-level meter, Hempton bends an inquisitive and loving ear to the varied natural voices of the American landscape—bugling elk, trilling thrushes, and drumming, endangered prairie chickens. He is an equally patient and perceptive listener when talking with people he meets on his journey about the importance of quiet in their lives. By the time he reaches his destination, Washington, D.C., where he meets with federal officials to press his case for natural silence preservation, Hempton has produced a historic and unforgettable sonic record of America. With the incisiveness of Jack Kerouac’s observations on the road and the stirring wisdom of Robert Pirsig repairing an aging vehicle and his life, One Square Inch of Silence provides a moving call to action. More than simply a book, it is an actual place, too, located in one of America’s last naturally quiet places, in Olympic National Park in Washington State.

Download or read book Where the Heart Beats written by Kay Larson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “heroic” biography of John Cage and his “awakening through Zen Buddhism”—“a kind of love story” about a brilliant American pioneer of the creative arts who transformed himself and his culture (The New York Times) Composer John Cage sought the silence of a mind at peace with itself—and found it in Zen Buddhism, a spiritual path that changed both his music and his view of the universe. “Remarkably researched, exquisitely written,” Where the Heart Beats weaves together “a great many threads of cultural history” (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings) to illuminate Cage’s struggle to accept himself and his relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Freed to be his own man, Cage originated exciting experiments that set him at the epicenter of a new avant-garde forming in the 1950s. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Allan Kaprow, Morton Feldman, and Leo Castelli were among those influenced by his ‘teaching’ and ‘preaching.’ Where the Heart Beats shows the blossoming of Zen in the very heart of American culture.

Download or read book The Joy of Small Things written by Hannah Jane Parkinson and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This book is a not-so-small joy in itself.' NIGELLA LAWSON 'Parkinson has the gift of making you look with new eyes at everyday things. The perfect daily diversion.' JOJO MOYES 'Always funny and frank and full of insight, I absolutely love Parkinson's writing.' DAVID NICHOLLS 'I loved this book . . . Parkinson's writing transports you to unexpected places of joy and comfort . . . these pages contain happiness.' MARINA HYDE 'The twenty-first century feels a lot more bearable in Parkinson's company.' CHARLOTTE MENDELSON Drawn from the successful Guardian column, these everyday exultations and inspirations will get you through dismal days. Hannah Jane Parkinson is a specialist in savouring the small pleasures of life. She revels in her fluffy dressing gown ('like bathing in marshmallow'), finds calm in solo cinema trips, is charmed by the personalities of fonts ('you'll never see Comic Sans on a funeral notice'), celebrates pockets and gleefully abandons a book she isn't enjoying. Parkinson's everyday exaltations - selected from her immensely successful Guardian column - will utterly delight. FEATURES BRAND NEW MATERIAL 'A compendium of delights.' OBSERVER 'Delightful . . . a love letter to those little moments of bliss that get us through the daily grind.' RED