Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music attempts to map the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard musical culture today. Over the past few decades, a new audio culture has emerged, a culture of making and thinking about music and sound that disregards conventional categories and oppositions still operative in the academy and the mainstream music industry alike. Via writings by key philosophers, cultural theorists and composers, this book explores the interconnections among such forms as Minimalism, Indeterminacy, musique concrete, Improvised Music, the Classical Avant Garde, Experimental Music, Avant-Rock, Dub Reggae, Ambient Music, Hip Hop, and Techno. T transgressing generic boundaries, and how contemporary composers, producers, and musicians now work within complex networks of association and influence: New York art rockers Sonic Youth release a CD of works by John Cage and other avant-garde experimentalists; Bjork interviews Karlheinz Stockhausen for a music magazine and Derek Bailey, the septuagenarian founder of Free Improvisation, collaborates with Drum 'n' Bass producers. Each chapter opens with an introduction that situates and interconnects the writings to follow and concludes with an extensive bibliography and discography. The book also includes a comprehensive glossary of terms and phrases such as 'Ambient, ' 'Dub, ' 'just intonation, ' and 'modal improvisatio

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments (p. viii)
• Sources and Permissions (p. ix)
• Introduction: Music and the New Audio Culture (p. xiii)
• Part 1 Theories
• I Music and Its Others: Noise, Sound, Silence
• Introduction (p. 5)
• 1 "Noise and Politics" (p. 7)
• 2 "The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto" (p. 10)
• 3 "Sound, Noise, Varese, Boulez" (p. 15)
• 4 "The Liberation of Sound" (p. 17)
• 5 "The Joys of Noise" (p. 22)
• 6 "The Future of Music: Credo" (p. 25)
• 7 "The Music of the Environment" (p. 29)
• 8 "Listening for Silence: Notes on the Aural Life" (p. 40)
• 9 "Rough Music, Futurism, and Postpunk Industrial Noise Bands" (p. 47)
• 10 "Noise" (p. 55)
• 11 "The Beauty of Noise: An Interview with Masami Akita of Merzbow" (p. 59)
• II Modes of Listening
• Introduction (p. 65)
• 12 "Visual and Acoustic Space" (p. 67)
• 13 "The Politics of Hearing" (p. 73)
• 14 "Acousmatics" (p. 76)
• 15 "Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter" (p. 82)
• 16 "Adequate Modes of Listening" (p. 88)
• 17 "Ambient Music" (p. 94)
• 18 "The Aural Walk" (p. 98)
• 19 "Some Sound Observations" (p. 102)
• 20 "Compose Yourself" (p. 107)
• III Music in the Age of Electronic (Re)production
• Introduction (p. 113)
• 21 "The Prospects of Recording" (p. 115)
• 22 "The Studio as Compositional Tool" (p. 127)
• 23 "Bettered by the Borrower: The Ethics of Musical Debt" (p. 131)
• 24 "Plunderphonia" (p. 138)
• 25 "Operating System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality" (p. 157)
• Part 2 Practices
• IV The Open Work
• Introduction (p. 165)
• 26 "The Poetics of the Open Work" (p. 167)
• 27 "Composition as Process: Indeterminacy" (p. 176)
• 28 "Visual Sounds: On Graphic Scores" (p. 187)
• 29 "Transformations and Developments of a Radical Aesthetic" (p. 189)
• 30 "The Game Pieces" (p. 196)
• 31 "Introduction to Catalog of Works" (p. 201)
• V Experimental Musics
• Introduction (p. 207)
• 32 "Towards (a Definition of) Experimental Music" (p. 209)
• 33 "Introduction to Themes & Variations" (p. 221)
• 34 "Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts" (p. 226)
• 35 "A Scratch Orchestra: Draft Constitution" (p. 234)
• 36 "The Generation Game: Experimental Music and Digital Culture" (p. 239)
• VI Improvised Musics
• Introduction (p. 251)
• 37 "Change of the Century" (p. 253)
• 38 "Free Improvisation" (p. 255)
• 39 "Little Bangs: A Nihilist Theory of Improvisation" (p. 266)
• 40 "Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives" (p. 272)
• VII Minimalisms
• Introduction (p. 287)
• 41 "Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture" (p. 289)
• 42 "Thankless Attempts at a Definition of Minimalism" (p. 299)
• 43 "Music as a Gradual Process" (p. 304)
• 44 "Basic Concepts of Minimal Music" (p. 307)
• 45 "LYssophobia: On Four Violins" (p. 313)
• 46 "Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno" (p. 319)
• VIII DJ Culture
• Introduction (p. 329)
• 47 "Production-Reproduction: Potentialities of the Phonograph" (p. 331)
• 48 "The Invisible Generation" (p. 334)
• 49 "Record, CD, Analog, Digital" (p. 341)
• 50 "Algorithms: Erasures and the Art of Memory" (p. 348)
• 51 "Replicant: On Dub" (p. 355)
• 52 "Post-Rock" (p. 358)
• IX Electronic Music and Electronica
• Introduction (p. 365)
• 53 "Introductory Remarks to a Program of Works Produced at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center" (p. 367)
• 54 "Electronic and Instrumental Music" (p. 370)
• 55 "Stockhausen vs. the 'Technocrats'" (p. 381)
• 56 "Breakthrough Beats: Rhythm and the Aesthetics of Contemporary Electronic Music" (p. 386)
• 57 "The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music" (p. 392)
• Chronology (p. 399)
• Glossary (p. 409)
• Selected Discography (p. 419)
• Selected Bibliography (p. 427)
• Notes for Quotations (p. 445)
• Index (p. 448)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

A philosophy and a music professor, respectively, Cox and Warner (both Hampshire Coll.) oversee this collection of 57 brief essays on contemporary music and aesthetics. The contributors include composers from the worlds of avant-garde classical music, pop, and jazz e.g., John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pauline Oliveros as well as cultural historians like Marshall MacLuhan and Jacques Barzun and literary experimentalists such as William S. Burroughs. The quality of the essays varies considerably: some are thoughtful and contain illuminating ideas, while others tend toward didacticism and dense, jargon-laden prose. Students of contemporary music will find this compendium useful. Recommended for academic libraries to complement books like Mark Prendergast's The Ambient Century. Larry Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

A philosophy and a music professor, respectively, Cox and Warner (both Hampshire Coll.) oversee this collection of 57 brief essays on contemporary music and aesthetics. The contributors include composers from the worlds of avant-garde classical music, pop, and jazz--e.g., John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pauline Oliveros--as well as cultural historians like Marshall MacLuhan and Jacques Barzun and literary experimentalists such as William S. Burroughs. The quality of the essays varies considerably: some are thoughtful and contain illuminating ideas, while others tend toward didacticism and dense, jargon-laden prose. Students of contemporary music will find this compendium useful. Recommended for academic libraries to complement books like Mark Prendergast's The Ambient Century.--Larry Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.