Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music

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.

They demonstrate the way these musics constantly cross-pollinate each other, 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 improvisation.'

CONTENIDO:

Acknowledgments
Sources and permissions
Introduction: Music and the new audio culture

Part One: Theories
I. Music and its others: noise, sound, silence
Introduction
1. Jacques Attali, "Noise and politics"
2. Luigi Russolo, "The art of noises: Futurist manifesto"
3. Morton Feldman, "Sound, noise, Varèse, Boulez"
4. Edgard Varèse, "The Liberation of sound"
5. Henry Cowell, "The joys of noise"
6. John Cage, "The future of music: Credo"
7. R. Murray Schafer, "The music of the Environment"
8. Mark Slouka, "Listening for silence: notes on aural life"
9. Mary Russo and Daniel Warner, "Rough Music, futurism, and postpunk industrial noise bands"
10. Simon Reynolds, "Noise"
11. "The beauty of noise: An interview with Masami Akita of Merzbow"

II. Modes of Listening
Introduction
12. Marshall McLuhan, "Visual and acoustic space"
13. Hanns Einer & Theodor Adorno, "The politics of hearing"
14. Pierre Schaefer, "Acousmatics"
15. Francisco López, "Profound listening and environmental sound matter"
16. Ola Stockfelt, "Adequate modes of listening"
17. Brian Eno, "Ambient music"
18. Iain Chambers, "The aural walk"
19. Pauline Oliveros, "Some sound observations"
20. J.K. Randall, "Compose yourself"

III. Music in the age of electronic (Re)production
Introduction
21. Glenn Gould, "The prospects of recording"
22. Brian Eno, "The Studio as compositional tool"
23. John Oswald, "Bettered by the borrower: The ethics of musical Debt"
24. Chris Cutler, "Plunderphonia"
25. Kodwo Eshun, "Operating system for the redesign of sonic reality"

Part Two: Practices
IV. The open work
Introduction
26. Umberto Eco, "The poetics of the open work"
27. John Cage, "Composition as process: Indeterminacy"
28. Christoph Cox, "Visual sounds: On graphic scores"
29. Earle Brown, "Transformations and developments of a radical aesthetic"
30. John Zorn, "The game pieces"
31. Anthony Braxton, "Introduction to catalog of works"

V. Experimental Musics
Introduction
32. Michael Nyman, "Towards (a definition of) experimental music
33. John Cage, "Introduction to Themes & Variations"
34. Brian Eno, "Generating and organizing variety in the arts"
35. Cornelius Cardew, "A scratch orchestra: Draft constitution"
36. David Toop, "The Generation Game: Experimental music and digital culture"

VI. Improvised Musics
Introduction
37. Ornette Coleman, "Change of the century"
38. Derek Bailey, "Free improvisation"
39. Frederic Rzewski, "Little bangs: a nihilist theory of improvisation"
40. George E. Lewis, "Improvised music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological perspectives"

VII. Minimalisms
Introduction
41. Susan McClary, "Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of time in late Twentieth-century culture"
42. Kyle Gann, "Thankless attempts at a definition of minimalism"
43. Steve Reich, "Music as a gradual process"
44. Wim Mertens, "Basic concepts of minimal music"
45. Tony Conrad, "LYssophobia: on four violins"
46. Philip Sherburne, "Digital discipline: minimalism in house and techno"

VIII. DJ Culture
Introduction
47. László Moholy-Nagy, "Production-reproduction: potentialities of the phonograph"
48. William S. Burroughs, "The invisible generation"
49. Christian Marclay & Yasunao Tone, "Record, CD, Analog, Digital"
50. Paul D. Miller, "Algorithms: Erasures and the art of memory"
51. David Toop, "Replicant: On dub"
52. Simon Reynolds, "Post-Rock"

IX. Electronic music and electronica
Introduction
53. Jacques Barzun, "Introductory remarks to a program of works produced at the Columbia-Princenton Electronic Music Center"
54. Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Electronic and instrumental music"
55. Karlheinz Stockhausen et al., "Stockhausen vs. the 'Technocrats'"
56. Ben Neill, "Breakthrough beats: Rhythm and the aesthetics of contemporary electronic music"
57. Kim Cascone, "The aestehetics of failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in contemporary computer music"

Chronology
Glossary
Selected discography
Selected bibliography
Notes for quotations
Index