Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music - Softcover

Christoph Cox; Daniel Warner

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826416152 ISBN 13: 9780826416155

Publisher: Continuum, 2007

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

Audio Culture is the best introduction to the long historical fades and theoretical jumpcuts of what millions in the 21st C. now listen to as music: overwhelming noise and disturbed silences, unfettered Improv and indeterminate obstacles, the performance of recording, electricity, eclectics, mistakes and just the thought of music.""- --Douglas Kahn, author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, and Director of Technocultural Studies at the University of California, Davis

Synopsis:

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.'

About this edition

• Publisher: Continuum
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0826416152
• ISBN 13: 9780826416155
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416