Description
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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
viii
Sources and Permissions
ix
Introduction: Music and the New Audio Culture
xiii
Part One: THEORIES
I. Music and Its Others: Noise, Sound, Silence
Introduction 5
1. Jacques Attali,
‘‘Noise and Politics’’ 7
2. Luigi Russolo,
‘‘The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto’’ 10
3. Morton Feldman,
‘‘Sound, Noise, Vare`se, Boulez’’ 15
4. Edgard Vare`se,
‘‘The Liberation of Sound’’ 17
5. Henry Cowell,
‘‘The Joys of Noise’’ 22
6. John Cage,
‘‘The Future of Music: Credo’’ 25
7. R. Murray Schafer,
‘‘The Music of the Environment’’ 29
8. Mark Slouka,
‘‘Listening for Silence: Notes on the Aural Life’’ 40
9. Mary Russo and Daniel Warner,
‘‘Rough Music, Futurism, and
Postpunk Industrial Noise Bands
’’ 47
10. Simon Reynolds,
‘‘Noise’’ 55
11.
‘‘The Beauty of Noise: An Interview with Masami Akita of Merzbow’’ 59
II. Modes of Listening
Introduction 65
12. Marshall McLuhan,
‘‘Visual and Acoustic Space’’ 67
13. Hanns Eisler & Theodor Adorno,
‘‘The Politics of Hearing’’ 73
14. Pierre Schaeffer,
‘‘Acousmatics’’ 76
15. Francisco Lo
´pez, ‘‘Profound Listening and Environmental Sound
Matter
’’ 82
16. Ola Stockfelt,
‘‘Adequate Modes of Listening’’ 88
17. Brian Eno,
‘‘Ambient Music’’ 94
18. Iain Chambers, ‘‘The Aural Walk’’ 98
19. Pauline Oliveros,
‘‘Some Sound Observations’’ 102
20. J.K. Randall,
‘‘Compose Yourself’’ 107
III. Music in the Age of Electronic (Re)production
Introduction 113
21. Glenn Gould,
‘‘The Prospects of Recording’’ 115
22. Brian Eno,
‘‘The Studio as Compositional Tool’’ 127
23. John Oswald,
‘‘Bettered by the Borrower: The Ethics of Musical
Debt
’’ 131
24. Chris Cutler,
‘‘Plunderphonia’’ 138
25. Kodwo Eshun,
‘‘Operating System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality’’ 157
Part Two: PRACTICES
IV. The Open Work
Introduction 165
26. Umberto Eco,
‘‘The Poetics of the Open Work’’ 167
27. John Cage,
‘‘Composition as Process: Indeterminacy’’ 176
28. Christoph Cox,
‘‘
Author(s)
Christoph Cox, Christoph Cox is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College, in Massachusetts. He writes regularly on contemporary art and music for Artforum, The Wire, Cabinet, and other magazines.
Daniel Warner, Daniel Warner is a Professor of Music at Hampshire College, MA, where he teaches electronic and computer music