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.' |
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