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. This new and
expanded edition of the Audio Culture contains twenty-five
additional essays, including four newly-commissioned pieces. Taken
as a whole, the book explores the interconnections among such forms
as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrete, free improvisation,
experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, ambient music, hip hop,
and techno via writings by philosophers, cultural theorists, and
composers. Instead of focusing on some "crossover" between "high
art" and "popular culture," Audio Culture takes all 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, Ornette Coleman,
Pauline Oliveros, Maryanne Amacher, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco,
Jacques Attali, Simon Reynolds, Eliane Radigue, David Toop, John
Zorn, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. Each essay has its
own short introduction, helping the reader to place the essay
within musical, historical, and conceptual contexts, and the volume
concludes with a glossary, a timeline, and an extensive
discography.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!