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In 1972-73, Barney Childs embarked on an ambitious attempt to
survey the landscape of new American concert music. He recorded
freewheeling conversations with fellow composers, most of them
under forty, all of them important but most not yet famous. Though
unable to publish the interviews in his lifetime, Childs had
gathered invaluable dialogues with the likes of Robert Ashley, Olly
Wilson, Harold Budd, Christian Wolff, and others. Virginia Anderson
edits the first published collection of these conversations. She
pairs each interview with a contextual essay by a contemporary
expert that shows how the composer's discussion with Childs fits
into his life and work. Together, the interviewees cover a broad
range of ideas and concerns around topics like education, notation,
developments in electronic music, changing demands on performers,
and tonal music. Innovative and revealing, Interviews with American
Composers is an artistic and historical snapshot of American music
at an important crossroads.
This anthology of essays, interviews, and autobiographical pieces
provides an invaluable overview of the evolution of contemporary
music-from chromaticism, serialism, and indeterminacy to jazz,
vernacular, electronic, and non-Western influences. Featuring
classic essays by Stravinsky, Stockhausen, and Reich, as well as
writings by lesser-known but equally innovative composers such as
Jack Beeson, Richard Maxfield, and T. J. Anderson, this collection
covers a broad range of styles and approaches. Here you will find
Busoni's influential "Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music"; Partch's
exploration of a new notation system; Babbitt's defense of advanced
composition in his controversial "Who Cares If You Listen?"; and
Pauline Oliveros's meditations on sound. Now updated with fifteen
new composers including Michael Tippet, Gyorgy Ligeti, Gunther
Schuller, Ben Johnston, Sofia Gubaidulina, and William Bolcom, this
important book gathers together forty-nine pieces-many out of print
and some newly written for this volume-which serve as a documentary
history of twentieth-century music, in theory and practice.
Impassioned, provocative, and eloquent, these writings are as
exciting and diverse as the music they discuss.
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