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Sound Art /

We Have Always Been Minimalist The Construction and Triumph of a Musical Style (Book)
*2023 stock* Rising out of the American art music movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, minimalism shook the foundations of the traditional constructs of classical music, becoming one of the most important and influential trends of the twentieth century. The emergence of minimalism sparked an active writing culture around the controversies, philosophies, and forms represented in the music’s style and performance, and its defenders faced a relentless struggle within the music establishment and be…
Living Genres in Late Modernity American Music of the Long 1970s (Book)
*2023 stock* Living Genres in Late Modernity rehears the American 1970s through the workings of its musical genres. Exploring stylistic developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, including soul, funk, disco, pop, the nocturne, and the concerto, Charles Kronengold treats genres as unstable constellations of works, people, practices, institutions, technologies, money, conventions, forms, ideas, and multisensory experiences. What these genres share is a significant cultural moment: t…
The Hum of the World A Philosophy of Listening (Book)
*2023 stock* The Hum of the World is an invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas, playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and persistence of life acquires tangible form. The positive experience of aliveness is not merely in accord with sound, but inaccessible, even inconceivable, without it. Lawrence Kramer’s poeti…
Capturing Sound How Technology Has Changed Music, Revised Edition (Book)
*2023 stock* There is more to sound recording than just recording sound. Far from being simply a tool for the preservation of music, the technology is a catalyst. In this award-winning text, Mark Katz provides a wide-ranging, deeply informative, consistently entertaining history of recording's profound impact on the musical life of the past century, from Edison to the Internet. Fully revised and updated, this new edition adds coverage of mashups and Auto-Tune, explores recent developments in fil…
Western Music and Its Others Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (Book)
*2023 stock* This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to Western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a sociocultural kind. The essays scrutinize a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant exampl…
Serial Music A Classified Bibliography of Writings on Twelve-Tone (Book)
*2023 stock* This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.
The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles (Book)
*2023 stock* Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in the past few years to gain access to Davis’s live recordings from this time, when he was working with an ensemble that has come to be known as the Lost Quintet. In this book, jazz historian and musician Bob Gluck explores the performances of this revolutionary group—Davis’s first electric band—to illuminate the thinkin…
You’ll Know When You Get There - Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band (Book)
*2023 stock* As the 1960s ended, Herbie Hancock embarked on a grand creative experiment. Having just been dismissed from the celebrated Miles Davis Quintet, he set out on the road, playing with his first touring group as a leader until he eventually formed what would become a revolutionary band. Taking the Swahili name Mwandishi, the group would go on to play some of the most innovative music of the 1970s, fusing an assortment of musical genres, American and African cultures, and acoustic and el…
Mainframe Experimentalism Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts (Book)
*2023 stock* Mainframe Experimentalism challenges the conventional wisdom that the digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley’s technological revolutions in the 1970s. In fact, in the 1960s, a diverse array of artists, musicians, poets, writers, and filmmakers around the world were engaging with mainframe and mini-computers to create innovative new artworks that contradict the stereotypes of "computer art." Juxtaposing the original works alongside scholarly contributions by well-established and em…
Loft Jazz Improvising New York in the 1970s (Book)
*2023 stock* The New York loft jazz scene of the 1970s was a pivotal period for uncompromising, artist-produced work. Faced with a flagging jazz economy, a group of young avant-garde improvisers chose to eschew the commercial sphere and develop alternative venues in the abandoned factories and warehouses of Lower Manhattan. Loft Jazz provides the first book-length study of this period, tracing its history amid a series of overlapping discourses surrounding collectivism, urban renewal, experiment…
Struggling to Define a Nation American Music and the Twentieth Century (Book)
*2023 stock* Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, Struggling to Define a Nation captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. In an engaging blend of music analysis and cultural critique, Charles Hiroshi Garrett examines a dazzling array of genres—including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian music—and numerous well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin. Garrett argues that rat…
Music Downtown Writings from the Village Voice
*2023 stock* This collection represents the cream of the more than five hundred articles written for the Village Voice by Kyle Gann, a leading authority on experimental American music of the late twentieth century. Charged with exploring every facet of cutting-edge music coming out of New York City in the 1980s and '90s, Gann writes about a wide array of timely issues that few critics have addressed, including computer music, multiculturalism and its thorny relation to music, music for the AIDS …
Sometimes It Degenerates Into Music (Book)
Unquestionably one of the most exciting books to emerge this year - filled with revelation, insight and surprise, finally offering Conrad Schnitzler the attention and recognition he’s always deserved. An unparalleled survey of his work in music, sculpture, video, performance and installation.
Cramps Records – Il suono che misura la libertà del tuo tempo (Book)
The illustrated history of legendary Cramps Records (Area, Demetrio Stratos, Arti e Mestieri, Claudio Rocchi, Alberto Camerini, Canzoniere del Lazio…) in a 22cm square-sized 244-page book.
The Ritual Year Book - Dave Pearson's English Calendar Customs 1973-1983
A hauntological beauty reminiscent of Seventies folk horror movies and Broadcast’s soundtrack work
Folklore Tapes: Ten Year Anniversary Book (2011-2021) (Book)
186 page full colour photo book, covering ten years of 35mm photography in the field, stage and studio. Includes essay by Jez winship and archival artwork. The Tenth Anniversary Book is filled with hitherto unseen images and text. Over the past decade, Folklore Tapes have amassed a vast archive of 35mm and slide film photography, detailing their activities on stage during live performances, and on-site during fieldtrips. This behind-the-scenes material will finally see the light of day through t…
File Under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music (Book)
This substantial book was written in 1984/85, soon after the band broke up and while memories were still fresh. It was written very much from the perspective of the time – that’s more important than it may sound in such a project: hindsight has its own value, but it loses the essence of the moment, the context, the freshness; the feel of unfamiliarity. Originally written as a master’s degree thesis, it was updated and published in book form in 2000 by the Norwegian University of Science and Tech…
Henry Cow : an Analysis of Avant Garde Rock (Book)
Theoretical and critical writings on Music. 200pp. Illustrated with woodcuts and Photographs. Chapters on Sun Ra, The Residents, Phil Ochs and Elvis Presley, What Is Popular Music?, Progressive Music in the UK, Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms, Henry Cow, Rock in Opposition etc.L
Heads Together – Weed and the Underground Press Syndicate, 1965–73 (Book)
A glorious design herbarium of marijuana ads from the great underground magazines of the 1960s and '70s.
Reminded by the Instruments. David Tudor's Music (Book)
** 768 Pages | Over 300 illustrations  ** David Tudor is remembered today in two guises: as an extraordinary pianist of post-war avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and as a founding figure of live-electronic music. His early realization of indeterminate graphic scores and his later performances using homemade modular instruments both inspired a whole generation of musicians. But his reticence, his unorthodox approaches, and the diversity …