The Instant Composers Pool and Improvisation Beyond Jazz (Book)
The Instant Composers Pool and Improvisation Beyond Jazz contributes to the expansion and diversification of our understanding of the jazz tradition by describing the history and practice of one of the most important non-American jazz groups: The Instant Composers Pool, founded in Amsterdam in 1967.
The Instant Composers Pool describes the meaning of "instant composition" from both a historical and ethnographic perspective. Historically, it details instant composition’s emergence from the encoun…
VOCAL Adventures Free Improvisation in Sound, Space, Spirit and Song (Book)
“These Vocal Adventures chart a decades-long exploration of soundscapes – ones produced by the outside world but most prominently those created through free improvisation in music. The expedition into this realm of musical experience and expression has taken the author across oceans and continents, with diverse musical encounters providing invaluable sources of inspiration and a wealth of learning and teaching opportunities while enriching her own ideas and approaches along the way. This book as…
A Slightly Curving Place (Book)
Softcover, English, 180 pages, A Slightly Curving Place asks what it means to listen to the past and its absence which remains. It responds to the practice of acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi, whose life and work are a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he has been building ambisonic microphones since the 1990s to measure the acoustic properties of premodern performance spaces. Comprising a range…
We Have Delivered Ourselves From the Tonal - Of, Towards, On, For Julius Eastman
2022 Repress * Softcover, English, 260 pages, B/W*An absolutely stunning achievement, “We Have Delivered Ourselves From the Tonal – Of, Towards, On, For Julius Eastman” - published by Archive Books and SAVVY Contemporary - gathers a collection of essays, librettos, lyrics, memories, photos, personal anecdotes by musicians, visual artists, researchers and archivers that pays homage to the work and life of African-American composer, musician, performer, activist Julius Eastman. Clocking in at 264 …
Black Phoenix: Third World Perspective on Contemporary Art and Culture (Book)
*In process of stocking* Primary Information is pleased to announce the release of Black Phoenix: Third World Perspective on Contemporary Art and Culture. Edited and published by Rasheed Araeen and Mahmood Jamal between 1978 and 1979 in the United Kingdom, Black Phoenix remains a key and radical document of transnational solidarity and cultural production in the visual arts, literature, activism, and beyond. This publication collects all three issues of the journal into a single volume.More than…
Stockhausen on Music (Book)
*2022 stock* If a genius is someone whose ideas survive all attempts at explanation', writes the well-known contemporary musicologist Robin Maconie, 'then by that definition Stockhausen is the nearest thing to Beethoven this century has produced. Reason? His music lasts. With penetrating philosophical and spiritual insights Stockhausen describes, in this collection of lectures and interviews conducted in English, a whole new universe of sounds and events. Stockhausen's uncompromising attitude to…
Improvisation Rites (Book)
*2022 stock* "I used my experience of The Scratch Orchestra (1969 - 72) to work with a younger generation of people. We by working with John Cage's magnum opus 'Song Books'. Then we worked with the improvisation rites in Cornelius Cardew's collective work 'Nature Study Notes'. This book documents that process and its assessment, and afterglow in some details"
Sounding for Harry Smith (Book)
Harry Everett Smith (1923-1991) was a boyhood resident of Anacortes, Washington for ten years of the Great Depression. Sounding for Harry Smith: Early Pacific Northwest Influences is a visually compelling oral history-based biography that immerses the reader in Salish Sea traditions and discord to explore the myths of a countercultural shaman whose strange impacts on art, music and film resound from studies of place to beat improvisation, through brain paintings to a Grammy Award for his folk mu…
The Reflection Issue (Magazine)
Over the course of this bastard year of 2020, Numero will issue nearly 150 digital-only “records.” In previous years we may have attempted to press many of these, but as our world and industry change in light of the ongoing ecological crisis, we know that it’s irresponsible to commit precious resources to every flight of fancy. Our love for the physical hasn’t diminished—we’re still pressing a select number of LPs, box sets, and 45s—but at the end of the day, the music is what’s important, not t…
Draw a Straight Line and Follow It (Book)
* Hardcover Edition * Although La Monte Young is one of the most important composers of the late twentieth century, he is also one of the most elusive. Generally recognized as the patriarch of the minimalist movement—Brian Eno once called him "the daddy of us all"—he nonetheless remains an enigma within the music world. Early in his career Young eschewed almost completely the conventional musical institutions of publishers, record labels, and venues, in order to create compositions completely un…
Sound Commitments (Book)
Featuring new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period in each chapter, Sound Commitments will appeal to researchers and advanced students in the fields of post-war music, cultures of the 1960s, and the avant-garde, as well as to an informed general readership.
Composing Dissent (Book)
The 1960s saw the emergence in the Netherlands of a generation of avant-garde musicians (including figures such as Louis Andriessen, Willem Breuker, Reinbert de Leeuw and Misha Mengelberg) who were to gain international standing and influence as composers, performers and teachers, and who had a defining impact upon Dutch musical life. Fundamental to their activities in the sixties was a pronounced commitment to social and political engagement. The lively culture of activism and dissent on the st…
Terry Riley's in C (Book)
Unquestionably the founding work of minimalism in musical composition, Terry Riley's In C (1964) challenges the standards of imagination, intellect, and musical ingenuity to which "classical" music is held. Only one page of score in length, it contains neither specified instrumentation nor parts. Its fifty-three motives are compact, presented without any counterpoint or evident form. The composer gave only spare instructions and no tempo. And he assigned the work a title that's laconic in the ex…
Writings on Music (Book)
In the mid-1960s, Steve Reich radically renewed the musical landscape with a back-to-basics sound that came to be called Minimalism. These early works, characterized by a relentless pulse and static harmony, focused single-mindedly on the process of gradual rhythmic change. Throughout his career, Reich has continued to reinvigorate the music world, drawing from a wide array of classical, popular, sacred, and non-western idioms. His works reflect the steady evolution of an original musical mind.W…
This Life of Sounds (Book)
This Life of Sounds portrays an important and previously unexplored corner of the history of new music in America: the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts int eh State University of New York at Buffalo. Composers Lukas Foss (the Center's founder), Lejaren Hiller, and Morton Feldman were the music directors over the life of "the Buffalo group," during the years 1964-1980. Based on Foss's plan, the Rockefeller Foundation provided annual fellowships for young composers and virtuoso instrumen…
Rethinking Reich (Book)
Described by music critic Alex Ross as "the most original musical thinker of our time" and having received innumerable accolades in a career spanning over fifty years, composer Steve Reich is considered by many to be America's greatest contemporary composer. His music, however, remains largely underresearched. Rethinking Reich redresses this imbalance, providing a space for prominent and emerging scholars to reassess the composer's contribution to music in the twentieth century. Featuring fourte…
Brian Eno's Ambient 1 (Book)
Brian Eno's seminal album Ambient 1: Music for Airports continues to fascinate and charm audiences, not only as a masterpiece of ambient music, but as a powerful and transformative work of art. Author John T. Lysaker situates this album in the context of twentieth-century art music, where its ambitions and contributions to avant garde music practice become even more apparent. To appreciate the album's multifaceted character, Lysaker advocates for "prismatic listening," an attentiveness that cont…
Live Electronics in the SWR Experimentalstudio (Book)
Two events in music history had revolutionary consequences: the creation of notation and the invention of electronic sound. The initial stages of electronic music brought about new musical instruments like the theremin, the electric guitar and the synthesizer. In the digital age, the computer has itself become a musical instrument, with the invention of live electronics providing traditional instruments, such as the violin or piano, with new, unimagined sonic possibilities. The SWR Experimentals…
Graphème Vol.1 (Book)
Smallest Functional Unit was founded in 2020 by Ute Wassermann, Tony Buck, Mazen Kerbaj, Magda Mayas and Racha Gharbieh with the aim of performing and publishing unconventional, hybrid notational formats and graphic scores by international composers. The publication will appear as Graphème, a series with a thematic focus on experimental notation.
Labyrinthus: hic habitat Musica (Book)
The phenomenon of “graphic” scores has been a subject of fascination, controversy, and a flourishing of artistic talent since its inception in the aftermath of the Second World War. The scores of that age, despite their compelling visual presence, nevertheless remain elusive: the means of performance are obscure, and they resist conventional analysis. This study reconsiders graphic scores from the perspective of Information Theory, derived from studies of “ergodic” texts: the ergodic score requi…