Revisiting the Historiography of Postwar Avant-Garde Music PDF Download

Author: Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351609262
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This collection of essays delves into the historiographical traditions that have dominated how the stories of European postwar avant-garde music are told, seeking to approach commonplaces of that history writing from new perspectives. The contributors revisit subjects as varied as the impact of long-playing records on the emergence of open works, Messiaen’s interest in non-European musical traditions, Xenakis’s turn to information theory, Kagel’s strategic invention of a new genre, Berio’s dependence on funding from American foundations, and the ways in which figures like Boulez, Stockhausen, Pousseur, and Nono constructed their musical ancestries. Leading experts in their respective fields, the volume’s authors have sought to rethink the historiography of European experimental music of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in ways that resituate that small but influential milieu in broader historical and cultural contexts. In doing so, they suggest new directions and insights for students and specialists of twentieth-century music and music historiography.

Author: Jonathan Goldman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009363441
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
An innovative contribution to music history, cultural studies, and sound studies, Avant-garde on Record revisits post-war composers and their technologically oriented brand of musical modernism. It describes how a broad range of figures (including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Toshirō Mayuzumi, Claire Schapira, Anthony Braxton and Gunther Schuller) engaged with avant-garde aesthetics while responding to a rapidly changing, technologically fuelled, spatialized audio culture. Jonathan Goldman focuses on how contemporary listeners understood these composers' works in the golden age of LPs and explores how this reception was mediated through consumer-oriented sound technology that formed a prism through which listeners processed the 'music of their time'. His account reveals unexpected aspects of twentieth-century audio culture: from sonic ping-pong to son et lumière shows, from Venetian choral music by Stravinsky to the soundscape of Niagara Falls, from a Buddhist Cantata to an LP box set cast as a parlour game.

Author: Maurice Windleburn
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003853595
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
This book is the first study of John Zorn’s ‘file card’ works, with special focus made on the pieces Godard (1985), Spillane (1986), Interzone (2010), and Liber Novus (2010). It explains the unique creative process behind these compositions, contextualizing them in relation to the history of file cards, the ‘open work’ concept, cinematic listening, and uncreative aesthetics. Semiotic, hermeneutic, and ekphrastic analyses draw hypertextual links between the four file card compositions and the worlds of their respective dedicatees: author Mickey Spillane, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, novelist William S. Burroughs and painter Brion Gysin, and psychiatrist C. G. Jung. This book will appeal not only to those interested in Zorn’s music, but also to scholars of music semiotics and hermeneutics, intermedia studies, and avant-garde music.

Author: Lisa Cooper Vest
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520344243
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In Awangarda, Lisa Cooper Vest explores how the Polish postwar musical avant-garde framed itself in contrast to its Western European counterparts. Rather than a rejection of the past, the Polish avant-garde movement emerged as a manifestation of national cultural traditions stretching back into the interwar years and even earlier into the nineteenth century. Polish composers, scholars, and political leaders wielded the promise of national progress to broker consensus across generational and ideological divides. Together, they established an avant-garde musical tradition that pushed against the limitations of strict chronological time and instrumentalized discourses of backwardness and forwardness to articulate a Polish road to modernity. This is a history that resists Cold War periodization, opening up new ways of thinking about nations and nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century.

Author: Christiane Paul
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119225744
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
Reflecting the dynamic creativity of its subject, this definitive guide spans the evolution, aesthetics, and practice of today’s digital art, combining fresh, emerging perspectives with the nuanced insights of leading theorists. Showcases the critical and theoretical approaches in this fast-moving discipline Explores the history and evolution of digital art; its aesthetics and politics; as well as its often turbulent relationships with established institutions Provides a platform for the most influential voices shaping the current discourse surrounding digital art, combining fresh, emerging perspectives with the nuanced insights of leading theorists Tackles digital art’s primary practical challenges – how to present, document, and preserve pieces that could be erased forever by rapidly accelerating technological obsolescence Up-to-date, forward-looking, and critically reflective, this authoritative new collection is informed throughout by a deep appreciation of the technical intricacies of digital art

Author: Gregory P. A. Levine
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824858085
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Long Strange Journey presents the first critical analysis of visual objects and discourses that animate Zen art modernism and its legacies, with particular emphasis on the postwar “Zen boom.” Since the late nineteenth century, Zen and Zen art have emerged as globally familiar terms associated with a spectrum of practices, beliefs, works of visual art, aesthetic concepts, commercial products, and modes of self-fashioning. They have also been at the center of fiery public disputes that have erupted along national, denominational, racial-ethnic, class, and intellectual lines. Neither stable nor strictly a matter of euphoric religious or intercultural exchange, Zen and Zen art are best approached as productive predicaments in the study of religion, spirituality, art, and consumer culture, especially within the frame of Buddhist modernism. Long Strange Journey’s modern-contemporary emphasis sets it off from most writing on Zen art, which focuses on masterworks by premodern Chinese and Japanese artists, gushes over “timeless” visual qualities as indicative of metaphysical states, or promotes with ahistorical, trend-spotting flair Zen art’s design appeal and therapeutic values. In contrast, the present work plots a methodological through line distinguished by “discourse analysis,” moving from the first contacts between Europe and Japanese Zen in the sixteenth century to late nineteenth–early twentieth-century transnational exchanges driven by Japanese Buddhists and intellectuals and the formation of a Zen art canon; to postwar Zen transformations of practice and avant-garde expressions; to popular embodiments of our “Zenny zeitgeist,” such as Zen cartoons. The book presents an alternative history of modern-contemporary Zen and Zen art that emphasizes their unruly and polythetic-prototypical natures, taking into consideration serious religious practice and spiritual and creative discovery as well as conflicts over Zen’s value amid the convolutions of global modernity, squabbles over authenticity, resistance against the notion of “Zen influence,” and competing claims to speak for Zen art made by monastics, lay advocates, artists, and others.

Author: Michael Gallope
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226831752
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
An insightful look at how avant-garde musicians of the postwar period in New York explored the philosophical dimensions of music’s ineffability. The Musician as Philosopher explores the philosophical thought of avant-garde musicians in postwar New York: David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell. It contends that these musicians—all of whom are understudied and none of whom are traditionally taken to be composers—not only challenged the rules by which music is written and practiced but also confounded and reconfigured gendered and racialized expectations for what critics took to be legitimate forms of musical sound. From a broad historical perspective, their arresting music electrified a widely recognized social tendency of the 1960s: a simultaneous affirmation and crisis of the modern self.

Author: Christian Utz
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839450950
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 531

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Book Description
Since the early transformation of European music practice and theory in the cultural centers of Asia, Latin America, and Africa around 1900, it has become necessary for music history to be conceived globally - a challenge that musicology has hardly faced yet. This book discusses the effects of cultural globalization on processes of composition and distribution of art music in the 20th and 21st century. Christian Utz provides the foundations of a global music historiography, building on new models such as transnationalism, entangled histories, and reflexive globalization. The relationship between music and broader changes in society forms the central focus and is treated as a pivotal music-historical dynamic.

Author: Kevin C. Karnes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190469005
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
One of today's most widely acclaimed composers, Arvo Pärt broke into the soundscape of the Cold War West with Tabula Rasa in 1977, a work that introduced his signature tintinnabuli style to listeners throughout the world. In the first book dedicated to this pathbreaking composition, author Kevin C. Karnes tells the story of Tabula Rasa as one of Pärt and of Europe itself, traced over the course of a quarter-century that saw momentous transitions in European culture and politics, history and memory. Beginning at the site of the work's creation in the Estonian SSR, and drawing extensively upon a range of previously unexamined archival materials, Karnes recounts Pärt's discovery of tintinnabuli amidst his experiments with the music of the Western and Soviet avant-gardes. He examines Tabula Rasa in relation to modernist conceptions of musical structure, the ascetic practice of Orthodox Christianity, postwar experiences of electronic music, and the polystylistic approaches to composition that have become emblematic of the Soviet 1970s. Tracing the export of Tabula Rasa to the West and Pärt's emigration in 1980, the book reveals intersections of critical commentary with visions of the "end of history" that attended the collapse of European communism to suggest that it was in this confluence of listening, discovery, and geopolitical reordering that enduring lines of conversation about Pärt and his music took shape.

Author: Robert Adlington
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195336658
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This text examines the encounter of avant-garde music and 'the Sixties' across a range of genres, aesthetic positions and geographical locations.