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Title: Experimental Music : Cage and Beyond by Michael Nyman ISBN: 0-521-65383-5 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 29 July, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Classic Introduction
Comment: Not only is this a great introduction for someone who doesn't know his or her way around this subject, but it offers more experienced listeners and readers Nyman's own sensitive, and (to my mind) highly accurate, takes on what Cage, Feldman, Brown, Cardew, LaMonte Young and others were up to back in the pre-revolutionary 50's and the revolutionary 60's and 70's. This is a snapshot, if you will, of many of the giants fully formed, and some, like Gavin Bryars, in the larval stages of their genius, so it makes for a fascinating read. Nyman's prose is pellucid, and his explanations cogent. My dream is that Michael Nyman will someday return to update this book and offer some insights on the new, strange paths, experimental music has taken in the age of the personal computer, robotics and the Internet.
Rating: 5
Summary: THE 20th CENTURY RADICAL AVANT-GARDE
Comment: In this work originally published in 1974, Nyman discusses the work of composers and performers who shifted the boundaries of music as regards notation, time, space, and the roles of the composer, performer and audience. The author seeks to identify and explain a whole body of musical work that existed outside the classical tradition and the avant-garde orthodoxies that flowed from it. He thus explores the Anglo-American musical tradition loosely associated with John Cage. Since 1974 this book has been considered the classical work on the radical alternative to the mainstream avant-garde as represented by Berio, Boulez and Stockhausen. Many of the current popular composers like Glass and Reich trace their root to this experimental school. The most fascinating chapter to me is "Minimal Music, Determinacy And The New Tonality" in which the Theatre Of Eternal Music (Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marion Zazeela and John Cale) as well as the work of Terry Riley is discussed. Photographs, illustrations and musical notations enliven the text and the book concludes with a selected source bibliography, a discography of experimental music and a bibliography of publications since 1974. Brian Eno has contributed an interesting foreword to this edition. The text can get a bit technical for the non-musician, but it remains a detailed work on a radical musical direction that has borne great fruit in the years since it was first analysed in this thorough and scholarly work.
Rating: 5
Summary: processes and fields of sound, not time-objects...
Comment: Nyman's 1974 classic is here reprinted sans revisions. Brilliant! It captures a moment -- as Nyman concludes his preface, "Thank goodness I wrote it when I did." EM is not a survey of 20th century avant-garde music. It focuses on one trend, inaugurated by Cage, Wolff, Feldman and Brown in the 1950s, a trend which explicitly attempted to overturn the traditional avant-garde then marching under the banner of total serialism. Nyman contrasts Wolff to Stockhausen, then a leading serialist: "Stockhausen is speaking of an unwanted situation needing to be remedied by his intervention, Wolff of a situation he is quite happy to accept, leaving sounds to go their own way." (27) As Cage says in his "Silence,"
"Not an attempt to understand... Just an attention to the activity of sounds."
One of the great strengths of Nyman's short book is his careful attempt to define experimental music before he moves on to discuss the artists and their music. To summarize and paraphrase, he says experimental composers are excited by creating "a process of generating action," involving situations or fields delineated by compositional rules, but leaving them open to the performers. (4)
Experimental music is uncompromisingly radical, and represents an ongoing influence on creative music, but has certainly not become any sort of popular movement. So for instance, while the early "minimalists" Young and Riley were arguably part of the experimental tendency, as were Reich's early phase patterns, (and hence are included here by Nyman), the later works of Reich, and especially Glass, are no longer open and experimental. And while Eno and recent techno/ambient artists have been influenced, their innovations have been more technical than conceptual by comparison.
My recommendation if this sounds intriguing -- check out anything by the English free-improv group AMM, which is nowadays constituted by Eddie Prevost on percussion, Keith Rowe on guitar and electronics, and John Tilbury on piano!
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Title: Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage ISBN: 0819560286 Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr Pub. Date: 15 June, 1961 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Talking Music: Conversations With John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers by William Duckworth ISBN: 0306808935 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $18.50 |
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Title: Empty Words: Writings '73-'78 by John Cage ISBN: 0819560677 Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr Pub. Date: 15 February, 1979 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age (Technologies-Studies in Culture and Theory) by Joanna Zylinska, Joanna Linska ISBN: 082645903X Publisher: Continuum Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Writings on Music, 1965-2000 by Steve Reich, Paul Hillier ISBN: 0195111710 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: March, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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