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.

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.

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.

There has long been a need for an introduction to modern music for the general reader. This book fills that need. Beginning at the threshold between Romanticism and the modern era, with the music of Debussy and Mahler, the author traces the new directions of music. The various paths are made clear by a concentration on the major works and the major turning-points in the music of our time; the new rhythmic force that came in with The Rite of Spring, the unbounded universe of Schoenberg's atonality, the undreamt-of possibilites opened up by electronics, the role of chance in the music of John Cage. Naturally the emphasis is on those composers who have contributed most to forming the widened musical outlook of today. Apart from those already mentioned, the book considers the music of Alban Berg and Anton Webern, Charles Ives and the American experimentalists who followed him, Edgard Varese and Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. All are surveyed in a presentation which, without being technical, helps to explain how and why music has developed in the ways that it has. The illustrations include portraits, posters, costume designs, instruments and orchestras, as well as extracts from a wide variety of sources, many of which are beautiful as art objects in their own right.

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

Focusing on opera and modernism in postwar Venice, Boyd-Bennett challenges assumptions about music in the twentieth century.

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.