Product Description

Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music attempts to map the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard musical culture today. Over the past few decades, a new audio culture has emerged, a culture of making and thinking about music and sound that disregards conventional categories and oppositions still operative in the academy and the mainstream music industry alike. Via writings by key philosophers, cultural theorists and composers, this book explores the interconnections among such forms as Minimalism, Indeterminacy, musique concrete, Improvised Music, the Classical Avant Garde, Experimental Music, Avant-Rock, Dub Reggae, Ambient Music, Hip Hop, and Techno. They demonstrate the way these musics constantly cross-pollinate each other, transgressing generic boundaries, and how contemporary composers, producers, and musicians now work within complex networks of association and influence: New York art rockers Sonic Youth release a CD of works by John Cage and other avant-garde experimentalists; Bjork interviews Karlheinz Stockhausen for a music magazine and Derek Bailey, the septuagenarian founder of Free Improvisation, collaborates with Drum 'n' Bass producers. Each chapter opens with an introduction that situates and interconnects the writings to follow and concludes with an extensive bibliography and discography. The book also includes a comprehensive glossary of terms and phrases such as 'Ambient,' 'Dub,' 'just intonation,' and 'modal improvisation.'

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #96943 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 454 pages

The Wire
All in all, a wonderful book.

About the Author
Christoph Cox is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College, MA. He writes regularly on contemporary art and music for Artforum, The Wire and other magazines. Daniel Warner is Professor of Music at Hampshire College, MA, where he teaches electronic and computer music.

Customer Reviews

Some inspirational thoughts in this book
I wish I'd read this one when doing an essay for an MA module called 'Creative Music, Media and the Arts'. It has really put alot of things into perspective for me and I now feel like I'm beginning to gain a solid understanding of the wider issues surrounding the advent of recording
technology. The best thing about this book is that the collection of writings are presented in such a way as to allow the reader to make their own judgements. Quite often each successive piece contains contradicting judgments on relating and same issues giving a very convenient opportunity for objectivity. It helps the reader to gain an understanding of the world of sound on its own terms and not in terms of individual stylistic values emminating from supposedly disperate cultures.

Essential book for everyone interested in the subject
It's quite simple really - this book is an ideal and essential place for anyone wanting to learn more about the background of interesting sound and music and art since the age of electricity [roughly]. Great for dipping into and finding out fascinating ideas, facts and histories from some of the most important people to have written about the wide ranging and specific subject matter.... Doesn't matter if you are a beginner or a professor - everyone will learn from this book if their minds are open and their ears alert... Great great great......essential text book number one [ along side not may others in the field of soundart - very welcome arrival]

Excellent book to get into electronic music
Carefully picked essays written from different angles and
a chronological go-thru of the biggest inventions & recordings
from the beginning of the 20th century to this day.

Classical composers alongside free-jazz pioneers and turntablists. Economists and musicians, cult heroes and (for me at least) new and interesting authors.

If you're interested in electronic music and wish to understand
its currents and philosophy, this is a good book to begin with.
I have read maybe 5 other books related to issue, and this was easily the most informative and thought-provoking.