Avant-Garde on Record
Musical Responses to Stereos
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:9th Nov '23
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
A new perspective on post-war avant-garde music's engagement with records, highlighting the stereo technology that also fascinated popular music creators.
Largely focusing on avant-garde composers active in the 1950s and 60s, this book highlights their engagement with records and recording. Combining approaches from music history, cultural studies and sound studies, it shows how contemporary listeners experienced this music through consumer-oriented technology also embraced by popular music creators.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.
'Carefully researched, intelligently handled, and enjoyable-to-read … an invaluable contribution to research on postwar modernism'. Eric Drott, University of Texas at Austin
'This is a sweeping and impressive book in which Goldman convincingly demonstrates the massive impact that stereo records had on both the production and reception of midcentury avant-garde music.… it becomes clear time and time again that the author listens to and loves the music about which he is writing. This quality is disappointingly rare in writing about music, academic or otherwise, and it is - on top of the many other accomplishments of [the book] - very much worth celebrating.' David H. Miller, Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association.
'… I was continually impressed by the selection, variety, and imaginative discussion of the book's 40+ diagrams and figures. I am delighted with this addition to my bookshelf and look forward to seeing Goldman's ideas circulating in future scholarship across musicology, cultural history, and sound studies.' Frankie Perry, Fontes Artis Musicae
'This book makes an important contribution to understanding the significance of stereophony and the post-war innovation of the stereo LP in shaping how we might think about - and listen to - leading avant-garde composers of the twentieth century.' Nicholas Tochka, Music & Letters
'Brilliantly written … Goldman's work sheds valuable light and provides new context for a set of spatialized works that the author defines as a 'genre,' even if this is understood as a 'processual grouping,' the result of the interaction between a compositional intention and attitudes of reception.' Martin Kaltenecker, Revue de musicologie
ISBN: 9781009363396
Dimensions: 250mm x 175mm x 23mm
Weight: 750g
338 pages