Avant-Garde on Record
Avant-Garde on Record
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USDAn 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.
- Connects the history of twentieth-century concert music with other musical genres marked by phonographic practices, in particular, pop music
- Describes how twentieth-century listening practices informed the reception of post-war avant-garde music
- Discusses score-based contemporary music from the middle of the twentieth century in a way that benefits from recent scholarship in sound studies and popular music studies
Reviews & endorsements
‘Carefully researched, intelligently handled, and enjoyable-to-read … an invaluable contribution to research on postwar modernism'. Eric Drott, University of Texas at Austin
‘[T]his 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.
Product details
November 2023Hardback
9781009363396
320 pages
250 × 175 × 23 mm
0.75kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Ping-pong and its discontents
- 3. Doubles, rhymes and groups in stereo
- 4. Transnational multiorchestralism
- 5. The monumental stereo of son et lumière
- 6. Phonographic spaces: circling San Marco, navigating Niagara
- 7. Open works locked into grooves.
