Herein, John Cage recalls the turning point in his career; Ben Johnston criticizes the operas of his teacher Harry Partch; La Monte Young attributes his creative discipline to a Morman childhood; and much more. The results are revelatory conversations with some of America's most radical musical innovators.

    A meditation on the act of listening and the nature of performance, Cage’s controversial piece became the iconic statement of the meaning of silence in art and is a landmark work of American music.In this book, Kyle Gann, one of the nation’s leading music critics, explains 4'33" as a unique moment in American culture and musical composition. Finding resemblances and resonances of 4'33" in artworks as wide-ranging as the paintings of the Hudson River School and the music of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, he provides much-needed cultural context for this fundamentally challenging and often misunderstood piece. Gann also explores Cage’s craft, describing in illuminating detail the musical, philosophical, and even environmental influences that informed this groundbreaking piece of music. Having performed 4'33" himself and as a composer in his own right, Gann offers the reader both an expert’s analysis and a highly personal interpretation of Cage’s most divisive work.

    And then enthralled. He set about trying to catch their lightning in his Nikon F2AS.That quixotic impulse became a lifelong quest. A little history got made on the way.Collected here for the first time are the fruits of his labour. A Little History is an extraordinary document, tracking Nick Cave's creative career from the apoplectic extravagance of The Birthday Party to the calmer disquiet of 2013's Push The Sky Away via snapshots, spotlit visions and sumptuous, theatrical portraits. It mixes the candid and uncanny, the spontaneous and the patiently staged, and includes eyeball encounters with Cave's baddest lieutenants, men for the most part who long since burned their own bridges down. Butcher's Nikonic eye defines moment after arresting moment in Cave's glorious, sprawling story: it's a splendid testament to two brilliant careers.

    Lucier explains in detail how each piece is made, unlocking secrets of the composers' style and technique. The book as a whole charts the progress of American experimental music from the 1950s to the present, covering such topics as indeterminacy, electronics, and minimalism, as well as radical innovations in music for the piano, string quartet, and opera. Clear, approachable and lively, Music 109 is Lucier's indispensable guide to late 20th-century composition. No previous musical knowledge is required, and all readers are welcome.

    As a musician he organized the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theatre at Versailles in the early 1990s, and thus was instrumental in the rediscovery of much forgotten classical music. Yet in 1994 he abruptly renounced all musical activities. The Hatred of Music is Quignard’s masterful exploration of the power of music and what history reveals about the dangers it poses.   From prehistoric chants to challenging contemporary compositions, Quignard reflects on music of all kinds and eras. He draws on vast cultural knowledge—the Bible, Greek mythology, early modern history, modern philosophy, the Holocaust, and more—to develop ten accessible treatises on music. In each of these small masterpieces the author exposes music’s potential to manipulate, to mesmerize, to domesticate. Especially disturbing is his scrutiny of the role music played in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Quignard’s provocative book takes on particular relevance today, as we find ourselves surrounded by music as never before in history.

    It travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to virtual Las Vegas; from David Lynch's dream house high in the Hollywood Hills to the megalopolis of Tokyo.Ocean of Sound begins in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed. An ethereal culture developed in response to the intangibility of 20th century communications.Author of Rap Attack 3 and Exotica, David Toop has in Ocean of Sound written an exhilarating, path-breaking account of ambient sound.

    Graham Lock writes from the perceptual plane of insight and dedication-coupled with a keen wit and a dynamic intellect.

    For more than twenty years and from Blackwood, Wales to Tokyo, Japan, Nicky Wire has kept a personal visual history of the band in their various stages from Generation Terrorists through Holy Bible and right up to last year's remarkable album, Postcards from a Young Man. Edited down from over 1,000 of Wire's personal polaroids and with accompanying text by the man himself, Death of The Polaroid promises to be a rich, visual biography of one of the most loved and iconoclastic British bands of the past two decades.

    It was the first Brian Eno album tobe composed almost completely in the confines of a recording studio,over a scant few months in the summer of 1975. The album was a proofof concept for Eno's budding ideas of "the studio as musicalinstrument," and a signpost for a bold new way of thinking aboutmusic.In this book, Geeta Dayal unravels Another Green World's abundantmysteries, venturing into its dense thickets of sound. How was analbum this cohesive and refined formed in such a seemingly ad hoc way?How were electronics and layers of synthetic treatments used to createan album so redolent of the natural world? How did a deck of cardsfigure into all of this? Here, through interviews and archivalresearch, she unearths the strange story of how Another Green Worldformed the link to Eno's future -- foreshadowing his metamorphosisfrom unlikely glam rocker to sonic painter and producer.

    He references his own contributions to the canon of popular music, and he provides fascinating insider portraits of the industry and its protagonists. But above all, he questions our ideas of music and our attitude to sound, introducing us throughout this provocative and superbly written book to his current work, The17.

    He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP?In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.

    It brings together leading avant-garde composers of the early postwar period such as Elliot Carter, Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen; pioneers of electroacoustic music such as Francois Bayle, Pauline Oliveros, Iannis Xenakis and Peter Zinovieff; minimalist and Fluxus-inspired artist-musicians such as Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Phil Niblock, Yoko Ono, Steve Reich and Terry Riley; and figures that have moved between classical/experimental realms and more pop terrain, such as Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Howie B., Arto Lindsay and Caetano Veloso. Obrist's interviews map the evolution of the new music in Europe and America across all of its genres, from musique concrete to the recent hybridizations between pop and avant-garde, as techniques from both realms cross-pollinate. A Brief History of New Music is an ideal introduction to the experimental and new classical music of the past half-century.

    He was an authority on rock & roll, blues, jazz, punk, avant-garde, and world music -- often discovering new artists and trends years (even decades) before they hit the mainstream. Now, noted music writer Anthony DeCurtis has compiled the best pieces from Palmer's oeuvre and presents them here, in one compelling volume.A member of the elite group of the defining rock critics who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, Palmer possessed a vision so complete that, as DeCurtis writes, "it's almost as if, if you read Bob, you didn't need to read anyone else." Blues & Chaos features some of his most memorable pieces, including gripping stories about John Lennon, Led Zeppelin, Moroccan trance music, Miles Davis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Philip Glass, and Muddy Waters.Wonderfully entertaining, infused with passion, and deeply inspiring, Blues & Chaos is a must for music fans everywhere.Flirtations with chaos / by Anthony DeCurtis --The big picture : "The opinions expressed are dangerously subjective." --The blues : "A post-Heisenberg-uncertainty-principle mojo hand" --Jazz : "A kinetic kaleidoscope" --The originators : "Where the hell did this man come from?" --Soul and R&B : "It had to come from somewhere, and the church is where it all came from" --Classic rock : "Musically, we weren't afraid to go in any direction whatsoever" --John Lennon and Yoko Ono : "Now the music's coming through me again" --Punk rock and beyond : "Fear and nothing" --World music : "The world is changing and so is our music" --Morocco : "We fell through each other, weightless, into the sky" --On the edge : "Listen, as if a new world had suddenly opened up" --Sonic guitar maelstrom : "All hail the overdriven amp."

    The alternative music scene had all but died, and pre-packaged pop stars had filled the vacuum. But in a basement apartment in the heart of downtown Toronto, two musicians were forming a creative partnership that would revive the mass appeal of indie music and forever change how we think of a band.In this biography of the ever-evolving indie-rock collective, Broken Social Scene, music columnist Stuart Berman tracks the group's inception by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning; groundbreaking performances at Ted's Wrecking Yard that raised the band's local status to mythical proportions; Broken Social Scene's meteoric rise upon the release of breakout album You Forgot It In People; the creation of Arts & Crafts records with music-biz maverick Jeffrey Remedios; and life on the road with revolving bandmates, including members of Stars, Metric, The Dears, and international pop sensation Feist.Stuart Berman has drawn from hours of interviews with members and affiliates of Broken Social Scene, and exclusive, never-before-seen photographs, gig posters, and artwork to create a spectacular oral and visual history of this ever-evolving indie-rock collective.

    The book focuses on the scene surrounding the extreme heavy metal subgenre black metal in Norway in the early 1990s, with a focus on the string of church burnings and murders that occurred in the country around 1993.