In 1972-73, Barney Childs embarked on an ambitious attempt to survey the landscape of new American concert music. He recorded freewheeling conversations with fellow composers, most of them under forty, all of them important but most not yet famous. Though unable to publish the interviews in his lifetime, Childs had gathered invaluable dialogues with the likes of Robert Ashley, Olly Wilson, Harold Budd, Christian Wolff, and others.Virginia Anderson edits the first published collecti...

The classical record business gained a new lease on life in the 1980s when period instrument performances of baroque and classical music began to assume a place on the stage. This return to the past found its complement in the musical ascension of the American minimalists, in particular the music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams, and smaller specialty labels that focused on experimental composers like John Cage. During this period of change—of classical music’s transition of lo...

American writer, composer, artist, and philosopher John Cage (1912–92) is best known for his experimental composition 4’33,” a musical score in which the performer does not play an instrument during the duration of the piece. The purpose, Cage said, was for the audience to listen to the sounds of the environment around them while the piece was performed. Groundbreaking pieces such as 4’33”, as well as Sonatas and Interludes not only established Cage as a leading ...

In Listen to This, the award-winning music critic and author of The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross looks forward and backward in musical culture: capturing essential figures in classical music history, as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop music.From his own first encounter with classical music to vibrant sketches of Schubert, Verdi and Brahms; from in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead to the lives of a high school’s music students, Ross s...

Extending the inquiry of his early groundbreaking books, Christopher Small strikes at the heart of traditional studies of Western music by asserting that music is not a thing, but rather an activity. In this new book, Small outlines a theory of what he terms "musicking," a verb that encompasses all musical activity from composing to performing to listening to a Walkman to singing in the shower.Using Gregory Bateson's philosophy of mind and a Geertzian thick description of a typical...

A “heroic” and “fascinating” biography of John Cage showing how his work, and that of countless American artists, was transformed by Zen Buddhism (The New York Times)Where the Heart Beats is the story of the tremendous changes sweeping through American culture following the Second World War, a time when the arts in America broke away from centuries of tradition and reinvented themselves. Painters converted their canvases into arenas for action and...

The story of a revolution in music and technology, told through a century of recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian BachIn Reinventing Bach, his remarkable second book, Paul Elie tells the electrifying story of how musicians of genius have made Bach's music new in our time, at once restoring Bach as a universally revered composer and revolutionizing the ways that music figures into our lives.As a musician in eighteenth-century Germany, Bach was ...

The first major biography of Glenn Gould to stress the critical influence of the Canadian context on his life and artGlenn Gould was not, as has previously been suggested, an isolated and self-taught eccentric who burst out of nowhere onto the international musical scene in the mid-1950s. He was, says Kevin Bazzana in this fascinating new full-scale biography, very much a product of his time and place – and his entire life and diverse work reflect his Canadian heri...

A TIME Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2012A New Yorker Best Book of the YearLos Angeles Magazine's #1 Music Book of the YearA unique and revelatory book of music history that examines in great depth what is perhaps the best-known and most-popular symphony ever written and its four-note opening, which has fascinated musicians, historians, and philosophers for the last two hundred years.Music critic Matthew Guerrie...

Film music is as old as cinema itself. Years before synchronized sound became the norm, projected moving images were shown to musical accompaniment, whether performed by a lone piano player or a hundred-piece orchestra. Today film music has become its own industry, indispensable to the marketability of movies around the world. Film Music: A Very Short Introduction is a compact, lucid, and thoroughly engaging overview written by one of the leading authorities on the subject. After ...

Listen. What do you hear?We are surrounded by sounds all the time, but we tend not to hear them; our brains are very good at editing what our ears pick up. If we stop for a moment to listen, there they are: the ticking clock, traffic noise, fragments of conversation, a passing plane. These are examples of what the American composer John Cage called “illegal harmony”.In response to the noisiest century in history, modern composers have consistently flown in ...

John Cage was a man of extraordinary and seemingly limitless talents: musician, inventor, composer, poet. He became a central figure of the avant-garde early in his life and remained at that pinnacle until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty. Now award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman gives us the first comprehensive life of this remarkable artist. We follow Cage from his Los Angeles childhood—his father was a successful inventor—through his stay in Paris from 1930 to 1931, where im...