Product Description

The groundbreaking Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum; September 2004; paperback original) maps the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard music today. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, Audio Culture traces the genealogy of current musical practices and theoretical concerns, drawing lines of connection between recent musical production and earlier moments of sonic experimentation. It aims to foreground the various rewirings of musical composition and performance that have taken place in the past few decades and to provide a critical and theoretical language for this new audio culture.

Via writings by philosophers, cultural theorists, and composers, Audio Culture explores the interconnections among such forms as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrète, free improvisation, experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, Ambient music, HipHop, and Techno. Instead of focusing on the putative "crossover" between "high art" and "popular culture," Audio Culture takes all of these musics as experimental practices on par with, and linked to, one another. While cultural studies has tended to look at music (primarily popular music) from a sociological perspective, the concern here is philosophical, musical, and historical.

Audio Culture includes writing by some of the most important musical thinkers of the past half-century, among them John Cage, Brian Eno, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco, Ornette Coleman, Jacques Attali, Simon Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, Paul D. Miller, David Toop, John Zorn, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. The book is divided into nine thematically-organized sections, each with its own introduction. Section headings include topics such as "Modes of Listening," "Minimalisms," and "DJ Culture." In addition, each essay has its own short introduction, helping the reader to place the essay within musical, historical, and conceptual contexts. The book concludes with a glossary, a timeline, and an extensive discography.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37496 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 454 pages

About the Author
Christoph Cox is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College. The author of Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (University of California Press, 1999), Cox also regularly on contemporary art and music for Artforum, The Wire, Cabinet, and other magazines.

Daniel Warner is Professor of Music at Hampshire College. His recent computer music, video, and multi-media installations have been presented in the U.S., Canada, Spain, and France. His theoretical writing has appeared in Perspectives of New Music and DisCourse.

Customer Reviews

Very comprehensive guide
This is a very comprehensive guide on the different sides of "audio culture". Many of the authors and readings you'll find here are among the most influential on the subject...From Luigi Russolo's futurist musical manifesto to Brian Eno's ambient music, coming across Stockhausen, Steve Reich, Cage, Kim Cascone, etc. Very thought-provoking, it gives an interesting macro view of the world of audio as well as the different currents and inflexion points that have changed the way we perceive music and its context...

I definitely recommend it, but beware: you'll want more!

The missing manifestos of modern music
It is quite a challenge to write a review when just thinking about a book renders one speechless. The very first chapter (an excerpt from Jacques Attali) is more explosive that the opening sequence of a James Bond movie, with insights as penetrating as any I have read about quantum mechanics, astrophysics, economics, or philosophy. And that chapter was only two pages long!

Not all of the book spoke to me, because it covers an extremely wide range of topics, not all of which are of interest to me. But every single chapter that remotely connected with my interest in music, economics, culture, freedom, and sustainability spoke so clearly, so cogently, so powerfully, and so affirmingly YES! that I give the whole work five stars.

I was a reader (and lover) of The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross, and what he did in the way of explaining the evolution of modern musical composition, this book does for modern musical production, as well as the recontextualization of modern music *experience*. Indeed, I will say that this book really does pick up, and deliver, about where Ross's book exhausts itself. And it does so entirely with the words of the great producers, performers, and philosophers of this modern era.

just brilliant.
complex, yet easy to understand. informative, yet exciting. i recommend this boook to anyone who feels an intense love for music and the history of sound and noise.