 | A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music by George E. Lewis
Buy new: $23.10 / Used from: $20.15 2008) Great history of the AACM, one of these days I'll write a review!
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 | The Battle of the Five Spot, Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field by David Lee
I don't know that this has much theory, it looks like a history of Ornette Coleman and the avant-garde in NYC.
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 | This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture (The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America) by Iain Anderson
Buy new: $20.25 / Used from: $12.95 Here's another new book on Sixties jazz radicalism that looks interesting.
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 | The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross
Buy used from: $3.88 Ross has compiled a breezy, compulsively readable, populist overview of 20th century classical music, featuring lots of fascinating biographical detail on leading composers, for instance the first chapter's recounting of the tense relations between Mahler and Strauss.
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 | Modern Music and After - Directions Since 1945 (Clarendon Paperbacks) by Paul Griffiths
Buy new: $37.62 / Used from: $18.00 5 STARS (see my 5/24/01 review) This is the definitive work on the post-WWII avant-garde in "classical" music.
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 | Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America (The Norton Introduction to Music History) by Robert P. Morgan
Buy new: $50.63 / Used from: $21.99 5 STARS (see my 5/11/01 review) best overview of the century -- Griffiths and Gann make great companions
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 | American Music in the Twentieth Century by Kyle Gann
Buy used from: $39.99 5 STARS (see my 5/11/01 review) unique coverage of American composers, good follow-up to Griffiths
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 | Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) by Michael Nyman
Buy new: $30.45 / Used from: $15.60 5 STARS (see my 3/27/01 review) a brilliant work on Cage, Fluxus, and related process musics
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 | A Philosophy of Mass Art by Noel Carroll
Buy new: $53.63 / Used from: $8.05 5 STARS (see my 7/27/01 review) an idiosyncratic but provocative application of analytical philosophy
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 | Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology of Music (Music and Society) by Peter J. Martin
Buy new: $33.00 / Used from: $14.45 5 STARS (see my 3/17/01 review) This is the definitive analysis of how music acquires meaning.
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 | Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New by Charles Rosen
Buy new: $34.00 / Used from: $10.92 5 STARS (see my 11/11/01 review) great commentary on difficult music
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 | Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by Douglas Kahn
Buy used from: $25.00 5 STARS (see my 8/25/01 review) an innovative analysis of sound and the 20th century avant-garde, with a brilliant critique of John Cage
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 | Essays on Music by Theodor Adorno
Buy new: $31.16 / Used from: $31.10 This is an incredible collection of 27 essays, with great commentary by Leppert
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 | Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Theory and History of Literature) by Jacques Attali
Buy new: $16.27 / Used from: $12.86 very influential in certain circles... high B.S. quotient, but the first chapter is provocative ... very "70s"-ish neomarxism...
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 | Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (Harmonologia Series, No 6) by Iannis Xenakis
Buy new: $46.00 / Used from: $40.00 5 STARS (see my 6/24/02 review) mainly mathematics, but a couple of chapters that are essential reading
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 | Xenakis: His Life in Music by James Harley
Buy new: $92.71 / Used from: $95.35 Harley's book is the only English-language overview of Xenakis.
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 | Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Music in the Twentieth Century) by Keith Potter
Buy new: $38.70 / Used from: $36.01 5 STARS (see my 3/21/01 review) more than you want to know (plenty of music theory and analysis)
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 | Gyorgy Ligeti (20th-Century Composers) by Richard Toop
Buy new: $10.10 / Used from: $6.00 5 STARS (see my 11/5/01 review) great introduction to Ligeti
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 | Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937-1995 by Elliott Carter
Buy new: $35.00 / Used from: $14.80 5 STARS (see my 3/22/2 review) with Carter's thoughts on the "orchestral dinosaur" among other things
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 | Orientations: Collected Writings by Pierre Boulez
Buy new: $26.55 / Used from: $12.00 Boulez speaks, and as a leader of the post-war avant-garde, we want to know what he has to say... A substantial collection of essays.
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 | Arnold Schoenberg's Journey by Allen Shawn
Buy new: $23.50 / Used from: $9.00 5 STARS (see my 12/9/02 review) great sympathetic introduction to Schoenberg
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 | Charles Ives: A Life with Music by Jan Swafford
Buy new: $14.21 / Used from: $7.22 5 STARS (see my 3/17/02 review) tremendously sympathetic account of the American maverick
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 | The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy by Bryan Magee
Buy new: $17.95 / Used from: $5.75 5 STARS (see my 8/27/02 review) great read, a philosophical analysis of Wagner's music
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 | The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958 (A Da Capo Paperback) by John Litweiler
Buy used from: $5.48 still the best single work on free jazz after all these years...
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 | Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation by Ben Watson
Buy used from: $25.42 Ben Watson, the pugnacious British music journalist, follows up his tome on Zappa with one on Derek Bailey and free improvisation.
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 | Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein by John Corbett
Buy new: $23.95 / Used from: $8.99 5 STARS (see my 7/11/01 review) Don't be misled by the title -- this is mainly a collection of great interviews with free jazz/improv musicians.
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 | Electronic Music Pioneers (Book) by Ben Kettlewell
Buy new: $22.76 / Used from: $13.88 This looks like a good overview of one of the most important tendencies in avant-garde music these days...
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 | Brian Eno: His Music And The Vertical Color Of Sound by Eric Enno Tamm
Buy new: $13.68 / Used from: $7.23 5 STARS (see my 5/24/01 review) interesting insights into the much-touted "father of Ambient"
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 | The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby--The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age by Mark Prendergast
Buy used from: $26.25 3 STARS (see my 3/27/01 review) a non-theoretical compendium of information on "ambient" music, very broadly and loosely defined
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 | Blues People: Negro Music in White America by Leroi Jones
Buy new: $9.88 / Used from: $1.00 This is a powerful book on Black music in America, and it influenced me strongly for years, for good and bad -- some of my favorite music now is ruthlessly dissed by Jones/Baraka!
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Listmania!
