Audio Culture: Readings In Modern Music

The groundbreaking Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music maps the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard music today. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, it 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, Hip Hop, and Techno. Instead of focusing on the crossover between high art and popular culture, it considers all these musics as experimental practices. It includes writings by influential musical thinkers like John Cage, Brian Eno, Glenn Gould, and others, divided into thematic sections with introductions, a glossary, a timeline, and discography.