Roman Ingarden’s theory of the musical work is usually criticized for not being able to handle the problems of avant-garde music. The most important reason for this criticism is its dependence on the musical score and, generally, on the conventions of pre-twentieth century European classical music. In my article I offer a revision of Ingarden’s theory, which on the one hand leaves its substantial arguments intact and on the other allows the theory to tackle the problem (...) of avant-garde music successfully. I ultimately hope to demonstrate that this revised theory is suitable for dealing with the problem, and can yield fruit when applied. (shrink)

Here I will put forward a claim about rhythm – that rhythm is relation. To develop this I will explore the entanglement of and antagonism between two notions of the musical avant-garde and its theorization. The first of these is derived from the European classical tradition, the second concerns Afrodiasporic musical practices. This essay comes in two parts. The first will consider some music-theoretical and philosophical ideas about rhythm in the post-classical avant-garde. Here I will (...) explore how these ideas have been used to, on one hand, stage a critique of Afrodiasporic musics, and specifically jazz, and, on the other hand, diminish and obscure the relation between the post-classical and Afrodiasporic avant-gardes. In the second part I will develop another lineage of rhythm, orthogonal to that of the post-classical avant-garde. Drawing from philosophy and Afrocentric, Afromodernist and, finally, Afrofuturist theory, I will map a theoretical move from rhythm understood, in its post-classical guise, as an exclusive and strictly musical category, to rhythm understood as an inclusive and plural category. This likewise charts a passage from an aesthetically autonomous understanding of objects of art to social and collective forms of artistic practice. (shrink)

The avant-garde has been popular for some time, but its popularity has tended to fly under the radar. This ¿popular avant-garde,¿ conceived as the meeting ground of the avant-garde and popular, avoids the divorce of art and praxis of which the avant-garde has been accused. The Popular Avant-Garde takes stock of the debates about both the ¿historical¿ (¿modernist¿) and posterior avant-gardes, and sets them in relation to popular culture and (...) art forms. With a critical introduction that examines the concepts of ¿the avant-garde,¿ ¿the popular,¿ and ¿the popular avant-garde,¿ the series of essays analyzes the way in which the avant-garde employs popular genres for political purposes, as well as how the popular acquires a critical function with respect to the avant-garde. Each of the volume¿s three sections considers a different aspect of the productive exchange between the avant-garde and popular: the popular avant-garde as a culturally hybrid and cross-border phenomenon; the play between the popular avant-garde and developments in media and technology; and the popular avant-garde¿s upending of conventional ideas about ¿the people¿ and ¿the popular.¿ The Popular Avant-Garde takes a fresh look at the now canonical Dadaist, Futurist, and Surrealist movements from the perspectives of gender and sexuality, and cultural and critical theory, while at the same time exploring less well-known avant-garde work in literature, film, television, music, photography, dance, sculpture, and the graphic arts. This volume¿s coverage of the American and Afro-American, Luso-Brazilian and Latin-American, East-European, and Scandinavian avant-gardes, in addition to the vanguards of Spain and other parts of Western Europe, will appeal to all those interested in avant-garde and popular art forms. (shrink)

In Avant Garde: An American Odyssey from Gertrude Stein to Pierre Boulez, Stockhausen specialist Robin Maconie reconsiders the role of music and music technology through careful examination of key modern concepts with respect to time, existence, identity, and relationship as formulated by such thinkers as Einstein, Russell, Whitehead, and Gertrude Stein, along with Freud, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, and Marcel Duchamp.

When and how did pop music earn so much cultural capital? This text investigates five key moments when popular music and avant-garde art transgressed the rigid boundaries separating high and low culture to form friendly alliances.

Georges Seurat, one of the most popular and admired of post-Impressionist painters, has been the focus of much attention in recent years. This book by Paul Smith views the artist in a new context and explodes some of the myths that have grown up about him. Challenging the assumption that Seurat's work was scientific or that it expressed a serious commitment to anarchism, Smith instead traces the painters involvement with the various factions of the avant-garde and shows that (...) he was perhaps the earliest exponent of Idealism in modern art. Smith studies contemporary interpretations of Impressionism and analyzes how the groups surrounding Seurat constructed meaning from his art. From this investigation he creates a portrait of Seurat as one who was willing to accept, even encourage, interpretations of his art that he may not have intended. Smith shows, for example, that the "scientific" account of Seurat's color first developed by Félix Fénéon actually represents the theory and practice of Pissaro. He examines Seurat's involvement with anarchist critics and concludes that he merely posed as a painter with left-wing sympathies in order to benefit from the publicity these writers gave him. He explains that Seurat was sympathetic to Symbolism from its very inception and that he and his early Symbolist critics developed a theory of his art that was founded on Schopenhauer and Wagner's ideas on art. And he explores the ways that Seurat focused on the musicality of art and on incorporating certain "musical" features in his work. Beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, this book presents a convincing new interpretation of the work of a major artist. (shrink)

This book is premised on the view that the idea of the avant garde has an increased importance in these times of global political crisis. Much cultural production today is shaped by a biopolitics that construes all creative and knowledge production in terms of capital accumulation. A different kind of culture is possible. This collection of writings, essays, interviews and artworks by many of today's most radical cultural practitioners and astute commentators on matters avant garde mediates (...) the different strategies and temporalities of avant-garde art and politics. Tracing diverse genealogies and trajectories, the book offers an inter-generational forum of ideas that covers different arts fields, from visual art, art activism, photography, film and architecture, to literature, theatre, performance, intermedia and music. This is an extraordinarily rich collection and is sure to be a benchmark for many years. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Nos faysoms contre Nature...”: Fourteenth-Century Sophismata and the Musical Avant GardeDorit TanayThe secular musical repertory of the late fourteenth century has been described in terms of unparalleled rhythmic intricacies, reflecting a conscious tendency to exhaust the scope of free play within the parameter of time in music. 1 Historians of music see in such musical complexity a case of a musical system in disarray, to be (...) explained by patterns that seem always adequate to account for phases of aberration from stylistic norm, such as the notions of mannerism or fin de siècle phenomenon, understood literally as well as figuratively. 2Current views seem to echo contemporaneous observations. The late fourteenth-century poet-musician Guido cast his critique on what he interprets as a shift towards chaotic musical expression, in a form of an introspective ballade:Or voit tout en aventure Puis qu’ainsi me convient fayre A la novelle figure Qui doyt a chascun desplayre; Que c’est trestout en contraire De bon art qui est parfayt: Certes, ce n’est pas bien fayt. [End Page 29]Nos faysoms contre Nature De ce qu’est bien fayt deffayre; Que Philipe qui mais ne dure Nos dona boin exemplaire. Nos laisons tous ses afayres Por Marquet le contrefayt: Certes, ce n’est pas bien fayt. L’art de Marquet n’a mesureN’onques rien ne sait parfyre; D’ansuir et de portrayre C’est trop grant outrecuidure Ces figures, et tout traire Ou il n’a riens de bon trayt: Certes, ce n’est pas bien fayt. 3Curiously enough, Guido set his ballade to a melody that evokes some of the obscenities deplored in the poem. The musical text displays needless complication, being notated by deceitful figures that are willful, misleading, and difficult to decipher and follow. 4 The literary text, similarly, diversifies words in a vein of irony and ambiguity, clouding any indication as to whether the speaker is for or against the new style. In other words Guido’s esthetic position is sophistic, self-amused, and self-conscious.Since artistic expressions are generally conceived as reflecting their consumers, late-medieval chansons have been interpreted as a manifestation of the incredibly decadent yet sophisticated social milieu in which and for which the music was created. To ground further the argument for the correspondence between the countenance of the music and that of its audience, historians invoke the proximity in time and space between the evolution of the manneristic musical style, significantly in Avignon, and the Great Schism (1378–1417) that [End Page 30] followed the Babylonian Captivity. This famous crisis in the papal reign has been associated with a strong tendency to secularization in the papal Court, by which life styles became luxurious if not licentious. 5This socio-historical account is based on suggestive conjectures, comprising in part explanatory commonplaces. No direct relation can be established between the “Great Schism” or the specific social condition, of Avignon and the most refined music of the late fourteenth century. Furthermore, the claim of the above social account for a contextual approach is misleading. In fact no solid immanent relations are shown to exist between a complex, quasi-degenerate society on the one hand, and the intricate rhythms of the music on the other. The attribution of complexity in the broadest sense of the term does not satisfy our curiosity as to the possible interdependence between style and society. Interestingly enough, as far as late fourteenth-century chansons style is concerned, such an association can even be countered, considering the coincidental cultivation of the new simple style in the complex and decadent Burgundian courts of the waning Middle Ages. 6Here I propose to examine the late fourteenth-century musical style not on the background of social procedures but in the context of fourteenth century scientific thought, and to demonstrate immanent and structural cohesion between a compositional trend that features manipulations within the dimension of musical time and the sciences which investigate the properties of time qua continuum. This affinity concerns a parallel, yet not a completely overlapping, development directed towards the ultimate refinement of the notion of mensura. In other words we are dealing here... (shrink)

This paper locates its genesis in a small town called Vitebsk in Belorussia which experienced a flowering of creativity and artistic energy that led to significant modernist experimentation in the years 1917–1921. Marc Chagall, returning from the October Revolution took up the position of art commissioner and developed an academy of art that became the laboratory for Russian modernism. Chagall’s Academy, Bakhtin’s Circle, and Malevich’s experiments, artistic group UNOVIS—all in fierce dialogue with one another—made the town of Vitebsk into an (...) artistic crucible in the early twentieth century. We argue that this creative collective transformed creative energies of Russian drama, music, theatre, art, and philosophy in a distinctive contribution to modernism, structuralism and formalism that contributed richly to the social understanding of creativity itself that is so evident across Mikhail Bakhtin’s subsequent body of work, and elsewhere across the world. This paper argues that a consideration of such interplay has much potential for twenty-first century educational philosophy. (shrink)

This essay is an excerpt for a larger paper exploring the concept of autonomy as it emerges in the life and work of the composer, performer, record label executive and club-owner John Zorn. Zorn’s activities over his wide-ranging career span from performing at jazz lofts in the 1970s to winning the MacArthur “genius” grant in 2008, while maintaining his status as a prolific composer and producer of avant-garde music. In interviews, documentaries, and in his music, Zorn (...) often comments on his status as an avant-garde producer, specifically within the context of the record industry and within New York City’s so-called “Downtown” scene. Economics take the forefront in determining artistic attitudes towards both production of music and the music itself, as Zorn has, seemingly, been forced by the “mainstream market” to create a parallel, vertically-integrated economic system to support the livelihood of himself and his collaborators. This excerpt, from the first third of the essay, unpacks Zorn’s relationship with Downtown scene, his conception of the avant-garde, and his attitude towards artists who have set precedents for Zorn’s version of autonomous cultural production. It also notes the idiosyncratic way that both Zorn and his critics have placed Zorn’s music both within and without two distinct traditions: Avant-Garde composition and free Jazz. (shrink)

Audioscan Milano explores the strategies and experiments in the field of sound and noise of Milan’s legendary Studio di Fonologia Musicale. A multimedia installation composed of hundreds of field recordings of the city of Milan, Audioscan Milano provides its audience with a multisensory experience of the urban soundscape and the opportunity to interact with it digitally. The manipulation of noise and its transformation into musical sound via sophisticated electronic equipment emulates the Studio’s audio techniques but also exposes the reasons behind (...) its failure to attract a wider audience. Visitors to Audioscan Milano expect to hear urban noise rather than musical sounds and, despite some enthusiasm around being able to mix sound objects on the map and move them around the room, they fail to appreciate the technical subtleties of the procedures behind the music. Ultimately, Audioscan Milano constitutes an important link to Italy’s musical heritage of the 1950s and 1960s and can learn from its limitations, particularly when it comes to engaging the audience to play a more active role in the auditory experience of the city. (shrink)

Makes a case for the power of music and sound in the face of fascistic forces, from modernism to the present.

Resumen: Este artículo intenta visibilizar algunos aspectos del rol fundacional de la narrativa de Juan Emar en las letras nacionales, en particular, su fecundo diálogo con la antipoesía de Parra. Se propone que tanto en Miltín 1934 de Emar como en la Antipoesía de Parra asistimos a la práctica de una carnavalización del motivo de lo divino-sublime. En esta dirección, ambas poéticas vanguardistas modulan en el espacio hispanoamericano una de las aristas del “proyecto inconcluso de la modernidad” : la muerte (...) nietzscheana de Dios y de su espacio simbólico; connotado por el tópico de la música de las esferas. Tópico que en ambos autores se da en el marco de un cuestionamiento a una estética de lo sublime que predominaba en la crítica de la época.: This article attempts to draw attention to the foundational role of the literary production of Juan Emar in the national letters, in particular, its fruitful dialogue with the antipoesía de Parra. It is proposed that both in Miltín 1934 and the Antipoesía de Parra we attend the practice of carnivalization of the divine-sublime. In this direction, both avant-garde poetics modulate one of the edges the “unfinished project of modernity” : the simbolic death of God and the simbolic space; connotated by the topico of the spheres music. Topico that in both authors is given in a questioning of a critique of an aesthetic of the sublime; that prevailed in criticism of that period. (shrink)

Boring Formless Nonsense intervenes in an aesthetics of failure that has largely been delimited by the visual arts and its avant-garde legacies. It focuses on contemporary experimental composition in which failure rubs elbows with the categories of chance, noise, and obscurity. In these works we hear failure anew. We hear boredom, formlessness, and nonsense in a way that gives new purchase to aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical questions that falter in their negative capability. Reshaping current debates on failure as (...) an aesthetic category, eldritch Priest shows failure to be a duplicitous concept that traffics in paradox and sustains the conditions for magical thinking and hyperstition. Framing recent experimental composition as a deviant kind of sound art, Priest explores how the affective and formal elements of post-Cagean music couples with contemporary culture's themes of depression, distraction, and disinformation to create an esoteric reality composed of counterfactuals and pseudonymous beings. Ambitious in content and experimental in its approach, Boring Formless Nonsense will challenge and fracture your views on failure, creativity, and experimental music. (shrink)

The essay presents an attempt at characterizing contemporary music’s culture by identifying a dialectical tension between “modern” and “postmodern” currents in it. After initial considerations on the manifold usages of the term “postmodernism,” five composers’ approaches will be analyzed: John Cage, Philip Glass (and other minimalists), Bernhard Lang, Mauricio Kagel and Johannes Kreidler. However different they may be from one another, all these composers are being interpreted as undermining, in various ways, the practice and theoretical background of modernist (...) class='Hi'>avant-garde music. -/- . (shrink)

Experimental encounters in music and beyond opens a necessary dialogue on experimental practices in the arts and negotiates their place in contemporary society. Going beyond the music-historical usage of the term "experimental", this book reimagines experimentation as an open working definition encompassing multiple forms of artistic attitudes and processes. The texts, images, and sounds offer multiple traces, faces, and spaces, revealing what experimentalism in music and the wider arts entails today. With perspectives from a range of disciplines (...) - from choreography through composition to philosophy and beyond - the different experiences and artistic projects documented and discussed explore the complexity of experimentation in a way that is all the richer for being never-ending."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Examining a series of modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with non-European cultures as they pursued pure sound as a privileged presence, White Musical Mythologies pairs Erik Satie with Bergson, Edgard Varèse with Bataille, Pierre Boulez with Artaud, and John Cage with Derrida to offer an ambitious intellectual history of the colonial roots of modernist musical thought. Each of the musicians studied in this book re-created or appropriated non-European forms of expression as they conceived music ontologically, often thinking (...) class='Hi'>music as something immediate and immersive: from Satie's dabblings with mysticism and exoticism in bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s to Varèse's experience of ethnographic exhibitions and surrealist poetry in 1930s Paris, and from Boulez's endeavor to theorize a kind of musical writing that would "absorb" the sounds of non-European musical traditions to Cage, who took inspiration from Eastern thought as he wrote about sound, silence, and chance. Edmund Mendelssohn suggests that the Euro-American idea of "pure sound," and the twentieth-century quest to produce it, was premised on an assumed authority of "the West" over Europe's others. Intended for readers in philosophy, musicology, art theory, the history of modernism, sound studies, and postcolonial studies, this book demonstrates that we cannot fully understand French theory in its novelty and complexity without music and sound. (shrink)

This volume, reproducing a special issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism on &"The Philosophy of Music&" (Winter 1994) with a revised introduction and two new articles, is distinguished by its breadth of content, diversity of approaches, and clarity of argument, which should make it useful for classroom teaching. The topics covered include musical representation, the expression of feeling in music, the metaphysics of operatic speech and song, musical understanding, musical composition, feminist music theory, (...) class='Hi'>music and politics, music and racial identity, music in non-Western cultures, and the ontological implications of recording technology for rock music. The approaches used are philosophical, historical, social and political, feminist, and ethnomusicological. The book includes discussions of a great many styles and historical periods of music, from ancient Greek music and music theory to instrumental and operatic music in the Western classical tradition, Persian music, music of the Blackfoot Indians, rock and the blues, and the avant-garde compositions and performances of John Cage. The contributors, all eminent scholars in the field, are Philip Alperson, No&ël Carroll, Stephen Davies, Claire Detels, John Andrew Fisher, Lydia Goehr, Peter Kivy, Jerrold Levinson, James Manns, Bruno Nettl, Jenefer Robinson, Joel Rudinow, G&öran S&örbom, Francis Sparshott, and Kendall Walton. (shrink)

"The article presents a phenomenological investigation of body and music, with particular emphasis on electronic music. The investigation builds on theoretical framework developed in phenomenological investigations in art by Edmund Husserl, Mikel Dufrenne and Roman Ingarden. It is guided beyond these analyses by investigations of particular musical examples in avant-garde acoustic and electronic music. In the former case it tackles music from which body is being consciously erased. In the latter case, the erasure occurs (...) instantly. This negative approach elucidates the function of body in music. In case of electronic music, the article focuses on writings and music of pioneer of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer. Central argument is that electronic music always has been and still is defined by absence of body, here phenomenologically considered as Leib. As a consequence of the phenomenological elucidation, it is ultimately shown that erasure of body has been one of the avant-garde music’s crucial techniques, and that this avant-garde residue remains in electronic music as such, both experimental and mainstream. Keywords: Schaeffer, Husserl, phenomenology, music, body, aesthetics ". (shrink)

The so-called New Music in Europe after the Second World War was based on the idea of progress, similar to technological progress and related to it, and aimed at a complete rationalization of composing. The ideal of music as autopoiesis, which appeared in the 1950s, became inherent to this development. It supposed a kind of communication on music as a reified object, which opposed music making and listening as communication between partners. Separated from the life-world and (...) conceived as a self-referential system, New Music should represent not only the logical achievement of the historical development of European music, but also the superiority of Western musical thought in the more developed countries over the music cultures of the world. Therefore, the integral serialism, which should rule the musical composition, became a form of symbolic power within the musical field, in correspondence with similar forms of domination within the economic, political and technological fields. However, some European composers rejected this trend and tried to find an alternative to aestheticism by means of political engagement. For instance, the Italian composer Luigi Nono explores the dialectic between subject and object, technological development and critique of technology, avant-garde and critique of progress, globalization and anti-imperialistic resistance. In his strategy, in which Gramsci's and Walter Benjamin's thought played an important role, aesthetics became inseparable from politics. His search for identity as a composer transforms the tragedy of listening into an allegory of human condition. (shrink)

An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. -/- In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences (...) of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements. -/- Rather than pursuing the human’s beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human. (shrink)

Witold Wachowski’s brief exchange with John Zorn provides us with many valuable insights relating to the composer’s aesthetic. Zorn’s professed antipathy towards audiences, his faith in the creative instinct of the “artist,” and his belief in the transcendental nature of musical works are all refrains commonly encountered in many interviews with the composer. Given the fact that Zorn emphasizes these themes in his very short interview with Wachowski, we can assume that these ideas form the core of Zorn’s musical and (...) artistic aesthetic. For any person with even a basic knowledge of Western aesthetic traditions, however, these same aesthetic features and positions characterize musical institutions common to the Western art tradition, particularly the “romantic” ideal of music and composers that developed in the nineteenth century. Philosophers along with music critics and composers all contributed to the development of a romantic musical aesthetic in the nineteenth century that emphasized the role of the artist who created “works” that – through purely musical relations that exist irregardless of the listener’s abilities – reveal hidden worlds of truth and beauty, worlds far-removed from the humdrum concerns of daily existence. Given the close correspondences between Zorn and aestheticians/philosophers of the nineteenth century, one could make the argument that Zorn holds a “romantic” view of music and art. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 157-172 [Access article in PDF] Symposium: On Ken Burns's "Jazz" Jazz: America's Classical Music? 1 Lee B. Brown I VIEWERS OF KEN BURNS'S third cultural epic "Jazz" probably fell into one of three categories. 2 Some found it gripping. Some found it grating. Some found it both at once.The series has unforgettable moments: spectacular jitterbug sequences; Jimmy Lunceford's horn men fanning their trumpet (...) bells with hat mutes in sync; the close-up of the whirring cross-hand drumming of Art Blakey; the bitter-sweet glance Billie Holiday and Lester Young exchange in their last filmed appearance together; the occasional marriage of visuals to music. One riveting three minutes comes when the talking heads tune out, a 78-rpm disk of Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" is set spinning, and the thrilling notes pour out on a carousel of visual imagery—finally freeze-framing on the face of the young genius himself.On the downside, the series is massively repetitious. As a result of Burns's decision to track two major figures—Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington—from cradle to grave, the same cuts of Armstrong appear again and again, no matter what the time frame. Some of the series' commentators are particularly annoying—the fiddler of Burns's Civil War series, Matt Glaser, for instance, with his fatuous theories [End Page 157] about Louis Armstrong and Albert Einstein. And the documentary's heavy load of social freight—by Wynton Marsalis, and his mentors Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch 3 —threatens to flatten the music.The series is designed as informative entertainment, not Jazz 101. But Burns pays a price here, as he did in his documentary about baseball, in which not even the basics of the game, let alone any of the subtleties, were explained. In "Jazz" we get no explanation of what Jelly Roll Morton did to transform ragtime into jazz. (The series could easily have pressed Morton himself into service. With no sacrifice of his considerable charm, Morton did explain it, beautifully, in his recorded Library of Congress interviews. 4) Although the swing era gets big billing, no attempt is made to explain how swing rhythm actually works, as contrasted with earlier practices. (I have watched swing drummer Panama Francis entertain a packed hall with a brief but riveting illustration of how it works.)As jazz history, the film also has problems. Some legendary figures are resurrected unconvincingly. When Marsalis tells us what the legendary trumpet player Buddy Bolden sounded like, the illustrative off-camera trumpet is Marsalis's, not Bolden's, who embedded not one note in a record groove. Further, we face the tiresomely obvious problem of omissions. We hear nothing of Albert Ayler, Keith Jarrett, Sun Ra, Mildred Bailey, Benny Carter, Lennie Tristano, Erroll Garner, Eric Dolphy, Art Pepper, or Woody Herman. All we learn about Bill Evans—whose influence on jazz piano was huge—is that Miles Davis hired him even though he was white. Omissions are inevitable, of course. But there is a muted pattern to the exclusions. It was impossible for the series to avoid Benny Goodman, given his central role in the swing era. But white figures are too often either ignored or treated as alienated outsiders. We hear New York Times columnist Margo Jefferson opine that Bix Beiderbecke drank himself to death because he wasn't allowed to play with black musicians. In fact, many of the greatest players—white and black—never played with musicians of their own caliber.Most figures covered in the film are treated either with respect or with reverence. But things get nasty when matters turn to avant-gardists. Thus, Branford Marsalis—Wynton's talented brother—singles out the volcanic pianist Cecil Taylor for a particularly hostile attack. 5 Instead of explaining what Ornette Coleman meant by "free jazz," Albert Murray tells us that jazz is, by definition, free music—and by implication, that Coleman's concept must be fatuous. And Wynton has complained [End Page 158] elsewhere about a jazz avant-garde retreat into what he calls "a... (shrink)

Music and noise seem to be mutually exclusive. Music is generally considered as an ordered arrangement of sounds pleasing to the ear and noise as its opposite: chaotic, ugly, aggressive, sometimes even deafening. When presented in a musical context, noise can thus act as a tool to express resistance to predominant cultural values, to society, or to socioeconomic structures (including those of the music industry). The oppositional stance confirms current notions of noise as something which is destructive, (...) a belief not only cherished by hard-core rock bands but also shared by engineers and companies developing devices to suppress or reduce noise in our daily environment. In contrast to the common opinions on noise just described, this volume seeks to explore the constructive potential of noise in contemporary musical practices. Rather than viewing noise as a 'defect', this volume aims at studying its aesthetic and cultural potential. Within the noise music study field, most recent publications focus on subgenres such as psychedelic post-rock, industrial, hard-core punk, trash or rave, as they developed from rock and popular music. This book includes work on avant-garde music developed in the domain of classical music as well. In addition to already well-established (social) historical and aesthetical perspectives on noise and noise music, this volume also offers contributions by music analysts. (shrink)

Aesthetics and Music is a rich and interesting study. Hamilton's approach is innovative. He interleaves chapters on the history of philosophical thought about music with more theoretical discussions of music, sound, rhythm and improvisation, but does not cover the work–performance relation, depiction or expression. He draws on an atypically broad range of examples, including avant-garde, medieval, non-Western and jazz. The assumptions are humanist: ‘I wish to argue for an aesthetic conception of music as an (...) art … according to which music is a human activity grounded in the body and bodily movement and interfused with human life’ .The historical chapters are valuable and not without analysis and criticism. Hamilton shows how the ancient Greek theorists were more interested in music's mathematical properties as reflecting the underlying harmony of relations between cosmic bodies than in the practice of musicians. While they equated the value of art with its contribution to an education for citizenship and while their concept of the arts differed …. (shrink)

In this thesis we construct a critical encounter between the composer John Cage and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. This encounter circulates through a constellation of problems found across and between mid-twentieth century musical, artistic, and philosophical practices, the central focus for our line of enquiry being the concept of experimentation. We emphasize the production of a method of experimentation through a practice historically situated with regards to the traditions of the respective fields of music and philosophy. However, we argue (...) that these experimental practices are not reducible to their historical traditions, but rather, by adopting what we term a problematic reading, or transcendental critique, with regards to historical givens, they take their historical situation as the site of an experimental departure. We follow Cage through his relation to the history of Western classical music, his contemporaries in the musical avant-garde, and artistic movements surrounding and in some respects stemming from Cage’s work, and Deleuze through his relation to Kant, phenomenology, and structuralism, in order to map the production of a practice of experimentation spanning music, art, and philosophy. Some specific figures we engage with in these respective traditions include Jean-Phillipe Rameau, Pierre Schaeffer, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Boulez, Robert Morris, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Edmund Husserl, Maurice-Merleau-Ponty, Alain Badiou, and Félix Guattari. In so doing we seek to find between these practices points of both conjunction and disjunction which enrich our understanding of Cage’s and Deleuze’s work, and, more widely speaking, of the passage of twentieth century music and philosophy in general. Here we hope to make contributions to the fields of continental philosophy and music theory especially, and to open a point of engagement with the nascent field of sound studies. (shrink)

Combining the philosophy and musicology of T.W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Gilles Deleuze, Joseph Weiss makes an original contribution to the field of aesthetics and critical theory. Highlighting previously hidden connections between these philosophers' work brings into focus a new perspective on the dynamic relationship between music, nature, history, and technology. Musical expression in this study is presented as one of the core ways in which human beings are able to escape their more base natures and instincts. The complex (...) ways in which song is taken up across time and place is viewed through the prism of different technologies and histories. This historical process, which Weiss refers to as the 'instrumentalization of the voice', following Deleuze, is illuminated though a wide-ranging analysis encompassing lullaby, jazz, classical music, and the electroacoustic avant-garde. Deepening the aesthetic analysis of music in relation to the conceptual problems of continental philosophy, Weiss reveals enlightening theoretical consequences. By engaging with an eclectic range of 20th century theorists, including Primo Levi, James Baldwin, Édouard Glissant, Fred Moten, and Angela Davis, Weiss makes the argument that advanced music remains a refuge for political hopes that are as yet blocked from realization. Speaking to contemporary debates on post-humanism, memory, and the threat of neo-fascist social relations, the author outlines a bold new aesthetics of music. (shrink)

In its open improvisations, lapidary lyrics, errant melodies, and relentless pursuit of spontaneity, the British experimental band Henry Cow pushed rock music to its limits. The band's rotating personnel, sprung from rock, free jazz, and orchestral worlds, synthesized a distinct sound that troubled genre lines, and with this musical diversity came a mixed politics, including Maoism, communism, feminism, and Italian Marxism. In Henry Cow: The World is a Problem Benjamin Piekut tells the band's story-from its founding in Cambridge in (...) 1968 and later affiliation with Virgin Records to its demise ten years later-and analyzes its varied efforts to link aesthetics with politics. Drawing on ninety interviews with Henry Cow musicians and crew, letters, notebooks, scores, journals, and meeting notes, Piekut traces the group's pursuit of a political and musical collectivism, offering up its history as but one example of the vernacular avant-garde that emerged in the decades after World War II. Henry Cow's story resonates far beyond its inimitable music; it speaks to the avant-garde's unpredictable potential to transform the world.--Back cover. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 157-172 [Access article in PDF] Symposium: On Ken Burns's "Jazz" Jazz: America's Classical Music? 1 Lee B. Brown I VIEWERS OF KEN BURNS'S third cultural epic "Jazz" probably fell into one of three categories. 2 Some found it gripping. Some found it grating. Some found it both at once.The series has unforgettable moments: spectacular jitterbug sequences; Jimmy Lunceford's horn men fanning their trumpet (...) bells with hat mutes in sync; the close-up of the whirring cross-hand drumming of Art Blakey; the bitter-sweet glance Billie Holiday and Lester Young exchange in their last filmed appearance together; the occasional marriage of visuals to music. One riveting three minutes comes when the talking heads tune out, a 78-rpm disk of Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" is set spinning, and the thrilling notes pour out on a carousel of visual imagery—finally freeze-framing on the face of the young genius himself.On the downside, the series is massively repetitious. As a result of Burns's decision to track two major figures—Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington—from cradle to grave, the same cuts of Armstrong appear again and again, no matter what the time frame. Some of the series' commentators are particularly annoying—the fiddler of Burns's Civil War series, Matt Glaser, for instance, with his fatuous theories [End Page 157] about Louis Armstrong and Albert Einstein. And the documentary's heavy load of social freight—by Wynton Marsalis, and his mentors Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch 3 —threatens to flatten the music.The series is designed as informative entertainment, not Jazz 101. But Burns pays a price here, as he did in his documentary about baseball, in which not even the basics of the game, let alone any of the subtleties, were explained. In "Jazz" we get no explanation of what Jelly Roll Morton did to transform ragtime into jazz. (The series could easily have pressed Morton himself into service. With no sacrifice of his considerable charm, Morton did explain it, beautifully, in his recorded Library of Congress interviews. 4) Although the swing era gets big billing, no attempt is made to explain how swing rhythm actually works, as contrasted with earlier practices. (I have watched swing drummer Panama Francis entertain a packed hall with a brief but riveting illustration of how it works.)As jazz history, the film also has problems. Some legendary figures are resurrected unconvincingly. When Marsalis tells us what the legendary trumpet player Buddy Bolden sounded like, the illustrative off-camera trumpet is Marsalis's, not Bolden's, who embedded not one note in a record groove. Further, we face the tiresomely obvious problem of omissions. We hear nothing of Albert Ayler, Keith Jarrett, Sun Ra, Mildred Bailey, Benny Carter, Lennie Tristano, Erroll Garner, Eric Dolphy, Art Pepper, or Woody Herman. All we learn about Bill Evans—whose influence on jazz piano was huge—is that Miles Davis hired him even though he was white. Omissions are inevitable, of course. But there is a muted pattern to the exclusions. It was impossible for the series to avoid Benny Goodman, given his central role in the swing era. But white figures are too often either ignored or treated as alienated outsiders. We hear New York Times columnist Margo Jefferson opine that Bix Beiderbecke drank himself to death because he wasn't allowed to play with black musicians. In fact, many of the greatest players—white and black—never played with musicians of their own caliber.Most figures covered in the film are treated either with respect or with reverence. But things get nasty when matters turn to avant-gardists. Thus, Branford Marsalis—Wynton's talented brother—singles out the volcanic pianist Cecil Taylor for a particularly hostile attack. 5 Instead of explaining what Ornette Coleman meant by "free jazz," Albert Murray tells us that jazz is, by definition, free music—and by implication, that Coleman's concept must be fatuous. And Wynton has complained [End Page 158] elsewhere about a jazz avant-garde retreat into what he calls "a... (shrink)

Aesthetics and Music is a rich and interesting study. Hamilton's approach is innovative. He interleaves chapters on the history of philosophical thought about music with more theoretical discussions of music, sound, rhythm and improvisation, but does not cover the work–performance relation, depiction or expression. He draws on an atypically broad range of examples, including avant-garde, medieval, non-Western and jazz. The assumptions are humanist: ‘I wish to argue for an aesthetic conception of music as an (...) art … according to which music is a human activity grounded in the body and bodily movement and interfused with human life’.The historical chapters are valuable and not without analysis and criticism. Hamilton shows how the ancient Greek theorists were more interested in music's mathematical properties as reflecting the underlying harmony of relations between cosmic bodies than in the practice of musicians. While they equated the value of art with its contribution to an education for citizenship and while their concept of the arts differed …. (shrink)

This innovative study re-evaluates the philosophical significance of aesthetics in the context of contemporary debates on the nature of philosophy. Lewis's main argument is that contemporary conceptions of meaning and truth have been reified, and that aesthetics is able to articulate why this is the case, with important consequences for understanding the horizons and nature of philosophical inquiry. _Reification and the Aesthetics of Music_ challenges the most emphatic and problematic conceptions of meaning and truth in both analytic philosophy and postmodern (...) thought by acknowledging the ontological and logical primacy of our concrete, practice-based experiences with aesthetic phenomena. By engaging with a variety of aesthetic practices, including Beethoven's symphonies and string quartets, Wagner's music dramas, Richard Strauss's _Elektra_, the twentieth-century avant-garde, Jamaican soundsystem culture, and punk and contemporary noise, this book demonstrates the aesthetic relevance of reification as well as the concept's applicability to contemporary debates within philosophy. (shrink)

This collection brings together philosophers, sociologists, musicologists and students of culture who theorize music through cultural practices as diverse as opera and classical music, jazz and pop, avant-garde and DIY musical cultures, music festivals and isolated listening through the iPod, rock in urban heritage and the piano in East Asia.

The twentieth century was a time of dramatic change in the structure, language, and aesthetic purpose of music. Numerous factors came together that led the musical avant-garde toward new artistic paths such as atonality and aleatoricism (use of chance elements) in music, and a shift in the idea of what music should portray away from beauty toward truth, or from idealized to actualized. If the arts are a reflection of the philosophical and aesthetic spirit of (...) the times, then an examination of prominent philosophical and aesthetic regimes of the time should reveal changes that facilitated the aesthetic and artistic innovations of the era. This article will examine the relationship between the philosophical and aesthetic writings of Henri Bergson and the affinities, and in some cases influences, they had on the development of two of the major musical innovations of the twentieth century. Specifically, Arnold Schoenberg's development of atonal compositional technique results partially from Bergson's focus on knowledge as a conveyor of truth, and John Cage's cultivation of aleatoricism as a compositional process arises out of Bergson's critique of nothingness as stated in Creative Evolution. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente trabajo explora el estatuto del arte en la filosofía de Spinoza, en el marco de la inversión copernicana que da origen a la estética y del barroco holandés. Si bien el pensamiento spinozista se inscribe en la conversión antropológica, en donde lo bello resulta ser un efecto en el sujeto y no una cualidad de los objetos, su comprensión del arte es inasimilable a la “estética” como ámbito diferenciado y autónomo que se consolida en el siglo XVIII, (...) y más bien concibe el arte integrado a la vida y a la experiencia común -a la vez que, en cuanto praxis de origen corporal al alcance de cualquiera, presenta puntos de contacto con las vanguardias históricas del siglo XX-. Spinoza, según se propone en este texto, concibe la producción de “obras de arte” menos como un hecho estético que como una actividad corporal éticamente orientada a la vida buena.: The present work explores the status of art in the philosophy of Spinoza, within the framework of the Copernican revolution that gives rise to aesthetics and the Dutch Baroque. Although the Spinozist thought is inscribed in the anthropological conversion by virtue of which beauty turns out to be an effect on the subject and not a property of objects, its understanding of art is unassimilable to "aesthetics" as a differentiated and autonomous area that it was consolidated in the eighteenth century, and rather conceived art integrated to life and common experience -at the same time, as praxis of bodily origin within the reach of anyone, presents points of contact with the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century-. Spinoza conceives the production of "artworks" less as an aesthetic fact than as a body activity ethically oriented to the good life. (shrink)

That [John] Cage’s challenge to our musical beliefs, attitudes, and practices is posed from the difficult perspective of a Zen master has often been discussed. What has been neglected both by Cage himself and by others is another equally potent challenge to the ordinary which Cage formulates in a related but distinct voice: that of the philosopher. Through his relentless inquiry into new music, Cage had defined certain radical possibilities for musical change. What is in effect his skepticism about (...) music as we know it contains a cogent analysis of our musical concepts and practices: of what it is for us ordinarily to believe that something is music as opposed to not music, and of how those beliefs about music connect with styles of feeling and treating what we hear when we hear it as music. Indeed it is Cage’s genius to have established the topic of skepticism about music as an issue for philosophy and cultural criticism. Cage’s radical perspective on our musical beliefs allows us to consider both what those beliefs are and whether and how they might be justified. This invitation to philosophical response is an important feature of the avant-garde which Cage shares with Duchamp in plastic art, Gordon Matta-Clarke in architecture, and others. I wish to give it its due by outlining and addressing Cage’s skepticism about music. Daniel A. Herwitz is an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. He is currently at work on a book exploring philosophical tendencies in twentieth-century music, art, and architecture. (shrink)

The paper investigates the cultural unit of “sanctity” in the light of the notion of “form of life”, in order to show how jazz master John Coltrane pursued sanctity as a regulative model with regards both to personhood and musicianship, so as to translate his existential quest into music. Firstly, the paper briefly summarizes: what we mean today by sanctity ; what are the relationships interweaving music and sanctity ; what we mean by form of life—a notion brought (...) into philosophical discourse by Ludwig Wittgenstein—in semiotic terms and why we can apply it to sanctity. Afterwards, the paper addresses Coltrane’s musical career, relying both on hagiographic discourse built around him and his discography, with special focus on three game-changers among his albums: Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, and Ascension. Coltrane headed a twofold conversion: he abandoned his native Methodist faith to embrace a personal form of syncretic pantheism; he abandoned the language of traditional jazz to embrace the avant-garde technique of modal composition and the once despised free jazz. Not only Coltrane wanted to be a saint, not only was he regarded as such to the extent that a “St. John William Coltrane Church” was established in San Francisco, but he tried to be one through music; namely, by conveying his spiritual journey via sonic means: proposing a musical catechism, a musical mass, and his own mystique. Consistently with the process of selection any saintly figure—and mystiques especially—undergoes in order to be canonized stricto sensu, only some tokens within Coltrane’s body of work were included in the canon, while his later works were left out due to their radicalism. (shrink)

How are we to understand, define, and critically evaluate the function, origin, and types of art and establish criteria for describing a work as "superior?" While such esthetic questions are unchanging, the answers vary markedly from decade to decade and even year to year, depending upon the prevailing opinion of critics, artists, and the public. Esthetics Contemporary has been revised and updated to include fourteen new selections from many of the most respected authorities on literature, dance, the visual arts, theatre, (...) music, cinema, and architecture. Kostelanetz captures the rich diversity of our changing views of art while at the same time discloses its variegated influence on the contemporary art scene. Esthetics withers if compelled to remain within the stultifying confines of rigid theories. The experiential dimension of esthetic requires that it change if trends and breakthroughs in the arts are to be appreciated fully. Esthetics can ill afford to ignore the fluid reality of creative forces - that intimate and interpenetrating relationship between the esthetic theory of a particular period and the arts that dominate. Featured in this volume are discussions of the future of music, minimalist tendencies in dance, conceptual art, theatre esthetics, de-architecturalization, art as internal technology, the esthetics of the avant-garde, modernism and postmodernism, photography and esthetics, video art, radio drama, affirmation of space-time forces, criticism of imaginative writing, a structural-informational approach to cinema, phenomenal art, and much more. The first edition of Esthetics Contemporary distinguished itself as a pioneering volume that gave new meaning and clearer understanding to the often misunderstood world of contemporary art. This revised edition with its many new selections will continue that fine tradition into the next decade and beyond. (shrink)

A collection of texts by Alessandro Bosetti, between theory, poetry and score, all of which breathe in concert with a series of sound projects and often focus on the voice from different angles and perspectives--Publisher's WWW site.