Audio Culture

Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music attempts to map the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard musical culture today. Over the past few decades, a new audio culture has emerged, a culture of making and thinking about music and sound that disregards conventional categories and oppositions still operative in the academy and the mainstream music industry alike. Via writings by key philosophers, cultural theorists and composers, this book explores the interconnections among such forms as Minimalism, Indeterminacy, musique concrete, Improvised Music, the Classical Avant Garde, Experimental Music, Avant-Rock, Dub Reggae, Ambient Music, Hip Hop, and Techno. They demonstrate the way these musics constantly cross-pollinate each other, transgressing generic boundaries, and how contemporary composers, producers, and musicians now work within complex networks of association and influence: New York art rockers Sonic Youth release a CD of works by John Cage and other avant-garde experimentalists; Bjork interviews Karlheinz Stockhausen for a music magazine and Derek Bailey, the septuagenarian founder of Free Improvisation, collaborates with Drum 'n' Bass producers. Each chapter opens with an introduction that situates and interconnects the writings to follow and concludes with an extensive bibliography and discography. The book also includes a comprehensive glossary of terms and phrases such as 'Ambient,' 'Dub,' 'just intonation,' and 'modal improvisation.'