Electronic And Experimental Music

Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture provides a comprehensive history of electronic music, covering key composers, genres, and techniques used in analog and digital synthesis. This textbook has been extensively revised with the needs of students and instructors in mind. The reader-friendly style, logical organization, and pedagogical features of the fifth edition allow easy access to key ideas, milestones, and concepts. New to this edition: • A companion website, featuring key examples of electronic music, both historical and contemporary. • Listening Guides providing a moment-by-moment annotated exploration of key works of electronic music. • A new chapter—Contemporary Practices in Composing Electronic Music. • Updated presentation of classic electronic music in the United Kingdom, Italy, Latin America, and Asia, covering the history of electronic music globally. • An expanded discussion of early experiments with jazz and electronic music, and the roots of electronic rock. • Additional accounts of the vastly under-reported contributions of women composers in the field. • More photos, scores, and illustrations throughout. The companion website features a number of student and instructor resources, such as additional Listening Guides, links to streaming audio examples and online video resources, PowerPoint slides, and interactive quizzes.

The second edition of a classic text on the history of electronic music, this book has been thoroughly updated to present material on home computers and the Internet, as well as enlarged sections on history and theoretical issues.

Contemporary electronic music has splintered into numerous genres and subgenres, all of which share a concern with whether sound, in itself, bears meaning. Listening through the Noise considers how the experience of listening to electronic music constitutes a departure from the expectations that have long governed music listening in the West.

Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture provides a comprehensive history of electronic music, covering key composers, genres, and techniques used in analog and digital synthesis. This textbook has been extensively revised with the needs of students and instructors in mind. The reader-friendly style, logical organization, and pedagogical features of the fifth edition allow easy access to key ideas, milestones, and concepts. New to this edition: • A companion website, featuring key examples of electronic music, both historical and contemporary. • Listening Guides providing a moment-by-moment annotated exploration of key works of electronic music. • A new chapter—Contemporary Practices in Composing Electronic Music. • Updated presentation of classic electronic music in the United Kingdom, Italy, Latin America, and Asia, covering the history of electronic music globally. • An expanded discussion of early experiments with jazz and electronic music, and the roots of electronic rock. • Additional accounts of the vastly under-reported contributions of women composers in the field. • More photos, scores, and illustrations throughout. The companion website features a number of student and instructor resources, such as additional Listening Guides, links to streaming audio examples and online video resources, PowerPoint slides, and interactive quizzes.

The recent resurgence of experimental music has given rise to a more divergent range of practices than has previously been the case. The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music reflects these recent developments by providing examples of current thinking and presenting detailed case studies that document the work of contemporary figures. The book examines fourteen current practitioners by interrogating their artistic practices through annotated interviews, contextualized by nine authored chapters which explore central issues that emerge from and inform these discussions. Whilst focusing on composition, the book also encompasses related aspects of performance, improvisation and sonic art. The interviews all explore how the selected artists work, focusing on the processes involved in developing their recent projects, set against more general aesthetic concerns. They aim to shed light on the disparate nature of current work whilst seeking to find possible points of contact. Many of the practitioners are active in areas that span disciplines, such as composition and improvisation, and the book explores the interaction of these activities in the context of their work. The other chapters consider a range of issues pertinent to recent developments in the genre, including: definitions of experimentalism and its relationship with a broader avant garde; experimentalism and cultural change; notation and its effect on composition; realising open scores; issues of notation and interpretation in live electronic music; performing experimental music; improvisation and technology; improvisation and social meaning; instrumentalizing objects; visual artists' relationships to experimental music; working across interdisciplinary boundaries; listening and the soundscape; working methods, techniques and aesthetics of recent experimental music.

Composer Michael Nyman's classic 1974 account of the postwar experimental tradition in music.

What does a one hour contemporary orchestral piece by Georg Friedrich Haas have in common with a series of glitch-noise electronic tracks by Pan Sonic? This book proposes that, despite their differences, they share a particular understanding of sound that is found across several quite distinct genres of contemporary art music: the ecstatic-materialist perspective. Sound in the ecstatic-materialist perspective is considered as a material mass or element, unfolding in time, encountered by a listener, for whom the experience of that sound exceeds the purely sonic without becoming entirely divorced from its materiality. It is "material" by virtue of the focus on the texture, consistency, and density of sound; it is "ecstatic" in the etymological sense, that is to say that the experience of this sound involves an instability; an inclination to depart from material appearance, an ephemeral and transitory impulse in the very perception of sound to something beyond – but still related to – it. By examining musical pieces from spectralism to electroacoustic domains, from minimalism to glitch electronica and dubstep, this book identifies the key intrinsic characteristics of this musical perspective. To fully account for this perspective on sonic experience, listener feedback and interviews with composers and performers are also incorporated. Sound in the ecstatic-materialist perspective is the common territory where composers, sound artists, performers, and listeners converge.