Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The groundbreaking Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum; September 2004; paperback original) maps the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard music today. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, Audio Culture 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, HipHop, and Techno. Instead of focusing on the putative "crossover" between "high art" and "popular culture," Audio Culture takes all of these musics as experimental practices on par with, and linked to, one another. While cultural studies has tended to look at music (primarily popular music) from a sociological perspective, the concern here is philosophical, musical, and historical.

Audio Culture includes writing by some of the most important musical thinkers of the past half-century, among them John Cage, Brian Eno, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco, Ornette Coleman, Jacques Attali, Simon Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, Paul D. Miller, David Toop, John Zorn, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. The book is divided into nine thematically-organized sections, each with its own introduction. Section headings include topics such as "Modes of Listening," "Minimalisms," and "DJ Culture." In addition, each essay has its own short introduction, helping the reader to place the essay within musical, historical, and conceptual contexts. The book concludes with a glossary, a timeline, and an extensive discography.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments (p. viii)
• Sources and Permissions (p. ix)
• Introduction: Music and the New Audio Culture (p. xiii)
• Part 1 Theories
• I Music and Its Others: Noise, Sound, Silence
• Introduction (p. 5)
• 1 "Noise and Politics" (p. 7)
• 2 "The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto" (p. 10)
• 3 "Sound, Noise, Varese, Boulez" (p. 15)
• 4 "The Liberation of Sound" (p. 17)
• 5 "The Joys of Noise" (p. 22)
• 6 "The Future of Music: Credo" (p. 25)
• 7 "The Music of the Environment" (p. 29)
• 8 "Listening for Silence: Notes on the Aural Life" (p. 40)
• 9 "Rough Music, Futurism, and Postpunk Industrial Noise Bands" (p. 47)
• 10 "Noise" (p. 55)
• 11 "The Beauty of Noise: An Interview with Masami Akita of Merzbow" (p. 59)
• II Modes of Listening
• Introduction (p. 65)
• 12 "Visual and Acoustic Space" (p. 67)
• 13 "The Politics of Hearing" (p. 73)
• 14 "Acousmatics" (p. 76)
• 15 "Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter" (p. 82)
• 16 "Adequate Modes of Listening" (p. 88)
• 17 "Ambient Music" (p. 94)
• 18 "The Aural Walk" (p. 98)
• 19 "Some Sound Observations" (p. 102)
• 20 "Compose Yourself" (p. 107)
• III Music in the Age of Electronic (Re)production
• Introduction (p. 113)
• 21 "The Prospects of Recording" (p. 115)
• 22 "The Studio as Compositional Tool" (p. 127)
• 23 "Bettered by the Borrower: The Ethics of Musical Debt" (p. 131)
• 24 "Plunderphonia" (p. 138)
• 25 "Operating System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality" (p. 157)
• Part 2 Practices
• IV The Open Work
• Introduction (p. 165)
• 26 "The Poetics of the Open Work" (p. 167)
• 27 "Composition as Process: Indeterminacy" (p. 176)
• 28 "Visual Sounds: On Graphic Scores" (p. 187)
• 29 "Transformations and Developments of a Radical Aesthetic" (p. 189)
• 30 "The Game Pieces" (p. 196)
• 31 "Introduction to Catalog of Works" (p. 201)
• V Experimental Musics
• Introduction (p. 207)
• 32 "Towards (a Definition of) Experimental Music" (p. 209)
• 33 "Introduction to Themes & Variations" (p. 221)
• 34 "Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts" (p. 226)
• 35 "A Scratch Orchestra: Draft Constitution" (p. 234)
• 36 "The Generation Game: Experimental Music and Digital Culture" (p. 239)
• VI Improvised Musics
• Introduction (p. 251)
• 37 "Change of the Century" (p. 253)
• 38 "Free Improvisation" (p. 255)
• 39 "Little Bangs: A Nihilist Theory of Improvisation" (p. 266)
• 40 "Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives" (p. 272)
• VII Minimalisms
• Introduction (p. 287)
• 41 "Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture" (p. 289)
• 42 "Thankless Attempts at a Definition of Minimalism" (p. 299)
• 43 "Music as a Gradual Process" (p. 304)
• 44 "Basic Concepts of Minimal Music" (p. 307)
• 45 "LYssophobia: On Four Violins" (p. 313)
• 46 "Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno" (p. 319)
• VIII DJ Culture
• Introduction (p. 329)
• 47 "Production-Reproduction: Potentialities of the Phonograph" (p. 331)
• 48 "The Invisible Generation" (p. 334)
• 49 "Record, CD, Analog, Digital" (p. 341)
• 50 "Algorithms: Erasures and the Art of Memory" (p. 348)
• 51 "Replicant: On Dub" (p. 355)
• 52 "Post-Rock" (p. 358)
• IX Electronic Music and Electronica
• Introduction (p. 365)
• 53 "Introductory Remarks to a Program of Works Produced at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center" (p. 367)
• 54 "Electronic and Instrumental Music" (p. 370)
• 55 "Stockhausen vs. the 'Technocrats'" (p. 381)
• 56 "Breakthrough Beats: Rhythm and the Aesthetics of Contemporary Electronic Music" (p. 386)
• 57 "The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music" (p. 392)
• Chronology (p. 399)
• Glossary (p. 409)
• Selected Discography (p. 419)
• Selected Bibliography (p. 427)
• Notes for Quotations (p. 445)
• Index (p. 448)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

A philosophy and a music professor, respectively, Cox and Warner (both Hampshire Coll.) oversee this collection of 57 brief essays on contemporary music and aesthetics. The contributors include composers from the worlds of avant-garde classical music, pop, and jazz e.g., John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pauline Oliveros as well as cultural historians like Marshall MacLuhan and Jacques Barzun and literary experimentalists such as William S. Burroughs. The quality of the essays varies considerably: some are thoughtful and contain illuminating ideas, while others tend toward didacticism and dense, jargon-laden prose. Students of contemporary music will find this compendium useful. Recommended for academic libraries to complement books like Mark Prendergast's The Ambient Century. Larry Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

A philosophy and a music professor, respectively, Cox and Warner (both Hampshire Coll.) oversee this collection of 57 brief essays on contemporary music and aesthetics. The contributors include composers from the worlds of avant-garde classical music, pop, and jazz--e.g., John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pauline Oliveros--as well as cultural historians like Marshall MacLuhan and Jacques Barzun and literary experimentalists such as William S. Burroughs. The quality of the essays varies considerably: some are thoughtful and contain illuminating ideas, while others tend toward didacticism and dense, jargon-laden prose. Students of contemporary music will find this compendium useful. Recommended for academic libraries to complement books like Mark Prendergast's The Ambient Century.--Larry Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.