Sound commitments : avant-garde music and the sixties / edited by Robert Adlington.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Adlington, Robert, editor, contributor.

Louis A. Duhring Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Music--Political aspects--History--20th century.

Music.

Avant-garde (Music).

Nineteen sixties.

Music--Political aspects.

History.

Physical Description:

xi, 292 pages : illustrations, music ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2009.

Summary:

The role of popular music is widely recognized in giving voice to radical political views, the plight of the oppressed, and the desire for social change. Avant-garde music, by contrast, is often thought to prioritize the pursuit of new technical or conceptual territory over issues of human and social concern. Yet throughout the activist 1960s, many avant-garde musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Intensely involved in the era's social and political upheavals, they often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. Yet how could avant-garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny, initiated clique? In answer, Sound Commitments examines the encounter of avant-garde music and "the Sixties" across a range of genres, aesthetic positions, and geographical locations. Through music for the concert hall, tape and electronic music, jazz and improvisation, Participatory "events," performance art, and experimental popular music, the essays in this volume explore developments in the United States, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan, and Parts of the "Third World," delving into the deep richness of avant-garde musicians' response to the decade's defining cultural shifts.

Featuring new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period in each chapter, Sound Commitments will appeal to researchers and advanced students in the fields of post-war music, cultures of the 1960s, and the avant-garde, as well as to an informed general readership.

Contents:

Avant-garde : some introductory notes on the politics of a label / Hubert F. van den Berg

Ideologies. "Demolish serious culture!" : Henry Flynt and Workers World Party / Benjamin Piekut ; Forms of opposition at the "politiek-demonstratief experimenteel" concert / Robert Adlington ; Aesthetic theories and revolutionary practice : Nikolaus A. Huber and Clytus Gottwald in dissent / Beate Kutschke

Rethinking the popular. "Music is a universal human right" : Musica Elettronica Viva / Amy C. Beal

The problem of the political in Steve Reich's Come out / Sumanth Gopinath ; The politics of Presque rien / Eric Drott

Politicising performance. ONCE and the sixties / Ralf Dietrich ; "Scream against the sky" : Japanese avant-garde music in the sixties / Yayoi Uno Everett

The challenge of institutionalization. After the October revolution : the jazz avant-garde in New York, 1964-65 / Bernard Gendron ; American cultural diplomacy and the mediation of avant-garde music / Danielle Fosler-Lussier ; From Scriabin to Pink Floyd : the ANS synthesizer and the politics of Soviet music between thaw and stagnation / Peter J. Schmelz.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Louis A. Duhring Fund.

ISBN:

019533664X

9780195336641

0195336658

9780195336658

OCLC:

226984592