Music
Recommended New and Recent Books on Music
James Fairclough and Harry Farnham The Mozart ProjectPipedreams Media, 2014
An utterly spectacular production that realizes the promise of multimedia, this interactive book combines learned and richly presented critical, biographical, and historical writing on Mozart with audio and video: interviews, panel discussions, three hours of music, 25 filmed performances, and a performance of Alexander Pushkin’s drama Mozart and Salieri (available through iBooks for iPad and Mac OS X only).
Robert GordonRespect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul ExplosionBloomsbury USA, 2013
Now in paperback, Gordon’s 2013 account of the rise and fall of Stax Records doubles as a cultural history of the South in the 1960s.
Tristan Perich1-Bit SymphonyPhysical Editions, 2014
Not a reissue but a republication: Perich’s breakthrough 1-Bit Symphony is now available with a bound copy of the score—to be exact, the first 1/100th of a second of the score, which amounts to almost 700 pages of hypnotic code, the first in a series on Physical Editions that packages recordings of Perich’s new compositions with a poster print of the score (Parallels is new and currently available).
Joshua HarmonThe Annotated Mixtape Dzanc Books, 2014
Harmon, a poet and fiction writer, views US history and his own life through the lens of his own record collection, a seemingly self-indulgent premise that nevertheless yields compelling results.
John SzwedBillie Holiday, The Musician and the MythViking, March 2015
2015 is Lady Day’s centennial year, and the great biographer of Miles Davis and Sun Ra explores her life and music without the romantic clichés that cloud her reputation and achievement.
Jon FineYour Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution* (But Can No Longer Hear)Viking Adult, 2015
A truly terrible title, but Jon Fine’s in-the-trenches account of his time in bands like Bitch Magnet and Don Caballero is a grounded antidote to the inevitable myth-making of books like Our Band Can Be Your Life (2001). It’s also, surprisingly, a frank examination of the nature of male friendship.
David GrubbsRecords Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound RecordingDuke University Press, 2014
A fascinating exploration of an enduring paradox at the core of avant-garde music: the sub rosa conflict between a listener’s path to knowledge—via records—and how those who made that music, particularly John Cage, thought that records were the antithesis of their art and values.
David StubbsFuture Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern GermanyMelville House, 2015
Published last year in the UK but due stateside in July, Stubbs’s survey of the fertile postwar ground that sprouted bands like Can and Kraftwerk promises to shed light on Krautrock and Germany in a way similar to that in which Rob Young’s Electric Eden (2010) examined folk music in the British Isles.
Will Holder and Alex WatermanYes, But is it Edible?New Documents, 2014
Something like the Old and New Testament of Robert Ashley, this large-scale book collects essays by Ashley and important early and late scores—including ...in memoriam Kit Carson (1963) and the entirety of Dust (1998) and Celestial Excursions (2003)—and with it, ambitious readers can literally make their own performances of his works, in the deepest, fundamental tradition of classical music.
Robert ChristgauGoing into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man Dey Street Books, 2015
Christgau’s excoriating brevity in his long-running Consumer Guide frustrates me as much as Greil Marcus’s bloated mythologizing, but there’s no denying the man’s stature as one of rock’s foremost critics. Who are we to begrudge him a memoir?
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
“A Totally Integrated Club Scene”: New York, New Music: 1980–1986 at the Museum of the City of New York
By Matthew Pessar JosephOCT 2021 | Music
Now, 1980s music has become anything but underground. Perhaps spurred by the cost of once artistically vibrant downtown neighborhoods like the East Village and SoHo, nostalgia for the decade has reached new heights.
Music of Harry Partch, Vol. 3: Sonata Dementia, Bridge Records (2019)
By Jude ThomasNOV 2019 | Music
Beyond the accuracy of the playing, the fidelity of the recording, and the delight of hearing Partch himself interpret a rare work, the album demonstrates how Partch’s music and legacy have persisted and changed in the 45 years since his death.
Tallinn Music Week
By Martin LongleyOCT 2020 | Music
There was a pivotal juncture shortly before this year’s Tallinn Music Week when fortitude bloomed and the organizers threw themselves into realizing 2020’s already postponed conference-cum-festival—the Estonian government giving permission to operate at a reduced venue capacity—across the city’s broad range of indoor and outdoor stages. Braving a steady domino-fall of cancellations by visiting international acts, as red-patches proliferated, TMW understandably placed the emphasis on indigenous artists, covering most styles, including rock, jazz, folk, hip hop, electronica, ambient, pop, and modern classical.
Music: A Subversive History
By George GrellaNOV 2019 | Music
Songs about fucking and killing—that would have also been an appropriate subtitle for this scintillating new book from Ted Gioia. He’s already written three valuable books about the place of music in society and human experience, Healing Songs (2006), Works Songs (2006), and Love Songs: The Hidden history (2015). Music: A Subversive History builds on those by digging down into the fundamental nature of music, how it is made and how it affects us.
