Experimental Music and Audio Art --

The essential reading list

Nicolas Collins
October 2013

This is a short, highly subjective list of core reading for those interested in quickly picking up a
decent grounding in experimental music and audio art. Several of the books include audio CDs.

Before and After Cage – an introduction to 20th Century music

Alex Ross
The Rest Is Noise – Listening to the Twentieth Century
Good history of 20th Century music – useful for those who need to know what
happened B.C. (before Cage). More comprehensive than 20/20.

William Duckworth
20/20 – 20 New Sounds of the 20th Century
A selective history of music of the 20th Century, heard through 20 landmark
compositions, from Debussy, Joplin and Stravinsky to Cage, Lucier and Laurie
Anderson. A good companion to Oceans of Sound.

Experimental Music – Cage and beyond (listed in rough historical sequence)

John Cage
Silence
The classic starting point.

Kenneth Silverman
Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage
Does a great job of explain Cage’s working method, esp. in a visual art context.

Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn, editors

Source – Music of the Avant Garde, 1966 – 1973
Facsimile edition of the magazine of score and writing by fringe composers.

Michael Nyman
Experimental Music – Cage and Beyond
If you are going to read only one book on new music, let this be it. A superb
overview of the evolution and influence of Cage’s ideas up to the mid-1970s.

Thom Holmes
Electronic and Experimental Music (2nd Edition, 2002)
Brings Nyman into the 21st Century, with lots of well-selected first-person
statements culled from extensive interviews.
David Toop
Oceans of Sound
Essentially a history of the concept of “ambient music”, tracing it back to the
influence of Indonesian music on French composers such as Debussy and Ravel
in the late 19th Century.

William Duckworth
Talking Music – Conversations with Five Generations of American Experimental
Composers
As a Southerner, Duckworth is a gifted and disarming interviewer. From John
Cage to John Zorn, this is the best oral history of late-20th Century music, and it
follows his 20/20 neatly.

Alvin Lucier
Reflections/Reflexionen
Interviews with, and scores by, one of the most revolutionary, articulate
composers working today.

Derek Bailey
Improvisation
Interviews and observations on improvisation in music ranging from “free
improvisation” to Baroque music to Indian ragas.

George Lewis
A Power Stronger Than Itself -- The AACM And American Experimental Music
Brilliant history and analysis of the African-American avant garde.

Georgina Born
Rationalizing Culture
Entertaining anthropological analysis of IRCAM, the French music research
center.

John Zorn, editor

Arcana
Essays by a number of musicians who established their reputations in the 1980s.
Some are tiresome, but some – most notably those by George Lewis and Fred
Frith – are excellent.

John Lely & James Saunders

Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation
Good collection of prose scores, with analyses.

Austin, Kahn & Gurusinge, editors

Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973
Scaled-down facsimile collection of most of the material from this important
periodical of scores and interviews.
“Sound Art” and Critical Theory

Douglas Kahn
Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts
The book that started the “sound art theory” wave.

Jonathan Sterne
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
Picks up where Kahn leaves off.

Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner, editors

Audio Culture – Readings in Modern Music
Massive collection of essays by 57 artists and critics from Luigi Russolo to DJ
Spooky, covering “music” and “sound art”.

Seth Kim-Cohen
In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sound Art
The latest angle on Sound Art.

Recording history, future and impact

Mark Katz
Capturing Sound – How Technology Has Changed Music
Excellent history of the influence of recording on music composition,
performance and consumption.

David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard

The Future of Music – Manifesto for the Digital Revolution
From an unlikely source (Berklee press) comes a far-reaching analysis of the
impact file sharing on music.

Simon Reynolds
Retromania – Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past
On the tyranny of recent history in Pop music.

Miscellaneous

Leonardo Music Journal

Each volume of this annual journal features a different theme (David Tudor, English
Music, Pleasure, etc.), a dozen or more articles by artists from all over the world about
their own music, and an audio CD.