It’s the last week of August – time to prepare your brain for the new school year! Look for some of these fantastic August releases from Bloomsbury Academic.
Learn more about the mastermind behind some of the world’s favorite musicians (Talking Heads, U2, and Coldplay) from Sean Albiez and David Pattie’s masterful portrait of the musical genius Brian Eno. Their in-depth exploration of Eno’s work as a musician, theoretician, collaborator, and producer will provide you with insight into how a brilliant musical mind operates.
“As producer, musician, theorist, facilitator and more, Brian Eno has left significant traces across popular culture since the 1970s and this wide-ranging volume skillfully brings to light both well-known and more obscure aspects of his work and legacy.” – Alexei Monroe, cultural theorist and author of Interrogation Machine: Laibach & NSK
Transglobal Sounds: Music, Youth and Migration
Join authors João Sardinha and Ricardo Campos’ as they explore of how music can be transformed by youth and immigration in this in comprehensive study. Learn more about how new modes of identification are born out of the social, cultural, historical and political interfaces among youth, migration and music.
“Transglobal Sounds is an exciting volume that focuses on an important demographic slice of the migrant pie – youth, and the particular importance of music in addressing the challenges of deterritorialization and return.” – Kimberly DaCosta Holton, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, Rutgers University, USA
Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening
In this final, posthumous publication, readers are invited to examine a critical turning points in musical history led by one of the most visionary musical thinkers of our time, Jonathan Kramer. Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening shows how musical postmodernism is not just a style or movement, but a fundamental shift in the relationship between composer and listener.
“A brilliant “both/and,” inclusive thinker, Jonathan Kramer has always been accessible and engaging, eclectic and learned. As a consummate writer, teacher and composer, he has astutely theorized postmodernism-that slippery, contentious beast-from the evidence of contemporary music itself and from the social values of its listeners, as well as creators. In this multi-layered, innovative study of music in our world of “social saturation”, the postmodern is neither a category nor an era: it is a way of hearing, a musical attitude shared by composers and listeners alike. This captivating book will make you rethink modernism, anti-modernism, and of course postmodernism.” – Linda Hutcheon, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, Canada
Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture
Join Branden W. Joseph in his detailed exploration of avant-garde composer John Cage’s interactions with art and architecture as a means of understanding the aesthetic and political stakes of Cage’s career. Paying particular attention to Cage’s engagements with the visual arts and architecture, Joseph sheds new light on some of Cage’s most controversial innovations, such as the use of noise, chance techniques, indeterminacy, electronic technologies, and computerization.
“With great musical and historical sensitivity Joseph unpacks John Cage’s struggles: on the one hand, with Beethoven, Schoenberg, Stockhausen-the whole weighty European musical tradition, and on the other, with changing notions of experimentation and the avant-garde. What emerges is an artist who places music in the service of remaking the entire institution of art. Joseph succeeds in writing a brilliant book that is equally captivating for musicians and art historians.” – Alexander Rehding, Professor of Music, Harvard University, USA
Join Jennie Gottschalk as she offers a new insight into experimental music and explores how experimentation is a way of working. Gottschalk pushes past that which is known to discover new knowledge, forms, and relationships and demonstrates how craft for composers and sound artists is developed and transformed in response to the questions they bring to their work.
“We have needed a reformulation of what experimental music now means, i.e., what has become since Michael Nyman took stock of it in 1974-and this book beautifully fulfills that requirement. Jennie Gottschalk takes a fresh and independent look at experimental music of the last forty years, finding both points of continuation from the previous era and many novel and heartening developments. It is also an adventure story with surprising twists and a panoramic cast of characters, like a novel in which works and ideas are the central figures, seemingly with a collective life of their own.” – Michael Pisaro, Composer and Faculty Member, Composition and Experimental Sound Practices, California Institute of the Arts, USA
After Sound: Toward a Critical Music
G. Douglas Barrett explores some of the most well-known visual acts of the last ten years (Pussy Riot, Ultra-red, Hong-Kai Wang, Peter Ablinger, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and others) and offers a significant update to how we think about music. After Sound examines contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of sound and music’s unique historical forms.
“An analyst in a crowded field of partisans, G. Douglas Barrett has given us a radical tool for apprehending the mess that we call music in the twenty-first century. Favoring clear-headed argument over strident polemics, he diagnoses the limits of discourse and practice in sound art, contemporary (visual) art, and new music by listening through and beyond them.” – Benjamin Piekut, Associate Professor of Music, Cornell University, USA
