Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen (Zero Books)
by David Stubbs
Modern art is a mass phenomenon. Conceptual artists like Damien Hirst enjoy celebrity status. Works by 20th century abstract artists like Mark Rothko are selling for record breaking sums, while the millions commanded by works by Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon make headline news.
However, while the general public has no trouble embracing avant garde and experimental art, there is, by contrast, mass resistance to avant garde and experimental music, although both were born at the same time under similar circumstances - and despite the fact that from Schoenberg and Kandinsky onwards, musicians and artists have made repeated efforts to establish a "synaesthesia" between their two media.
This book examines the parallel histories of modern art and modern music and examines why one is embraced and understood and the other ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment, as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated by, and listened to by the inexplicably crazed. It draws on interviews and often highly amusing anecdotal evidence in order to find answers to the question: Why do people get Rothko and not Stockhausen?
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Cage's only grant application (denied)
The John Cage Trust provides a scan of Cage's only known grant application, from 1940, involving amongst other things "the only center of experimental music in the country".
An annecdote relating to this is here
An annecdote relating to this is here
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Monday, May 31, 2010
BRANDEN W. JOSEPH - The Roh and the Cooked: Structural Film, Actionism, Paracinema
Please join us for the RMIT University School of Architecture and Design Graduate Research Conference Saturday night lecture. Details below.
Saturday 5th June, 2010
Drinks: 6:00-6:30PM 8.12.01
Saturday night lecture 6:30-7:30PM 8.11.68 (Lecture Theatre)
BRANDEN W. JOSEPH
The Roh and the Cooked: Structural Film, Actionism, Paracinema
Branden W. Joseph will discuss the travels of Tony Conrad and Beverly Grant throughout Europe in the early 1970s. Their itinerary, and thetransformations in Conrad’s work upon his return to the United States,sheds light on the particular “crisis” of experimental cinema at thetime and the manner in which it was (temporarily) overcome. Revisingcurrent understandings of the notion of there being “twoavant-gardes” (as Peter Wollen famously put it), an examination ofConrad’s development and his interactions with Malcolm Le Grice,Wilhelm and Birgit Hein, and Otto Muehl will outline another line ofavant-garde development. Drawn from Conrad’s personal archives andother research, this talk covers material that is not included in theauthor’s recent book, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and theArts after Cage.
Branden W. Joseph is Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern andContemporary Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and an editor of the journal Grey Room (MIT Press).—
(forwarded from Jon Dale)
Friday, April 9, 2010
Australia's participation in the ISCM
John Davis outlines some thoughts on the forthcoming ISCM festival in Sydney, and reviews the history of Australia's participation in the ISCM (Resonate Magazine)
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Noise circa 1964
Blog to Comm post that mentions a 1964 record called "Sounds of the Junkyard", which Lester Bangs reviewed in Village Voice in 1981.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
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