The American Experimental Music Century. An Oral History (en Inglés)
Reseña del libro "The American Experimental Music Century. An Oral History (en Inglés)"
This book is the first ever oral history of American experimental music, an oft-unheralded inheritance of musical culture from America. Both anecdotal and narrative, it covers the entire twentieth century, including thirty-four major figures and drawing together many more. Pulling upon the rich oral histories preserved in the Oral History of Americ
What is American experimental music, who made and supported it, and why does it matter? The American Experimental Music Century: An Oral History offers the first oral history of this transformative, oft-unheralded inheritance in American music history that emerged during the twentieth century. As the first book in the Oral History of American Music series, the book explores the nation's fecund, unique, and diverse experimental music tradition as told to the reader by the composers, performers, editors, and patrons themselves, those who have created, developed, and extended the tradition into the present day.
American experimental music as a twentieth-century tradition grew out of many musical traditions, including historically considered European classical music, music from Asia and the Americas, India, and Africa, and elsewhere, over time by means of technologies, travels, and immigration, to suggest new and fruitful means of making music to these innovative figures. As the century progressed, new paradigms emerged around composing techniques, performance practices and situations, sound sources, innovative scales, instrument building, and community building through music. As American composers reinvented basic attitudes towards the most fundamental features of music, like harmony, melody, and rhythm, they created a profoundly homegrown tradition, reflective of the diversity of a nation built from multiple immigrant communities and fused with originality and spirit that speaks to the American experience of individualism and exploration. In The American Experimental Music Century, thirty-four participants in American experimental music's history tell us not only how this happened, but what they each contributed, why, when, and with whom, their stories often dovetailing into one another's in a kaleidoscopic narrative.
Drawing upon the rich oral histories preserved in the Oral History of American Music (OHAM) collection of Yale University, enhanced with supplemental interviews, composer and writer Dean Rosenthal offers a story of richness and depth that includes major figures such as John Cage, Meredith Monk, Muhal Richard Abrams, the Kronos Quartet, Charles Ives, Betty Freeman, Philip Glass, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Pauline Oliveros, and many others. Together, their interwoven stories constitute a vivid history told in the words of the people who built it and authored by someone who is a part of it.
