Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties
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Review
This book encapsulates how and why popular music engages with politics and it is an illuminating read ... [an] original, enjoyable and very readable book. (Guy Osborn, Times Higher Education )
a wide-ranging survey, and a valuable one...Deftly editied by Robert Adlington...throws a revealing light on a movement with too many manifestos in 'a decade that saw some of its most singular and provocative manifestations'. (Michael Quinn, Classical Music )
a wide-ranging survey, and a valuable one...Deftly editied by Robert Adlington...throws a revealing light on a movement with too many manifestos in 'a decade that saw some of its most singular and provocative manifestations'. (Michael Quinn, Classical Music )
Product Description
The role of popular music is widely recognized in giving voice to radical political views, the plight of the oppressed, and the desire for social change. Avant-garde music, by contrast, is often thought to prioritize the pursuit of new technical or conceptual territory over issues of human and social concern. Yet throughout the activist 1960s, many avant-garde musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Intensely involved in the era's social and political upheavals, they often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. Yet how could avant-garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny, initiated clique? In answer, Sound Commitments, examines the encounter of avant-garde music and "the Sixties" across a range of genres, aesthetic positions and geographical locations. Through music for the concert hall, tape and electronic music, jazz and improvisation, participatory "events," performance art, and experimental popular music, the essays in this volume explore developments in the United States, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan and parts of the "Third World," delving into the deep richness of avant-garde musicians' response to the decade's defining cultural shifts. Featuring new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period in each chapter, Sound Commitments will appeal to researchers and advanced students in the fields of post-war music, cultures of the 1960s, and the avant-garde, as well as to an informed general readership.
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7 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Oh please
27 Jun 2009
Format:Paperback
I will concede that this book is probably well-meaning, although its primary beneficiaries are the assistant professors (I'm guessing here at rank) who wrote the various essays, which will be more small feathers in their tenure caps.
But, as both a former assistant professor and a musician who was a part of the sixties avantegarde referenced here, this seems largely a waste of time. Stripped of academic jargon (god--things have only gotten worse since I skipped out of academe) there are few actual insights in these indigestible essays; in fact, stripped of jargon what is left is largely either self-evident, a cliche or both. A note to our authors: come on, guys, you got into this because you loved music. Show us that you still do. Try reading Alex Ross's intelligent, beautifully informed and modest but effective guide to 20th C music, The Rest is Noise. That's what good writing looks like: personal, efficient, generous and extremely well-informed, but unpretentious. Not trendy, self-referential and jargon-ridden (I guess it's too late to kill Adorno, Derrida and Foucalt; instead let's try just ignoring them). And, yes, I know Alex Ross's book is written for the general reader (not that this is a bad thing); it's also possible to address other academics and still make sense. Every few years I go back and reread sections of Pieter van den Toorn's Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring. Although addressed first, I suppose, to Stravinsky specialists, it's still generously informative, readable and, best of all, it gets me listening, score-reading and thinking about Stravinsky: what he intended, what he achieved and, rather precisely, how he achieved it. That's what it's supposed to be about. Not academic gun-notching.
But, as both a former assistant professor and a musician who was a part of the sixties avantegarde referenced here, this seems largely a waste of time. Stripped of academic jargon (god--things have only gotten worse since I skipped out of academe) there are few actual insights in these indigestible essays; in fact, stripped of jargon what is left is largely either self-evident, a cliche or both. A note to our authors: come on, guys, you got into this because you loved music. Show us that you still do. Try reading Alex Ross's intelligent, beautifully informed and modest but effective guide to 20th C music, The Rest is Noise. That's what good writing looks like: personal, efficient, generous and extremely well-informed, but unpretentious. Not trendy, self-referential and jargon-ridden (I guess it's too late to kill Adorno, Derrida and Foucalt; instead let's try just ignoring them). And, yes, I know Alex Ross's book is written for the general reader (not that this is a bad thing); it's also possible to address other academics and still make sense. Every few years I go back and reread sections of Pieter van den Toorn's Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring. Although addressed first, I suppose, to Stravinsky specialists, it's still generously informative, readable and, best of all, it gets me listening, score-reading and thinking about Stravinsky: what he intended, what he achieved and, rather precisely, how he achieved it. That's what it's supposed to be about. Not academic gun-notching.
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