Here are my favorite music books that I read in 2011. Full disclosure: I either know the author (all of them), the subject (Russell and Ashley), or the publisher (MusikTexte). However, I would have chosen these books without knowing any of them.
1. Outside of Time: Ideas About Music, Robert Ashley, MusikTexte.
If you don’t know Ashley’s work, you should. Alex Ross has described him as the “musical counterpart of David Lynch.” What I didn’t know before was how opinionated (in a good way) the soft-spoken Ashley is. Besides writing about his work, he also discusses his involvement with the Once Festival and the music program at Mills College, and all of the composers and performers associated with them.
2. How Johanna Beyer Spent Her Days, Amy C. Beal (who also has written the fantastic New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, a must-read if you want to know how a lot of American new music got its initial support). Available on her web site.
This is a short essay about the enigmatic Beyer, who served as Henry Cowell’s secretary, but has come to be known as a wonderful composer in her own right. That such a good composer can leave such a small footprint on the musical world is baffling. Read this, but be prepared to be depressed afterwards, frustrated that more is not known about this composer.
3. Schoenberg’s New World, The American Years, Sabine Feisst, Oxford University Press.
Whether or not you like Schoenberg (I do), this is a really interesting book, as it writes about his years in America, a topic not written about much before. He was beloved by such diverse musical figures as John Cage and Lou Harrison, as well as influencing numerous film composers. One issue cleared up for me was Cage’s study with him – it turns out that he studied with him for years, just not composition. So many writings leave you thinking that they only had a brief encounter, when Schoenberg told Cage he couldn’t help him compositionally, but it turns out that Cage took many other music courses with him, as well as chauffeuring him around Los Angeles.
4. Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992, Tim Lawrence, Duke University Press.
If you’re interested in Arthur Russell’s music, or, more generally, new music, this book is a good place to start. It is more than a biography of Russell, who was active in several different music scenes, as it also writes a lot about the New York new music scene, which is fascinating. One interesting tidbit I didn’t know before was Julius Eastman’s role in the cult disco hit Go Bang, in which he sang a long, mad glissando, perhaps as startling vocally as his performance in Peter Maxwell-Davies Eight Songs for a Mad King.
5. This Life of Sounds, Evenings for New Music in Buffalo, Renee Levine Packer, Oxford University Press.
Believe it or not, Buffalo was a hotbed of new music at one time, thanks to the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo, which was founded by Lukas Foss and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Lejaren Hiller and Morton Feldman were later also the Center’s music directors, during its short lifespan (1964-1980). Seemingly every important composer and musician passed through it at one time or another. This book is a fascinating read, and fills in a lot of blanks about contemporary music.
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