Sounding Out Pauline Oliveros And Lesbian Musicality

Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality examines the musical career of the avant-garde composer, accordionist, whose radical innovations of the 1960s, 70s and 80s have redefined the aesthetic and formal parameters of American experimental music. While other scholars have studied Oliveros as a disciple of John Cage and a contemporary of composers Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, Gordon Mumma, and Robert Ashley, Sounding Out resituates Pauline Oliveros in a gynecentric network of feminist activists, writers, artists and musicians. This book shows how the women in Oliveros’s life were central sources of creative energy and exchange during a crucial moment in feminist and queer cultural history. Crafting a dynamic relationship between feminism and music-making, this book offers a queerly original analysis of Oliveros’s work as a musical form of feminist activism and argues for the productive role of experimental music in lesbian feminist theory. Sounding Out combines key elements of feminist theories of lesbian sexuality with Oliveros’s major compositions, performances, critical essays, and interviews. It also includes previously unpublished correspondence between Oliveros and Edith Guttierez, Jill Johnston, Annea Lockwood, Kate Millett, and Jane Rule.

An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements. Rather than pursuing the human's beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human.

For Denise Von Glahn, listening is that special quality afforded women who have been fettered for generations by the maxim "be seen and not heard." In Music and the Skillful Listener, Von Glahn explores the relationship between listening and musical composition focusing on nine American women composers inspired by the sounds of the natural world: Amy Beach, Marion Bauer, Louise Talma, Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Victoria Bond, Libby Larsen, and Emily Doolittle. Von Glahn situates "nature composing" among the larger tradition of nature writing and argues that, like their literary sisters, works of these women express deeply held spiritual and aesthetic beliefs about nature. Drawing on a wealth of archival and original source material, Von Glahn skillfully employs literary and gender studies, ecocriticism and ecomusicology, and the larger world of contemporary musicological thought to tell the stories of nine women composers who seek to understand nature through music.

Essays investigating and sparking new questions in experimental music

After Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of sound. This book is called After Sound because music and sound are, in Barrett's account, different entities. While musicology and sound art theory alike typically equate music with pure instrumental sound, or absolute music, Barrett posits music as an expanded field of artistic practice encompassing a range of different media and symbolic relationships. The works discussed in After Sound thus use performance, text scores, musical automata, video, social practice, and installation while they articulate a novel aesthetic space for a radically engaged musical practice. Coining the term "critical music," this book examines a diverse collection of art projects which intervene into specific political and philosophical conflicts by exploring music's unique historical forms. Through a series of intimate studies of artworks surveyed from the visual and performing arts of the past ten years-Pussy Riot, Ultra-red, Hong-Kai Wang, Peter Ablinger, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and others-After Sound offers a significant revision to the way we think about music. The book as a whole offers a way out of one of the most vexing deadlocks of contemporary cultural criticism: the choice between a sound art effectively divorced from the formal-historical coordinates of musical practice and the hermetic music that dominates new music circles today.

The concept of assemblage has emerged in recent decades as a central tool for describing, analysing, and transforming dynamic systems in a variety of disciplines. Coined by Deleuze and Guattari in relation to different fields of knowledge, human practices, and nonhuman arrangements, “assemblage” is variously applied today in the arts, philosophy, and human and social sciences, forming links not only between disciplines but also between critical thought and artistic practice. Machinic Assemblages focuses on the concept’s uses, transpositions, and appropriations in the arts, bringing together the voices of artists and philosophers that have been working on and with this topic for many years with those of emerging scholar-practitioners. The volume embraces exciting new and reconceived artistic practices that discuss and challenge existing assemblages, propose new practices within given assemblages, and seek to invent totally unprecedented assemblages.

To what extent can music be employed to shape one culture's understanding of another? In the American imagination, Japan has represented the "most alien" nation for over 150 years. This perceived difference has inspired fantasies--of both desire and repulsion--through which Japanese culture has profoundly impacted the arts and industry of the U.S. While the influence of Japan on American and European painting, architecture, design, theater, and literature has been celebrated in numerous books and exhibitions, the role of music has been virtually ignored until now. W. Anthony Sheppard's Extreme Exoticism offers a detailed documentation and wide-ranging investigation of music's role in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, the influence of Japanese music on American composers, and the place of Japanese Americans in American musical life. Presenting numerous American encounters with and representations of Japanese music and Japan, this book reveals how music functions in exotic representation across a variety of genres and media, and how Japanese music has at various times served as a sign of modernist experimentation, a sounding board for defining American music, and a tool for reshaping conceptions of race and gender. From the Tin Pan Alley songs of the Russo-Japanese war period to Weezer's Pinkerton album, music has continued to inscribe Japan as the land of extreme exoticism.

Music therapy is an established profession that is recognized around the world. As a catalyst to promote health and wellbeing music therapy is both objective and explorative. The Oxford Handbook of Queer and Trans Music Therapy (QTMT) is a celebration of queer, trans, bisexual and gender nonconforming identities and the spontaneous creativity that is at the heart of queer music-making. As an emerging approach in the 21st century QTMT challenges perspectives and narratives from ethnocentric and cisheteronormative traditions, that have dominated the field. Raising the essential question of what it means to create queer and trans spaces in music therapy, this book presents an open discourse on the need for change and new beginnings. The therapists, musicians and artists included in this book collectively embody and represent a range of theory, research and practice that are central to the essence and core values of QTMT. This book does not shy away from the sociopolitical issues that challenge music therapy as a dominantly white, heteronormative, and cisgendered profession. Music as a therapeutic force has the potential to transform us in unique and extraordinary ways. In this book music and words are presented as innovative equals in describing and evaluating QTMT as a newly defined approach.

The contemporary music scene thus embodies a uniquely broad spectrum of activity, which has grown and changed down to the present hour. With new talents emerging and different technologies developing as we move further into the 21st century, no one can predict what paths music will take next. All we can be certain of is that the inspiration and originality that make music live will continue to bring awe, delight, fascination, and beauty to the people who listen to it. This book cover modernist and postmodern concert music worldwide from the years 1888 to 2018. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on the most important composers, musicians, methods, styles, and media in modernist and postmodern classical music worldwide, from 1888 to 2018. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about modern and contemporary classical music.

Conceptualized as a tool to expand creativity, questioning, and experimentation in arts research, Disruption and Convergences: Generating New Conversations through Arts Research offers timely narratives, musings, and descriptions of experimental and scholarly practice that ignite new creative considerations for graduate students and aspiring arts research practitioners. The book features a collection of practice-based research projects for which the experiential unfolding leads to unexpected outcomes. In its openness and generativity, this mode of questioning removes the need for conclusive findings. Prominent threads that emerged from the collection encompass collaboration and interconnectedness, disputed and shared spaces, and transformation through storytelling. Contributors to the book address ways of knowing that complicate familiar categories, learning with and listening to the fragile, the provisional, and heralding unthought futurity. Disruption and Convergences offers a scholarly and artistic exchange through dialogues between contributors and invites artful and multisensorial expressions, imaginative experimentations, poetic and critical propositions that carry the voices of creators at different stages in their research careers. This form of publication is itself an international symposium of sorts, and therefore an opportunity for readers to engage in wide-ranging approaches to making, writing, and arts thinking. Contributors are: Cathy Adams, Jelena Aleksic, Carolina Bergonzoni, Rébecca Bourgault, Rachel Epp Buller, Aurora Del Rio, Christine D’Onofrio, Hannah L. Drake, Emese Hall, Damali Ibrek, Rabeya Jalil, Estée Klar, Linda E. Kourkoulis, David LeRue, Stephanie Loveless, Katri Naukkarinen, Yolanda M. Manora, Rachel Payne, Patti Pente, Nicole Rallis, Roni Raviv, Catherine M. Roach, Catherine Rosamond, Myrtle Sodhi and Alice Wexler.