Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) (edit title)

Shelfari edited the description of Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) Sunday, August 2 2009.

• Michael Nyman's book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing that developed alongside, and partly in opposition to, the postwar modernist tradition of composers such as Boulez, Berio, or Stockhausen. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4' 33'' consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence to be performed on any instrument. Such pieces have a conceptual rather than purely musical starting point and radically challenge conventional notions of the musical work. Nyman's book traces the revolutionary attitudes that were developed toward concepts of time, space, sound, and composer/performer responsibility. It was within the experimental tradition that the seeds of musical minimalism were sown and the book contains reference to the early works of Reich, Riley, Young, and Glass. This second edition contains a new Foreword, an updated discography, and a historical overview by the author.

Shelfari edited the contributors of Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) Thursday, July 23 2009.

• Added a contributor: Michael Nyman: (Primary Author)

Shelfari edited the first sentence of Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) Friday, July 17 2009.

• In this opening chapter I shall make an attempt to isolate and identify what experimental music is, and what distinguishes it from the music of such avant-garde composers as Boulez, Kagel, Xenakis, Birtwistle, Berio, Stockhausen, Bussotti, which is conceived and executed along the well-trodden but sanctified path of the post-Renaissance tradition.