Customer Reviews

The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby--The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Your evaluation of THE AMBIENT CENTURY will depend on what you're looking for. I expected serious analysis, and by that criteria would give it 1 star. If what you're interested in, though, is an eclectic encyclopedia of interesting 20th century musicians, loosely grouped by the theme of "ambience," which is never defined, then you might think this is great. (I can't comment on the fact-checking criticism, but to me it's a secondary point.) Prendergast moves from "high art" composers including Debussy and Stockhausen, to "minimalism," to rock, broken into categories such as psychedelic, krautrock and synthesizer music, to the '90s techno/house/drum&bass/ambient trend.

However, his definition of "ambient" involves "music being deconstructed" by Mahler and Debussy (sounds really "postmodern," but what does it mean?), and developments in technology/electronics, along with an "interest in pure sound." He pronounces: "[T]he bleeding heart of electronic progress had by its very nature rendered all recorded music, by definition, Ambient." (4) Given this sort of cosmic perspective Prendergast could have included all music, and what he does include seems to be more or less "cool stuff that I like." Harsh, I know, but does Bob Dylan's "Knocking on Heaven's Door," by any stretch of the conceptual imagination, belong on a list of the Essential 100 Recordings of 20th Century Ambient Music? If so, our author fails to offer any explanation. How about Led Zeppelin IV (ie, ZOSO)? I'm at a loss.

If the book was appropriately titled, I would have much less to criticize. But when you title a book "The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age," you lead the reader to expect some sort of theoretical analysis -- what sort of evolution? In what direction? What mechanisms are involved? But there is "no there there" if what is happening is just technological progress, and "an interest in pure sound" may characterize Cage's famous *4'33"* (the silent composition), but there is not even an attempt here to argue that it is the direction of 20th century music. If Prendergast really means to emphasize the use of music as background, where is his discussion of Muzak, and music in advertising? He doesn't develop his embryonic theme(s), but rather rushes headlong into profiles of musicians, which are strung together with little connecting analysis.

Caveat emptor -- if you're looking for serious analysis, look elsewhere, but if you want a breezy journalistic encyclopedia of non-mainstream music (that is seen as cool by The Wire magazine) you might find this a useful reference work. (For a model of analysis of cutting edge music, check out Nyman's EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC. It also has a foreward by Brian Eno!)

I bought this book having read a review in "The Wire" magazine, the review said the book was bad, but I did'nt believe it and bought it. I have since read it and can honestly say that I have never read a book with so many factual mistakes in it. As the writer of a "History of Electronic Music" for a magazine and a lecturer in Computer music I would suggest that you do not buy this book until all the errors have been corrected. A typical example, "Robert Fripp studied JG Bennett at Sherborne House, Dorset", the Sherborne House where he studied Bennett is in Gloucestershire,near Cheltenham. Another "EMS produced the "Portobello" synth, it was in fact called the PUTNEY. There are many more mistakes which makes the book difficult to recommend to my students or indeed anyone else until such time as it has been corrected.

The title alone ought to be enough to suggest the daunting scope of Mark Prendergast's exploration of sound in the 20th Century. Prendergast argues that an "Ambient" tendency links together most of the musical output of the century, from Debussy to Derrick May and beyond. Rather than a single narrative, The Ambient Century is pieced together out of biographical segments and overviews of genres. And he squeezes it all in, beginning with the electronic pioneers (Theremin, Stockhausen, Subotnick) moving through Minimalism, "Ambience in the Rock Era" (encompassing the Beach Boys and the Stones but also the Dead, Krautrock, New Wave and even Enya), and ending with 100 pages on house, techno, and the broader scope of popular electronic music.

While the earlier chapters may provide interesting background for readers interested in the 20th Century avant garde, the book ultimately proves a disappointment. For anyone immersed in house, techno, drum'n'bass, or any other form of contemporary electronic music - commercial or experimental - the reading seems cursory at best. Prendergast sticks to the big names - in drum'n'bass, for instance, he dwells on Goldie and LTJ Bukem, ignoring less famous originators and more recent developments. To devote a page to DJ Rap at the expense of more influential producers seems short-sighted at best. House and techno are both treated as dead genres, barely breaking out of the historical contexts (early 90s Chicago and Detroit) with which they're associated, and with little insight into the subsequent fragmentation of genres and subgenres. (His earlier chapters, while more informed, suffer from similar flaws - Subotnick's entry barely hints at the philosophy behind the composer's music; La Monte Young's follows the official Youngian party line in casting Tony Conrad as bit player).

Ultimately, even greater methodological flaws mar Prendergast's account. His valorization of individual auteurs ignores the labels which often did as much, if not more, to further the development of particular sounds. He suffers from a lack of fact-checking. His historicism is simplistic at best - his treatment of the Compact Disc seems cribbed straight from a Philips corporate backgrounder, emphasizing the format's alleged superiority with little heed for its drawbacks, ignoring the corporate strongarm strategies (like price-fixing) that led to its dominance, and falling back on utopian pronouncements akin to a kind of digital "end-of-history." Sure, after the advent of the CD "there was just more music around for everybody," but how much is this due to the medium - and how much to the majors' aggressive marketing and enforced obsolescence of vinyl? Where Simon Reynolds has developed a complex (if controversial) linkage between drug consumption and music production, Prendergast - without citing him - falls back on a simplistic determinism, resulting in statements like "Trip-Hop was the product of post-club marijuana consumption." And he suffers from the habit of capitalizing neologized non-genres like "Trip Jazz," as if to grant them legitimacy.

Finally, Prendergast's very thesis is barely spelled out. Presumably, his concept of the Ambient refers to the ascendancy of sound-for-sound's-sake in the 20th Century. He probably has something in this, but without a more rigorous examination of the technological, sociological, economic and above all formal aspects linking, say, John Cage, the Beach Boys, King Tubby, and Aphex Twin, his book remains a collection of half-developed snapshots.

For sheer volume of information about Minimalism, Ambient, and the key 20th-century composers and performers thereof, this book is invaluable. Almost every experimental composer I could think of had an in-depth listing in here. If you have any interest at all in this kind of music--a broad genre including Satie, Debussey, Cage, Riley, Carlos, Oldfield, Orbital, Chemical Brothers, Air, Miles Davis...and on--I highly recommend checking this book out.

That said, there are faults with this book. One reviewer has already pointed out factual errors--I've found one too: John Cage was a professor at Wesleyan University in the '60s and '70s (I don't know the dates off the top of my head), and not, as Pendergrast states, at the University of Connecticut. There are also numerous typos and grammatical errors, all of which suggest that this book could use a copy editor and a couple of fact checkers. Let us hope for future editions.

Upon merely skimming through the index, I came upon numerous errors, as have the other reviewers. I list a couple that I spotted with ease:

Incredibly, there seems to be no mention at all of Isao Tomita, at least according to the contents and index.

Wendy Carlos has never owned or used a Moog System 55.

Giorgio Moroder didn't use a drum machine in anger until at last 1981, when the Linn LM-1 was released. The drums and percussion on all the groundbreaking 1970's Moroder/Bellotte recordings was provided by drummer Keith Forsey or through the use of Moog synthesizer modules. It was a tape loop of Forsey's kick drum that provided the only real drum sound on 'I Feel Love'.

The inaccuracies in this book made me refrain from buying it, which was a shame since the effort was clearly well-intentioned. Roll on a properly error checked new edition!

Mark Prendergast's THE AMBIENT CENTURY is an encyclopedia of the biggest names in "ambient music", a style that's never defined, but which might be a) music that the author digs, and b) music that the author doesn't like so much but which lends respectability to later figures.

Prendergast starts off all the way at the beginning of 1900s with innovative classical music figures such as Debussy, Mahler, and Ravel. There is little that these figures have in common with what came later, but Prendergast seems like he has to start early and so comes up with these guys. His inclusion of Schoenberg and the other Viennese composers is just crazy, since most of the minimalists (the real inspiration of techno, house, and drum & bass in the 80s and 90s) were trying as hard as possible *not* to write like that. Ditto for the inclusion of Pierre Boulez, although his friend Stockhausen merits inclusion.

Passing over the rock era (I'm not competent to comment much on this genre), I must take issue with his treatment of electronic music, which is somewhat US-centric. Sasha is presented as a minor figure that didn't achieve much until 1999, when his Ibiza compilation came out, when he had really be earning praise since 1990 (when the British press was calling him "The Man Like God"). The book then says that Sasha left the U.K. entirely for Australia, which is simply false. Frequent collaborator John Digweed is called "The James Brown of DJing", leading me to suspect that the author has never seen Digweed live.

This is a really disappointing and often-wrong book, and a bit of an odd duck because, expect for the "coolness" of it all, the people mentioned here have little in common. If you are interested in innovative classical music in the 20th century, try Griffith's MODERN MUSIC AND AFTER: Directions Since 1940 (Oxford University Press, 1995). Similarly, those interested in electronic music would do well to find a more focused guide.

The "family tree" of 20th Century music that Prendergast draws is deep in thought, yet lacking correctness on the minutiae. These failings leave the reader at times frustrated with these inaccuracies. Hopefully, a second edition can be drafted to allow the mistakes to be corrected. It seems that they slipped through the cracks, simply because the book is so encyclopedic, that tiny (yet important) facts get left either unsaid, or misstated.

Intellectually, it's a masterpiece meal, but unfortunately, the detail and factual wine's been kept next to the oven, and the bread is burnt. Fortunately for the book, its breath of fresh air in insight makes up for this. If the facts were fixed this book would be off the scale.

This is much more of a "who I think is cool" book than one with any information or analysis. Good for those who want to name-drop, but not for real students of music.

First, must note that i have an earlier edition of the book (2000)- And i did find the book quite useful (till the end). There's a HUGE problem, as others have mentioned. He doesn't define 'ambient', and as others have said, seems to use it to mean stuff he likes or that serves his thesis. I just do not see how Satie and Debussy leads to techno (or whatever variant, it's all "Voomta, voomta, voomta" to me). [The idea i guess is: Satie to Eno, ((i'm fine with that)); Eno to voomta- ((sorta)). But the logical flaw is using Eno as the link. He makes ambient music sometimes, but that does not make everything he touches 'ambient'. He's hired to add 'texture' to U2 and Paul Simon, that doesn't make their music ambient. QED.] There are some definitions (of 'ambient music') on Wiki that are useful. The term has no meaning when used so casually, as happened quickly to the term 'virtual'. If i tell people i make ambient music, and they imagine voomtavoomtavoomta it's completely wrong. The list of "100 essential ambient recordings" is just SILLY! There is a book titled "Who killed classical music" and that's where my review title comes from.

Really isn't anything beyond a list of records the author enjoys. Extremely noticable gaps in artist's careers (Focuses entirely on the "ambience" in Miles Davis' "Miles Ahead" and completely ignores the fusion years. Listen to Summertime and then listen to Yesternow. How is Summertime even remotely close to ambient?) and even completely lacking artists (If the Residents don't qualify for "Eskimo" but Jimi Hendrix does for "Electric Ladyland" then I've been grossly misinformed).

Book has almost nothing to do with Ambient music as a genre and everything to do with the records the author enjoys. All Music Guide does just as well at explaining it and that's just plain sad. Interesting only for fairly good record recommendations to new fans, and perhaps those interested in production.