Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) [Paperback]

Michael Nyman (Author), Brian Eno (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521653835 | ISBN-13: 978-0521653831 | Publication Date: August 28, 1999 | Edition: 2

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Nyman's book remains a privileged window into that strange world, and its republication will be a boon to a new generation.' BBC Music Magazine

'... a welcome reissue of the book ... Above all, Experimental Music is a useful source book for a period of radicalism in musical practice in which the rule was to break the rules.' Music Teacher

Book Description

This book, by the composer Michael Nyman, is a first-hand account of the postwar experimental tradition in music. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4' 33'' consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. Nyman's book traces the revolutionary attitudes that were developed towards 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 Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 2 edition (August 28, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521653835
• ISBN-13: 978-0521653831
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #230,400 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars processes and fields of sound, not time-objects..., March 27, 2001

By 

R. Hutchinson "autonomeus" (a world ruled by fossil fuels and fossil minds) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) (Paperback)

Nyman's 1974 classic is here reprinted sans revisions. Brilliant! It captures a moment -- as Nyman concludes his preface, "Thank goodness I wrote it when I did." EM is not a survey of 20th century avant-garde music. It focuses on one trend, inaugurated by Cage, Wolff, Feldman and Brown in the 1950s, a trend which explicitly attempted to overturn the traditional avant-garde then marching under the banner of total serialism. Nyman contrasts Wolff to Stockhausen, then a leading serialist: "Stockhausen is speaking of an unwanted situation needing to be remedied by his intervention, Wolff of a situation he is quite happy to accept, leaving sounds to go their own way." (27) As Cage says in his "Silence,"

"Not an attempt to understand... Just an attention to the activity of sounds."

One of the great strengths of Nyman's short book is his careful attempt to define experimental music before he moves on to discuss the artists and their music. To summarize and paraphrase, he says experimental composers are excited by creating "a process of generating action," involving situations or fields delineated by compositional rules, but leaving them open to the performers. (4)

Experimental music is uncompromisingly radical, and represents an ongoing influence on creative music, but has certainly not become any sort of popular movement. So for instance, while the early "minimalists" Young and Riley were arguably part of the experimental tendency, as were Reich's early phase patterns, (and hence are included here by Nyman), the later works of Reich, and especially Glass, are no longer open and experimental. And while Eno and recent techno/ambient artists have been influenced, their innovations have been more technical than conceptual by comparison.

My recommendation if this sounds intriguing -- check out anything by the English free-improv group AMM, which is nowadays constituted by Eddie Prevost on percussion, Keith Rowe on guitar and electronics, and John Tilbury on piano!

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE 20th CENTURY RADICAL AVANT-GARDE, February 8, 2003

By 

Pieter "Toypom" (Johannesburg) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) (Paperback)

In this work originally published in 1974, Nyman discusses the work of composers and performers who shifted the boundaries of music as regards notation, time, space, and the roles of the composer, performer and audience. The author seeks to identify and explain a whole body of musical work that existed outside the classical tradition and the avant-garde orthodoxies that flowed from it. He thus explores the Anglo-American musical tradition loosely associated with John Cage. Since 1974 this book has been considered the classical work on the radical alternative to the mainstream avant-garde as represented by Berio, Boulez and Stockhausen. Many of the current popular composers like Glass and Reich trace their root to this experimental school. The most fascinating chapter to me is "Minimal Music, Determinacy And The New Tonality" in which the Theatre Of Eternal Music (Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marion Zazeela and John Cale) as well as the work of Terry Riley is discussed. Photographs, illustrations and musical notations enliven the text and the book concludes with a selected source bibliography, a discography of experimental music and a bibliography of publications since 1974. Brian Eno has contributed an interesting foreword to this edition. The text can get a bit technical for the non-musician, but it remains a detailed work on a radical musical direction that has borne great fruit in the years since it was first analysed in this thorough and scholarly work.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A welcome return, November 13, 2000

By 

Jeff Abell (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) (Paperback)

When Michael Nyman first published this work in the 70s, it was the only book of its kind to discuss some of the most cutting-edge stuff going around. Most musical texts avoided discussing the Fluxus group as "music," but Nyman integrates these radicals easily, and provided the first discussion of the Scratch Orchestra (Cardew et al), and related topics. The book still contains some of the clearest discussions of these topics around. It's great to have it back in print, though too bad Nyman couldn't be bothered to provide updates on some of the folks discussed, like Hugh Skempton.