Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) 2nd Edition

by Michael Nyman (Author), Brian Eno (Foreword)

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ISBN-13: 978-0521653831

ISBN-10: 0521653835

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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.

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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

Composer Michael Nyman's classic 1974 account of the postwar experimental tradition in music.

Publisher : Cambridge University Press; 2nd edition (August 28, 1999)
Language : English
Paperback : 216 pages
ISBN-10 : 0521653835
ISBN-13 : 978-0521653831
Item Weight : 13.2 ounces
Dimensions : 6.85 x 0.49 x 9.72 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #561,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #825 in Music (Books)
- #1,895 in Music History & Criticism (Books)

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Mary Beth Flory

Music book

Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2013

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I ordered this book for my daughter who is pursuing her doctoral music degree. I don't know anything about the book.

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AutonomeusTop Contributor: Classic Rock

Processes and fields of sound, not time-objects...

Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2001

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!

(verified library loan)

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THE 20th CENTURY RADICAL AVANT-GARDE

Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2003

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.

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perhaps the only history of the what was the avant-garde

Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2000

Before Michael Nyman was a successful composer topping a millionaire gross worth, he was indeed a perceptive writer,with a turn of poetic phrase as when he described Cardew's magnum opus The Great Learning. There he described the confluence of Cardew's use of the Analects of Confucius with expression for the common man/woman,Cardew's intent utilized graphics as a common language read by anyone, a music for amateurs and professional instrumentalists to sing and play simultaneously.Nyman's rather modest pamphlet here when written, it was the only comprehensive explanation of what for the most part remained a confused, variegated,and fragemented avant-garde.One with no discernable direction,nor creative agenda accept possibly not to have one,in the typical Zen fashion of the times. The departures here and most of what Nyman discusses emanate from the Post-Cage realm of non-expression. The concern was in process,in graphic notation, in the means rather than the ends, how a process can undergo multiplication either through determinate means, actual writing of music or improvisation, or a mixtures of both.Cage began much of these departures along with associates Morton Feldman and Earle Brown, and later Christian Wolff.Here Cage with his various Variations, was the biginning marks where the performers needed to prepare a score to perform from a set of guidelines determining tones,rhythm,duration,physical placement and selection of instrument.The score was a set of instructions, a blueprint in a way.There was no right or wrong way merely one that didn't excite and inspire. This reduction of the creative process to its bare minimum was an exciting step hence there was plenty of room for divine intervention. Schoenberg, Cage's teacher had taught him the wealth of processes in music from the reservoir of variation form. And his use of it throughout his life, is akin to an unoffical hommage to the master of dodecaphonic thinking.Cage went on to compose seven such works each entitled Variations with a successive number. It was like a diary. Nyman is a perceptive writer discussing the minimalist expressions as well,a realm which came to work for him.Back when he wrote this work minimalism was just beginning to be recognized as a viable road a subversion of the Western Canon, and what was labeled as the tyrannical serial road as practiced by the Europeans. Reading Nyman today in retrospect is far more interesting however than appraising the repetitive patterns cadre today, for back in the late Sixties, early Seventies, these minimalists concepts, of transforming, scaling,nuanced timbral changes and permutating rhythm as mosaic patterns indeed opened up a creative chasm that has only been closed now. The market success of it is all a matter of history now.Even the Post-minimalists a la John Adams have exhausted its bleak emotive world. But Nyman was the first to discuss Reich's music, and that of Phillip Glass, and there early music was indeed much more exciting than their current homogenized,mannered and overlabored music today.Nyman was actually the shrewdest of the lot regenerating this creativity into the service (uncompromised) market. Improvisation also represented a new turn of the page, and a profound way of eradicating the package, the creator. The remarkable improvisors AMM, Keith Rowe and Eddie Prevost(later Cornelius Cardew,and John Tilbury) also make a great contribution here to Nyman's work. AMM was the first to adopt a post-Cage perspective,yet infusing their sensitive performances with more an ethic, a concern for the human condition which was a rather opaque and of mariginal value in the Cage edifice of creativity.Rowe utilized the radio as a sound source for instnace, but had projected a deep musicianship in its mixing it with his signature sound of the bowed electric guitar .A genre today where countless copy cats exhibit their expressions. Nyman also touches on the new use of melodic means, a realm that was to blossum wholeheartedly along all the creative avenues of the avant-garde throughout the Seventies coming ferociously up to the present times, with the homogenization of the commissioning agenda in today's orchestral venues.Melody represented a common experience a common language, and similar to jazz it was the focus of a piece.The work ends with Cardew's apostasy into Marxism and his utilization of revolutionary songs in arrangement form.Nyman short-changes this in some way, not realizing its implication, as no one else.

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Top reviews from other countries

Diego Espinosa

a classic

Reviewed in Canada on April 19, 2013

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This book is essential to understand xx century's music. I really recommend this new version compared to the old one.

John Martin

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 2, 2016

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Cool smart book

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