Description
Book SynopsisJohn Cage's disdain for records was legendary. It was shared by other experimental and avant-garde musicians in the 1960s. Scholar and longtime musician David Grubbs explores the present-day musical landscape, as listeners encounter experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings.
Trade Review“An engaging book.” -- David Revill * Times Higher Education *
“For compositions whose whole raison d’être is to generate a drastically different realization with every performance . . . no recording of any one performance could be said to ‘be’ the piece. . . . David Grubbs’s exhaustively researched
Records Ruin the Landscape explores this dilemma specifically as it affected the generation of avant-garde composers who hit their stride in the sixties, John Cage being the most prominent and outspoken among them.” -- Dave Mandl * Los Angeles Review of Books *
“The premise of [Grubbs’s] understandably authoritative first book is that experimental music’s flowering in the 1960s . . . was incompatible with the limitations of orthodox recording formats. . . . With an engaging frankness . . . Grubbs contrasts this tendency with his own fan-by appetite for records and the documentary efficacy of the contemporary digital realm, concluding positively that the latter potentially offers unmediated, universal access to the panoply of esoteric music—something unthinkable in the 1960s.” -- David Sheppard * Mojo *
“The risk writers run, of course, with the big questions approach, is universalising their personal narrative in order to present the big answer. Grubbs is too skilled and self-aware to run into this problem. His breadth of research in musicology and aesthetic theory is balanced in this short and engaging book with candid writing about his own experiences of recordings of experimental music. . . . It is testament to Grubbs’s sensitivity as a writer that a sympathetic picture emerges of these musicians, who seem often to be railing against hierarchies they can’t quite help being part of.” -- Frances Morgan * The Wire *
"One of the chief joys of this book is that [it] seeks to rediscover the avant-gardes of the 1960s in all their spontaneity, in their present-ness, as if unfolding these mavericks from their own perspectives, without benefit of current hindsight. We learn, reading this book, what the future looked like to the past.
Records Ruin the Landscape seeks to prestidigitate the landscape of the 1960s back to life. For this, one should be thankful—including for the recordings that allow David Grubbs’ act of imagination and scholarship to have taken place." -- Daniel Herwitz * Critical Inquiry *
Table of ContentsPreface ix
Acknowledgments xxiii
Introduction 1
1. Henry Flynt on the Air 19
2. Landscape with Cage 45
3. John Cage, Recording Artist 67
4. The Antiques Trade: Free Improvisation and Record Culture 105
5. Remove the Records from Texas: Online Resources and Impermanent Archives 135
Notes 167
Selected Disography 195
Bibliography 199
Index 209
