THE 20th CENTURY RADICAL AVANT-GARDE
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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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Thank goodness for a second edition of this book!
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Until this second edition (belatedly) appeared, copies of this stimulating book were variously borrowed, photocopied and stolen from each other by musicians and music students! What the rather weighty publisher's review of this book fails to convey is the sheer whimsy and enterprising spirit of much of the music of this period, well expressed in the book. Though a worthwhile and interesting read on Cage, Stockhausen, and so on, its outstanding value for many of us is based on the last chapter, which describes experimental music in Britain in the 60s and 70s under such composers as Cornelius Cardew, John White, and Howard Skempton. It is an entertaining and eye-opening read about such performing groups as the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia, for which there was no need to be able to play an instrument... The results were often hilarious (as well as brave and socially revolutionary) and are well conveyed by Nyman *who was there at the time* and hence conveys it all with a freshness like it was yesterday (which it more-or-less was at the time of the first edition). This book remains the authority on British experimental music of the period, and new scholarly books on the subject are only now about to emerge (judging from a session at 2001's conference on twentieth-century music). Buy quickly, before you have to wait for a third edition!
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