general interest
Records Ruin the Landscape John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording david grubbs David Grubbs is Associate
John Cage’s disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and records ruin the landscape
avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill-suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could
david grubbs
John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording
these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP?
In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast,
Professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he also teaches in the M.F.A. programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts and Creative Writing. As a musician, he has released twelve solo Photo by Thatcher Keats albums and appeared on more than 150 commercially released recordings. Grubbs was a founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has appeared on recordings by the Red Krayola, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Will Oldham, and Matmos, among other artists. He is known for crossdisciplinary collaborations with the writers Susan Howe and Rick Moody and the visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Stephen Prina. A grant recipient in music/sound from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grubbs has written for The Wire, Bookforum, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings, but also in even greater volume through Internet file-sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era’s experimental music through the recorded artifacts
“Beautifully written and brimming with unexpected insights, Records Ruin the Landscape will undoubtedly inspire its readers to collect, download, and/or stream the wonderfully
of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records
broad range of musicians and composers it examines.
Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered
With a remarkable level of attentiveness, expertise, and
listening practices.
care, David Grubbs’s fascinating book draws upon the most intimate, oft-overlooked details of sound recordings to produce a profound new understanding of the stakes of what
“Records Ruin the Landscape is a pleasure to read, full of wonderful anecdotes and
it means to listen to the past in the present.”—BRANDEN
historical material. David Grubbs approaches John Cage and his legacy from a new and
W. JOSEPH , author of Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony
refreshing angle, by examining the vexed relationship of experimental and improvised
Conrad and the Arts After Cage
music to recording and phonography. The questions that he poses—about the ontology and potentiality of recording in relation to live performance, improvisation, chance, and indeterminacy—are important, and he answers them in smart and provocative ways.” —CHRISTOPH COX , coeditor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music
M U S I C/A R T/S O U N D S T U D I E S
March 256 pages, 19 illustrations paper, 978–0–8223–5590–8, $23.95tr/£16.99 cloth, 978–0–8223–5576–2, $84.95/£68.00
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