My ten contributions to ACL’s 40 Best Books on Music (part one, part two)

Derek Bailey ~ Improvisation: Its Nature And Practice In Music (Da Capo, 1980/1993)
English guitarist Derek Bailey endures as a central figure in improvised music nearly two decades after his death, and likewise his short book on the subject remains essential reading. Written in the mid 1970s and published in 1980, this slim volume formed the basis of Bailey’s four-part 1992 BBC series, On The Edge: Improvisation in Music. Directed by Jeremy Marre and hosted by Bailey himself, that series did for improvisation what John Berger’s Ways of Seeing did for visual culture, and a slightly expanded (but still lean) edition was released the following year, augmented with excerpts from interviews with a diverse cast of musicians, from John Zorn to Jerry Garcia, Max Roach to Evan Parker, and many more. While the documentary has the advantage of sonic examples demonstrating the various manifestations of improvisation, historical and contemporary, this text allows for a deeper investigation into this elusive musical process.

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) ~ Blues People (William Morrow, 1963 / Harper, 1999)
Blues People is the foundational study of the broad effects of jazz and blues music on American culture (and beyond). Baraka, then a poet still going by the name LeRoi Jones who was soon to found the Black Arts Movement, asks what black history sounds like through studying the evolution of music. From the songs of the enslaved to the contemporary music of the early 1960s, Baraka traces the wide influence of this music. The history of the blues is tied up in a particular style of performance and cultural expression, inspiring Baraka himself to study history after hearing the resonant desperation of old blues recordings. Black musicians used their art to confront racism, poverty, and white supremacy, Baraka argues, viewing the cosmopolitan sophistication of jazz as a direct rebuttal to Eurocentric narratives. Looking back on the book half a century later, Baraka affirmed that blues was still “the predominate music under all American music.”

Daphne A. Brooks ~ Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Belknap / Harvard University Press, 2021)
Recording technologies profoundly transformed our relationship to music, and the emergence of the “collector” has since shaped how music becomes remembered and historicized. Brooks, a professor at Yale, is an interdisciplinary scholar focusing primarily on African American literary, cultural, and performance studies. Her work often underscores the role played by criticism in contextualizing and historicizing music, applying the lens of performance in order to ask questions about the expression of subjectivity. In Liner Notes for the Revolution, these strains combine for a deeply researched and personally situated exploration of race and gender in the history of rock music, “fighting with the white masculinist ‘aural gaze’ hanging over” music history. Brooks’ counterhistoriography uncovers the contributions of Black women and, perhaps more crucially, attends to the means by which critics and listeners have influenced the reception of Black women performers and recording artists. Of particular interest is the long overdue critique of John Fahey’s conflation of blackness, death, and aggression, which spins into a broader critique of the arrogance of the collecting class.

Joel Chadabe ~ Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music (Prentice Hall, 1996)
As much as the musical mediascape has changed since the release of this book, Joel Chadabe’s excellent overview of 20th century electronic music endures as a vivid and concise history that should nonetheless be of great interest to any reader. Chadabe was a composer, performer, researcher, entrepreneur, and teacher of wide influence, and his personal grounding in the subject elevates the text above similar volumes. Drawing on over 150 interviews with a diverse group of professionals in a wide variety of roles and experiences, Electronic Sound details the music, instruments, and techniques of electronic music, from the pioneers of electronic synthesis in the early 20th century, through mid-century evolution of tape music, and the development of modern synthesizers and computer music.

David Grubbs ~ Now That the Audience Is Assembled (2018)
Now That the Audience Is Assembled is a book-length prose poem that conveys the feeling of witnessing the live performance of experimental music. Grubbs imagines a fictional performance utilizing imagined instruments which provoke a variety of audience responses, from deep contemplative listening to inducing sleep. While Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs’ exploration of the impact that recording has had on experimental and improvised musics, is another favorite, Assembled is especially notable for insisting that the audience is an equally important part of the circuit of performance. More than a study of music, this book manifests as an aesthetic experience in its own right, as an imaginative and poetic form of writing. Grubbs’ often humorous literary speculation, rooted firmly in his own experience as a prolific musician and critic, touches upon musical categories, performance, scores, instruments, aesthetic deskilling and reskilling, and the relation between improvisation and composition.

Jennie Gottschalk ~ Experimental Music Since 1970 (Bloomsbury, 2016)
Like so many of our favorite books on music, Experimental Music Since 1970 was written by an author who is also a composer/performer. Framed as something of an unofficial sequel to Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (1974), Gottshalk picks up where that book closes. Beyond producing an updated state of the field, Gottschalk also confronts historiographic omissions, providing an overdue attention to non-male and non-Western artists, including emerging and lesser-known artists in addition to canonical figures. Confronting definitional difficulties head on, Gottschalk’s encyclopedic survey eschews categorization based on “tools, notation, technology, or musical techniques,” arguing that “these categories to be red herrings when it comes to identifying experimental qualities. The fundamental issue is not what tools are used, but how they are directed.” Rather than a unified theory of experimentalism, then, she instead offers a dizzying proliferation of approaches. This focus on process results in groupings according to resonance, harmony, objects, perception, sites, and histories.

George Lewis ~ A Power Stronger Than Itself (University of Chicago Press, 2007)
Lewis’ massive, unsurpassable history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is a must-read. His influential 1996 article, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” argues that the European tradition sets up a definition of improvisation that excludes history and memory, a whitening that refuses to see itself as engaged in an ethono-nationalistic project. This gets further developed in A Power Stronger Than Itself in the service of providing a much needed historical overview of the AACM, which began in Chicago in 1965 and continues to this day. Lewis joined the organization in 1971 while still a teenager, a relationship that allows for an insider perspective that still maintains some distance from the founders. From Chicago to Paris to New York and beyond, the members of the AACM produce radical, boundary obliterating music that continues to inspire and confound. Drawing on theory and practice, interviews and critical analysis of the music press, and of course the music itself, Lewis’ book is essential to understanding creative music in America.

Pauline Oliveros ~ Software for People: Collected Writings 1963-80 (Smith Publications, 1984)
Even the most truncated version of Pauline Oliveros’ accomplishments would overflow this space. Suffice to say that her work as a composer, performer, teacher, and founder of Deep Listening have solidified her place in the canon. Oliveros developed new tools and techniques for the production of electronic music, imbuing the practice of improvisation with the principles of meditation and ritual. Her writings remain an essential means of transmission for her ideas, as well as a historical snapshot of her evolution as a thinker and musician. The unique square format of this book reflects the singularity of its contents, containing 26 articles on a range of subjects: technical matters (“”Tape Delay Techniques for Electronic Music Composition”), poetry (“Dialogue with Basho”), philosophical concerns (“The Noetics of Music”), fellow composers (“Alvin Lucier”), a defense of institutionalization (“On the need for Research Facilities”), and polemics against the persistent misogyny within music (“And Don’t Call Them ‘Lady’ Composers”).

Benjamin Piekut ~ Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (University of California Press, 2011)
Experimentalism Otherwise proposes a radical rethinking of avant-garde as a network of contestation, dispute, and exclusion, tracing the limits of “experimentalism” as a category as it relates to matters of race, gender, politics, and sexual orientation. Piekut focuses on four separate events that all occurred in New York City in 1964 — John Cage’s disastrous collaboration with the Philharmonic, Henry Flynt’s militant protests against the avant-garde, Charlotte Moorman’s Avant Garde Festival, and the founding of the Jazz Composers Guild. Piekut’s critique of Cage’s partitioning of his “aleatory” techniques from improvisation is a welcome intervention, demonstrating one of the many ways that canonical figures and institutions have worked to segregate the contributions of black musicians from the history of American experimentalism. All the more necessary is the attention to the Jazz Composers Guild and the important contributions of the black radical tradition more broadly. A fascinating coda on Iggy Pop following the threads of experimentalism out of New York as they took root in a rock vernacular.

Tara Rodgers ~ Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Duke University Press, 2010)
Pink Noises is an essential collection of 24 interviews with women working in electronic music and sound (“including club and radio DJs, remixers, composers, improvisers, instrument builders, and installation and performance artists”). Rodgers began Pink Noises as a blog in 2000 “to promote women in electronic music and make information about music production more accessible to women and girls.” The opening chapter sketches a feminist historiography of electronic music, demonstrates that the tools we use are far from neutral, and highlights the tropes that have been repeated and naturalized in the service of canonizing male figures. Pushing back against this history, Rodgers’ subjects (including Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, Mira Calix, and Maria Chavez among many others) are given space to tell their own stories. The opening essay will satisfy those looking for a theoretical account, while the interview transcript format ensures that the book remains readable and accessible to a wider audience.

Greg Tate ~ Flyboy in the Buttermilk (Simon & Schuster, 1992)
The late Greg Tate (1957-2021) was, among many other things, a guitarist and leader of the improvised music ensemble Burnt Sugar. But above all Greg Tate was a writer. Like many of the authors on this list, Tate’s experiences as a musician influenced his writing, but he could do things with words unlike anybody else. As a critic for The Village Voice, NYC’s famed alt-weekly, Tate developed his own unique voice, dizzily weaving between the highbrow locution of the critic and the vernacular of the street. Flyboy in the Buttermilk consists of 40 essays on culture and politics drawn from the previous decade of work. It’s a testament to Tate’s singular brilliance that these essays hold up more than three decades later. Essays include celebration (and critique) of Public Enemy, Samuel Delany’s science fiction, reflections on Amiri Baraka, William Gibson’s cyberpunk, what’s wrong with Michael Jackson, and the street influenced art of Ramm-El-Zee and Basquiat. This is how you do it.