Academic
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OLD & NEW DREAMS
This episode of Sound Propositions features scholars Kerry O’Brien and Will Robin, editors of the recent anthology On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement. Described as a historical source reader, the book compiles over 100 primary sources retelling the story of minimalist music from the 1950s to the present. Sources include liner notes, interviews, journalism, manifestos, and other material organized chronologically…
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INDISCREET MUSIC
Patrick Nickleson is the author of The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art, Music, and Historiography in Dispute, an academic study that radically reconsiders the origins and boundaries of musical minimalism. Uninterested in searching for the earliest work of musical minimalism, or even in doing the admittedly necessary work of expanding the canon to include lesser known but equally…
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BOOKS ON MUSIC
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.…
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Subversive Communication Nine Years After 68
[Bologna, 1977] Semiologist Umberto Eco, professor at the University of Bologna, author of The Open Work and The Absent Structure, was one of the first intellectuals to comment in the press on the emarginati revolt movement. Eco is particularly committed to understanding the new culture of this movement of the unemployed, of students in the…
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Sonic Topographies of the South
Sonic Topographies of the South: Rural Futurity as Resonance and Dissonance One of my earliest sonic memories is of the altar bells at Sunday Mass, which as a child I mistook for a literal manifestation of divine presence. And so, the discovery that this joyous sound was performed by those sneaky altar boys is one…
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Signs and Sensibility: On the Saturation Machine
Yet another seminar paper on Derrida, this one from Spring 2016. “For not all the parts of a thought can be complete; at least one must be ‘unsaturated,’ or predicative; otherwise they would not hold together.” -Gottlob Frege¹ “Hail, my lady Leucippe. I am miserable in the midst of joy because I see you present…
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The Duty to Listen
Another old unpublished paper, this one from Spring 2015. Though I readily acknowledge the problematic nature of wasting any more space on Woody Allen, there’s a lot here I still like and think would be worth sharing.I use the film Another Woman to think through the relationship between psychoanalysis and acousmatic sound, which relates specifically…
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“But who, we?” Derrida’s Ends of Man
This short text was written in December 2005, as an end of term paper for an undergraduate philosophy course at SUNY Purchase taught by Prof. Frank Farrell, who also supervised my philosophy senior thesis. I’m somewhat reluctant to share such premature work, but at the same time feel some urge to make available writing which…
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CENSOR
Q. and not U. (or, Conspiracy Means To Breathe Together) a plunderphonic radio play https://files.cargocollective.com/c1063507/qandnotu.mp3 Presented as part of Disinformation Cultures Dramatis personae: Jean-Luc Picard Speech 2 Text Wu Ming 1 Q-grifter Guinan Q.(Star Trek) James Bond Q.(Bond) 45 Consigliere Chorus Talking Head Jodi Dean Q.(Bond 2) Counselor Troi Talking Head 2 Stéphane…
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The Real Cost of Austerity
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has once again brought the economic failures of austerity politics into stark relief. It may very well be the case that once the economy has “recovered” we can expect further cuts to public services, but it is just as likely that we may, finally, be entering a new phase. The global…
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Comments on Rock
Comments on Rock Luciano Berio One evening, many years ago (maybe 15), in the house of Roberto Leydi, I heard a series of quite rare recordings curated by Alan Lomax, in 1938, for the Library of Congress in Washington. In these recordings Jelly Roll Morton, the first great jazz pianist, recounts the story of jazz…
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Significant Scores
“Significant scores” (2008) Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Napolitano Translated by Joseph Sannicandro “The musical instrument is a machine useful to man. But not only useful for producing notes, and not at all neutral; with its techniques, it is the concrete custodian of the choices made in continuity and, like buildings, has a memory. The sounds produced by…
Sound Propositions 