Synopses & Reviews
John Cageand#39;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 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 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, 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 eraand#39;s experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape, Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.
Review
andquot;Records Ruin the Landscape is a pleasure to read, full of wonderful anecdotes and historical material. David Grubbs approaches John Cage and his legacy from a new and refreshing angle, by examining the vexed relationship of experimental and improvised music to recording and phonography. The questions that he posesandmdash;about the ontology and potentiality of recording in relation to live performance, improvisation, chance, and indeterminacyandmdash;are important, and he answers them in smart and provocative ways.andquot;
Review
andquot;David Grubbs delivers a vital, searching treatise on the volatility of musical listening and the seeminging encyclopedic record of the avant-garde we have inherited from the 1960s, an era vastly different from our own in ways that are newly unpacked here. John Cage and his contemporariesand#39; squemishness about the record and its and#39;thingnessand#39; are compellingly at odds with Grubbsand#39;s own phonophilia.andquot;
Review
andquot;Beautifully written and brimming with unexpected insights, Records Ruin the Landscape will undoubtedly inspire its readers to collect, download, and/or stream the wonderfully broad range of musicians and composers it examines. With a remarkable level of attentiveness, expertise, and care, David Grubbsand#39;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 it means to listen to the past in the present.andquot;
Review
“An engaging book.” David Revill
Review
andldquo;The premise of [Grubbsandrsquo;s] understandably authoritative first book is that experimental musicandrsquo;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 musicandmdash;something unthinkable in the 1960s.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;For compositions whose whole raison dandrsquo;andecirc;tre is to generate a drastically different realization with every performance . . . no recording of any one performance could be said to andlsquo;beandrsquo; the piece. . . . David Grubbsandrsquo;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.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;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 Grubbsandrsquo;s sensitivity as a writer that sympathetic picture merges of these musicians, who seem often to be railing against hierarchies they canandrsquo;t quite help being part of.andrdquo;
Review
andquot;One of the chief joys of this book is that 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. and#160;For this, one should be thankfulandmdash;including for the recordings that allow David Grubbsandrsquo; act of imagination and scholarship to have taken place.andquot;
Review
andldquo;An engaging book.andrdquo;
Synopsis
John 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.
About the Author
David Grubbs is Associate 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 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 cross-disciplinary 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 Sanduuml;ddeutsche Zeitung.
Table of Contents
Preface 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