After Sound: Toward a Critical Music

Printed on demand

Estimated despatch time 7 - 10 days

Other available formats

Introduction Music After Sound Silence and Collectivity
Chapter 1 : The Limits of Performing Cage: Ultra-red's SILENT|LISTEN
Chapter 2 : The Silent Network: The Music of Wandelweiser Language and Authority
Chapter 3 : "IDEAS MATTER": Zizek Sings Pussy Riot
Chapter 4 : Music to the Letter: Noise, Language, and the Letter from Schoenberg Speculation and Sense
Chapter 5 : The Debt of Philosophy: Music, Speculation, and The Sound of Debt
Chapter 6 : The Metaphoricity of Sense: Hong-Kai Wang's Music While We Work - with Lindsey Lodhie
Conclusion Music After Art
Acknowledgments Notes Selected
Bibliography
Index

About
Reviews
Explore

About

After Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of sound. This book is called After Sound because music and sound are, in Barrett's account, different entities. While musicology and sound art theory alike typically equate music with pure instrumental sound, or absolute music, Barrett posits music as an expanded field of artistic practice encompassing a range of different media and symbolic relationships. The works discussed in After Sound thus use performance, text scores, musical automata, video, social practice, and installation while they articulate a novel aesthetic space for a radically engaged musical practice. Coining the term "critical music," this book examines a diverse collection of art projects which intervene into specific political and philosophical conflicts by exploring music’s unique historical forms. Through a series of intimate studies of artworks surveyed from the visual and performing arts of the past ten years—Pussy Riot, Ultra-red, Hong-Kai Wang, Peter Ablinger, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and others—After Sound offers a significant revision to the way we think about music. The book as a whole offers a way out of one of the most vexing deadlocks of contemporary cultural criticism: the choice between a sound art effectively divorced from the formal-historical coordinates of musical practice and the hermetic music that dominates new music circles today.

Reviews

[A] provocative thesis. ... Barrett summarises Cage's manifold aims in one brilliant paragraph ... [and] shows he can write lucidly ... I learned a lot from this book

Book

Other available formats

Contents

Download queue