Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording

David Grubbs

Published by Duke University Press 2014

Records Ruin the Landscape

John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording

David Grubbs

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822377108

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

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 Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Reviews

“An engaging book.”

-- David Revill Times Higher Education

“The premise of [Grubbs’s] understandably authoritative first book is that experimental music’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 music—something unthinkable in the 1960s.”

-- David Sheppard Mojo

“For compositions whose whole raison d’être is to generate a drastically different realization with every performance . . . no recording of any one performance could be said to ‘be’ the piece. . . . David Grubbs’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.”

-- Dave Mandl Los Angeles Review of Books

“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 Grubbs’s sensitivity as a writer that a sympathetic picture emerges of these musicians, who seem often to be railing against hierarchies they can’t quite help being part of.”

-- Frances Morgan The Wire

"One of the chief joys of this book is that [it] 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. For this, one should be thankful—including for the recordings that allow David Grubbs’ act of imagination and scholarship to have taken place."

-- Daniel Herwitz Critical Inquiry

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xxiii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
ONE Henry Flynt on the Air Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
TWO Landscape with Cage Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
THREE John Cage, Recording Artist Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	67
FOUR The Antiques Trade Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	105
FIVE Remove the Records from Texas Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	135
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
Selected Discography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	195
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 248
Illustrations
- Other: 19 photographs

eBook

Published: March 3, 2014
ISBN: 9780822377108