[Leonardo/ISAST Network] Leonardo Music Journal Vol. 14 Now Available!

[Leonardo/ISAST]

Leonardo Music Journal Vol. 14 Now Available!

Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor

"In my electronics . . . I try to find out what's there---not to make it do
what I want but to release what's there. . . . The object should teach you
what it wants to hear." 

With this simple but subversive recipe, David Tudor articulated a profound
shift in the aesthetics of electronic music. Inspired by Tudor (and other
composers/luthiers like David Behrman and Gordon Mumma) and aided by the
Lego-like modularity of integrated circuits, the experimental music
community in the 1970s adopted a new working method based on
seat-of-the-pants electronic engineering. The circuit -- whether home-made,
self-hacked or store-bought but scrutinized-to-death -- became the score.

A generation later, aspects of the Tudor aesthetic have spread well beyond
the avant-garde: hip-hop, house and other forms of dance music and
electronica share a similar obsession with the quirks intrinsic to specific
pieces of audio gear. Every pop producer has a signature gizmo. The latest
software plug-ins emulate obsolete but beloved hardware. We've become
virtuosos of Tudor's practice of listening to the object, but the regularity
and repetition of Techno could not be further from the tangle of Tudor's
music.

For this special volume of the Leonardo Music Journal, we invited authors to
consider all aspects of the work of David Tudor, the influence of Tudor's
ideas on their own work and/or the role of technological idiosyncrasies in
their composition, performance or production.

LMJ14 addresses the connections between Tudor's work and the work of
composers and performers today. It includes articles by Austin Clarkson,
James Pritchett, John Driscoll and Matt Rogalsky, Ron Kuivila, D'Arcy Philip
Gray, Nancy Perloff, Bill Viola, Ralph Jones, Qubais Reed Ghazala, Stephen
Jones, Douglas Kahn with John Bischoff, Norbert Moslang, Gert-Jan Prins and
Douglas Irving Repetto.

LMJ14 includes David Tudor: Live Electronic Music, an audio CD curated by
Ron Kuivila. The featured pieces on this CD trace the development of David
Tudor's solo electronic music during the period from 1970 to 1984. This work
has not been well documented, and these recordings have never before been
released.

The LMJ series is devoted to aesthetic and technical issues in contemporary
music and sonic arts. Currently under the editorship of Nicolas Collins,
each thematic issue features artists/writers from around the world,
representing a wide range of thematic viewpoints, and includes an audio CD
or CD-ROM. LMJ is available by subscription from the MIT Press.

For more information about this issue, including the complete table of
contents, please visit http://lmj.mit.edu