Sound Commitments

Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties

Robert Adlington

Explores the rich and complex encounter between avant-garde music and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s
Draws on new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period
Explores the relevance of avant-garde music to implementing social change

Sound Commitments

Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties

Robert Adlington

Description

The role of popular music is widely recognized in giving voice to radical political views, the plight of the oppressed, and the desire for social change. Avant-garde music, by contrast, is often thought to prioritize the pursuit of new technical or conceptual territory over issues of human and social concern. Yet throughout the activist 1960s, many avant-garde musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Intensely involved in the era's social and political upheavals, they often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. Yet how could avant-garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny, initiated clique? In answer, Sound Commitments, examines the encounter of avant-garde music and "the Sixties" across a range of genres, aesthetic positions and geographical locations. Through music for the concert hall, tape and electronic music, jazz and improvisation, participatory "events," performance art, and experimental popular music, the essays in this volume explore developments in the United States, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan and parts of the "Third World," delving into the deep richness of avant-garde musicians' response to the decade's defining cultural shifts.

Featuring new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period in each chapter, Sound Commitments will appeal to researchers and advanced students in the fields of post-war music, cultures of the 1960s, and the avant-garde, as well as to an informed general readership.

Sound Commitments

Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties

Robert Adlington

List of contributors
Introduction: Avant-garde Music and the Sixties
Robert Adlington
1. Avant-garde-Some Introductory Notes on the Politics of a Label
Hubert van den Berg
IDEOLOGIES
2. "Demolish Serious Culture!": Henry Flynt and Workers World Party
Benjamin Piekut
3. Forms of Opposition at the 'Politiek-Demonstratief Experimenteel' Concert
Robert Adlington
4. Aesthetic Theories and Revolutionary Practice: Nikolaus A. Huber and Clytus Gottwald in Dissent
Beate Kutschke
RETHINKING THE POPULAR
5. "Music is a Universal Human Right": Musica Elettronica Viva
Amy C. Beal
6. The Problem of the Political in Steve Reich's Come Out
Sumanth Gopinath
7. The Politics of Presque rien
Eric Drott
POLITICISING PERFORMANCE
8. ONCE and the Sixties
Ralf Dietrich
9. "Scream Against the Sky": Japanese Avant-garde Music in the Sixties
Yayoi Uno Everett
THE CHALLENGE OF INSTITUTIONALISATION
1. . After the October Revolution: The Jazz Avant-garde in New York, 1964-65
Bernard Gendron
11. American Cultural Diplomacy and the Mediation of Avant-garde Music
Danielle Fosler-Lussier
12. From Scriabin to Pink Floyd: the ANS Synthesizer and the Politics of Soviet Music Between Thaw and Stagnation
Peter J. Schmelz
Index

Sound Commitments

Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties

Robert Adlington

Author Information

Robert Adlington is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Nottingham. He has written extensively on contemporary classical music, including monographs on Harrison Birtwistle (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Louis Andriessen (Ashgate, 2004). His current research explores music and politics in Amsterdam between 1966 and 1973, and has resulted in book chapters and articles in Journal of Musicology and Cambridge Opera Journal.

Sound Commitments

Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties

Robert Adlington

Reviews and Awards

"Recounting little-known tales...confirms Sound Commitments value, in tracing avant-garde sounds' movement from the academy to the streets. More volumes of this quality about those times would be welcome." --Jazz Word

"In popular discourse, that cantankerous and forward-looking decade the 1960s has been far too much smoothed over, redrawn as a climax of fatuous idealism that ultimately produced only new wrinkles in fashion. Adlington's bracingly revealing volume of internationally-chosen case studies in avant-garde music restores that brave era to us as we lived it, with quotations from protagonists on all sides that remind us how much was at stake - and how much we need a resurgence of that idealism today."--Kyle Gann

"Sound Commitments illuminates a decade that challenged prejudice, defeatism, dogma, and victorianism. Adlington's contributors don't smooth over the fault lines, but cover an ambitious variety of nations, styles, media, and agendas. We are left with a sense of failed idealism, but early 21st-century readers are left to ask, ruefully: isn't that better than no idealism whatsoever?"--Arved Ashby, Ohio State University, editor of The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology

"Makes a convincing case for the continued vigor of the musical avant-garde in the post-World War II period. The essays are impressive both for their individual depth and for their collective geographical and conceptual range."--Jonathan Bernard, University of Washington