Robert Adlington (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195336641
- eISBN:
- 9780199868551
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195336641.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western, Popular
During the 1960s many avant‐garde musicians were intensely involved in the era's social and political upheavals, and often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. This volume examines the ...
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During the 1960s many avant‐garde musicians were intensely involved in the era's social and political upheavals, and often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. This volume examines the encounter of avant‐garde music and ‘the sixties’, across a range of genres, aesthetic positions, and geographical locations. Rather than providing a comprehensive survey, the intention is to give an indication of the richness of avant‐garde musicians' response to the decade's defining cultural shifts. Many of these musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Yet this stance threw up some sharp dilemmas. For instance, how could institutional and governmental subsidy for recondite music continue to be justified in the context of demands for democratised decision‐making in cultural affairs? How was the cultural baggage of established performance institutions (such as concert halls, symphony orchestras, and broadcasting organizations) to be reconciled with a radical critique of bourgeois values? Most fundamentally, how could avant‐garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny, initiated clique? The contributors address music for the concert hall, tape and electronic music, jazz and improvisation, participatory ‘events’, performance art, and experimental popular music, and explore developments in the United States, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan, and parts of the so‐called ‘Third World’. Each chapter draws on new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period.Less
During the 1960s many avant‐garde musicians were intensely involved in the era's social and political upheavals, and often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. This volume examines the encounter of avant‐garde music and ‘the sixties’, across a range of genres, aesthetic positions, and geographical locations. Rather than providing a comprehensive survey, the intention is to give an indication of the richness of avant‐garde musicians' response to the decade's defining cultural shifts. Many of these musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Yet this stance threw up some sharp dilemmas. For instance, how could institutional and governmental subsidy for recondite music continue to be justified in the context of demands for democratised decision‐making in cultural affairs? How was the cultural baggage of established performance institutions (such as concert halls, symphony orchestras, and broadcasting organizations) to be reconciled with a radical critique of bourgeois values? Most fundamentally, how could avant‐garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny, initiated clique? The contributors address music for the concert hall, tape and electronic music, jazz and improvisation, participatory ‘events’, performance art, and experimental popular music, and explore developments in the United States, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan, and parts of the so‐called ‘Third World’. Each chapter draws on new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period.
Robert Adlington
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195336641
- eISBN:
- 9780199868551
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195336641.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western, Popular
The artistic avant‐garde, many of its theorists seem to agree, is a culture of subversion. Yet recent Anglo‐American musicology has tended to emphasise avant‐garde music's disavowal of issues of ...
More
The artistic avant‐garde, many of its theorists seem to agree, is a culture of subversion. Yet recent Anglo‐American musicology has tended to emphasise avant‐garde music's disavowal of issues of social and political concern. This volume assesses the intense engagement of many avant‐garde musicians in the tumultuous cultural and political developments of the 1960s, and the complex and often ambivalent status of their efforts when viewed in the wider social context. These musicians' conviction that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows inevitably threw up some sharp dilemmas. Each chapter is briefly summarized.Less
The artistic avant‐garde, many of its theorists seem to agree, is a culture of subversion. Yet recent Anglo‐American musicology has tended to emphasise avant‐garde music's disavowal of issues of social and political concern. This volume assesses the intense engagement of many avant‐garde musicians in the tumultuous cultural and political developments of the 1960s, and the complex and often ambivalent status of their efforts when viewed in the wider social context. These musicians' conviction that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows inevitably threw up some sharp dilemmas. Each chapter is briefly summarized.
Zahid R. Chaudhary
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816677481
- eISBN:
- 9781452946023
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816677481.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Photography
This book provides a philosophical and historical account of early photography in India that focuses on how aesthetic experiments in colonial photography changed the nature of perception. Considering ...
More
This book provides a philosophical and historical account of early photography in India that focuses on how aesthetic experiments in colonial photography changed the nature of perception. Considering photographs from the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 along with landscape, portraiture, and famine photography, this book explores larger issues of truth, memory, and embodiment. This book scrutinizes the colonial context to understand the production of sense itself, proposing a new theory of interpreting the historical difference of aesthetic forms. In rereading colonial photographic images, it shows how the histories of colonialism became aesthetically, mimetically, and perceptually generative. It suggests that photography arrived in India not only as a technology of the colonial state but also as an instrument that eventually extended and transformed sight for photographers and the body politic, both British and Indian.Less
This book provides a philosophical and historical account of early photography in India that focuses on how aesthetic experiments in colonial photography changed the nature of perception. Considering photographs from the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 along with landscape, portraiture, and famine photography, this book explores larger issues of truth, memory, and embodiment. This book scrutinizes the colonial context to understand the production of sense itself, proposing a new theory of interpreting the historical difference of aesthetic forms. In rereading colonial photographic images, it shows how the histories of colonialism became aesthetically, mimetically, and perceptually generative. It suggests that photography arrived in India not only as a technology of the colonial state but also as an instrument that eventually extended and transformed sight for photographers and the body politic, both British and Indian.
