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Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: the New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), ISBN 978-0-520-26850-0 (hb), 978-0-520-26851-7 (pb)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 August 2013

Abstract

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Reviews
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Nyman, Michael, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar and Beal, Amy C., New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Piekut's first chapter contains a brief historiography of the conflicting definitions and discourses around American experimentalism from Henry Cowell's 1933 American Composers on American Music through to Nyman's Experimental Music (11–12). In his introduction, Piekut emphasizes the conflict already present in the way that musicians struggle to define their own art and music. He further contextualizes the way in which free jazz, performance art, and protest art contain many of the same sonic and social traces but are not often included in scholarship on experimentalism.

3 Foucault, Michel, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Latour, Bruno, ‘On Recalling ANT’, in Actor Network Theory and After, ed. Law, John and Hassard, John (Malden, MA: Blackwell/Sociological Review, 1999), 1526Google Scholar.

4 Von Glahn, Denise, The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

5 Piekut draws most notably on Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice; Latour, Bruno, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, and de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

6 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Texts that could have strengthened Piekut's argument include: Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991)Google Scholar; Krims, Adam, Music and Urban Geography (New York and London: Routledge, 2007)Google Scholar; Von Glahn, The Sounds of Place; and Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Nice, Richard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984)Google Scholar.

7 Gendron, Bernard, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Born, Georgina, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies.

8 Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club, 2–3.

9 Cameron, Catherine M., Dialectics in the Arts: the Rise of Experimentalism in American Music (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996)Google Scholar; Nyman, Experimental Music; Broyles, Michael, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Moten, Fred, In the Break: the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

11 Radano, Ronald, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gennari, John, Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewis, George, A Power Stronger than Itself: the AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Baraka, Amiri, ‘American Sexual Reference: Black Male’, in Home: Social Essays (New York: Morrow, 1966), 221–2Google Scholar.

13 Chua, Daniel, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.