Robert Carl: Terry Riley’s In C
Oxford University Press, 2010
by Mark Zuckerman
Terry Riley’s In C (1964) is widely regarded as the seminal work in the minimalist canon. Its score is lean: one page of music and about a page and a half of performance advice. The music is a sequence of 53 modules: numbered linear fragments ranging in scope from a single note to an extended phrase (there’s exactly one of these, Module 35); most are short, oscillating sixteenth note patterns.
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Theresa Sauer: Notations 21
Published by Mark Batty Publisher, New York 2008
by Frank Retzel
“We live in an incredible time in music history – here is only a small sampling of the evidence.” With these words from the Preface, Theresa Sauer launches her 40-year revisiting of John Cage’s unique book Notations. As Cage sampled the notational evidence at mid-20th Century, Notations 21 is timely with its view of score practice early in the 21st century. Like Cage’s book, numerous composers are represented (here over 100), placed not according to the type of music but alphabetically.
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CRITIC-AT-LARGE: Leonard Lehrman
Is The Rest Really Just Noise?
©2008
Alex Ross’s long-awaited book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007, 624 pp., 21 photos, no musical examples), is the most ambitious overview of its kind since William Austin’s Music in the 20th Century (W.W. Norton, 1966, 708pp., 41 photos, many musical examples). Comparing the two may be instructive: Continue reading ‘CRITIC-AT-LARGE: Leonard Lehrman
Is The Rest Really Just Noise?’
Irving Fine, An American Composer in His Time
Phillip RAMEY: Irving Fine, An American Composer in His Time.
Pendragon Press ISBN 1-57647-116-0.
Reviewed by Leo Kraft (c) 2006
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A Dissenting View: Some Virtues But Too Many Voices
Phillip RAMEY: Irving Fine, An American Composer in His Time.
by Barry Drogin © 2006
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Learning to Listen to Each Other
by Barry Drogin ©2006
Kyle Gann: Music Downtown : Writings from the Village Voice. University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-22982-7.