Experimental Music Cage and Beyond [Paperback]

Composer Michael Nyman's classic 1974 account of the postwar experimental tradition in music.This book, by the composer Michael Nyman, is a first-hand account of the postwar experimental tradition in music. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4' 33'' consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. Nyman's book traces the revolutionary attitudes that were developed towards concepts of time, space, sound, and composer/performer responsibility. It was within the experimental tradition that the seeds of musical minimalism were sown and the book contains reference to the early works of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.This book, by the composer Michael Nyman, is a first-hand account of the postwar experimental tradition in music. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4' 33'' consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. Nyman's book traces the revolutionary attitudes that were developed towards concepts of time, space, sound, and composer/performer responsibility. It was within the experimental tradition that the seeds of musical minimalism were sown and the book contains reference to the early works of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.Michael Nyman's book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing that developed alongside, and partly in opposition to, the postwar modernist tradition of composers such as Boulez, Berio, or Stockhausen. The experimentalist par excellence was John Cage whose legendary 4' 33'' consists of four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence to be performed on any instrument. Such pieces have a conceptual rather than purely musical starting point and radically challenge conventional notions of the musical work. Nyman's book traces the revolutionary attitudes that were developed toward concepts of time, space, sound, and composer/performer rli