John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression [Paperback]

John Zorn is one of the most prolific and active American composers/performers working today. He has been a fixture of New York's Downtown Scene since the mid-70s as a tireless proponent of avant-garde and experimental music. Despite the acclaim and respect he has achieved in America and abroad, very little attention has been paid to Zorn by musicologists or music theorists. Author John Brackett suggests that the reason for the relative paucity of writing on Zorn's music and musical thought has to do with the difficulties and challenges they present both for listeners and scholars. Zorn's musical languagean amalgam of seemingly incongruous techniques, sounds, styles, and genrescreates complex and sometimes confusing listening experiences that are difficult to categorize in terms of overarching thematic or narrative design. Brackett offers a number of perspectives for understanding Zorn's music and musical practices, while challenging certain assumptions that limit the ways in which contemporary music is typically addressed.

The composerJohn Zornlikes to think of himself as an outsider, wallowing in paradoxes, and he's done a terrific job of it. The musicologist John Brackett has written what is apparently the first book-length study of the man's music, titledJohn Zorn: Tradition and Transgression. He's done not quite so terrific a job, but for anyone interested in an initial foray into the thickets of complexity and contradiction enveloping Zorn and his poetics (a Brackettian favorite), this is a start. It's a tribute to Zorn, who was born in 1953, that he has remained so stubbornly unknown to the general public for so long; he's been making his music on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for more than thirty years. Part of his problemif it is a problem for a defiant outsider, who is seemingly willing to offend anyone who might help propel him into the mainstreamis his determined catholicity of taste. He has undertaken free improvisatil£+