Experimental Music Notebooks. (book – ix, 172pp)  Harwood Academic Publishers (Chur/Reading, 1994).

No longer on the Taylor and Francis site but still available here and there.

Experimental Music Notebooks is about experimenting with sound: it is a book made for today’s and tomorrow’s music educator. The book describes a workshop approach for those who have trouble finding a way into the appreciation of experimental music. This approach enables teachers from primary, secondary and higher education, and within the community, to create circumstances for music experimentation for the classroom, as well as in other sometimes unusual contexts. Special points of focus include awareness of organising sounds through listening, experiencing soundscapes in various spaces, finding parallels with the sister arts, using sounds as sources for music-making, electroacoustic music, libertarian approaches to music-making, new complexities, simplicities and performance practices, audio-visual sonic art, and fusion and assimilation in experimental (popular) music.

Table of Contents

PART 1

I. INTRODUCTION

 

The approach

 

II. PRELIMINARY CHAPTER – GETTING THINGS STARTED

 

The musical world of sounds – Delineating our area of focus

Awareness/1: What one must do first – listen!

Awareness/2: Experimentation in the sister arts

A few introductory remarks on music education in our area

 

PART 2 – THE INNER CHAPTERS

III. SOUND SOURCES AND COLOUR

 

Sound = a source

Music = a source of inspiration and of sounds

A special case: Electroacoustic music

 

IV. SPATIAL AWARENESS

 

Outside/1: The concert hall as concert hall

Outside/2: The world as concert hall

Inside/1: The home as concert hall

Inside/2: Your headphones as concert hall

 

V. NOTATION / FORM / INTERPRETATION / PERFORMANCE

 

Opening: Technique (tekhne) vs. technology (tekhnologia)

Freeing things up/1: Interpretation <-> improvisation

Freeing things up/2: Aleatoric thinking <-> indeterminacy

Freeing things up/3: New notations and open form

Closing things up: New complexities … and New simplicities

Summing things up: New performance practices

A special subject: Audio-visual approaches

 

PART 3

VI. WORKSHOP APPROACHES FOR THE NINETIES

 

Workshops/1: At schools

Workshops/2: In the community

Workshops/3: Among musicians

 

VII. A FEW CLOSING WORDS

APPENDICES

 

A glossary for chapter III

Chapter II – From the bookshelf: a reading list for music education

Chapter III – Reading list and repertoire suggestions

Chapter IV – Reading list and repertoire suggestions

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY + INDEX OF NAMES