Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory

By: Boretz, Benjamin

Book Overview

This new series of Norton books, devoted to informed discussion of contemporary music, draws principally upon articles first published in Perspectives of New Music, which Richard Kostelanetz has described as "among the most consistently interesting magazines in America." The Perspectives books will comprise a repository of the clearest thinking and most serious writing about twentieth-century music, forming an essential addition to the libraries of both professionals and amateurs concerned with understanding recent developments.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393005488
• ISBN13: 9780393005486
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Serious papers on new music and topics that seemed to matter more in the 1960s than they do now

While this collection of essays from important music theorists and composers is from 1972, the works themselves are from the 1960s and are concerned with ideas about perspective, chance, choice, and coherence. There are also papers on electronic music, polyphony in 12 tone music (that never went very far), psycho-acoustics, and other topics. In some ways these papers are quite dated. However, they are by very important thinkers about music and composers of the time. Babbitt, Boulez, Stockhausen, Boretz, Cone, Westergaard, and more. Much of the language is of the academic stripe that seems to me to be unnecessarily opaque in order to keep the unwashed from hearing and understanding what the priests are doing inside the temple. Other essays seem to be quite interesting if a bit abstract. The point is this. If you are interested in what was being debated and considered at the edge of art music in the 1960s, these are pretty informative and representative papers. If you want to learn about music that you actually listen to and you aren't addicted to this stuff, well, these papers probably won't mean much to you. Still, you can get copies of this book quite inexpensively. I particularly recommend the essays by Cone "A View from Delf" and "Beyond Analysis". They are interesting and useful.