The musician as philosopher

by Michael Gallope

ISBN: 9780226831763

Published: 2024-03-15

"From 1958 to 1978 in New York a series of atmospheric irruptions emerged in the history of music, fraught with dissonance, obscurity, and volume. Beyond expanding musical resources into dissonance and noise with a familiar polemical edge, a group of musicians were thinking with sound: crafting metaphysical portals, aiming one to go somewhere, to get out of oneself. For many artists and thinkers of the postwar period, the self was taken to be ideological, given, normal. Their strange, intense, disorienting music was a way out, beyond, through the other, through the collective, through an ecstatic mystery. Their work had material underpinnings: radios, amplifiers, televisions, multi-track recording studios, and long-playing records. Some of the results were intricate, esoteric, and fractured; some of it oceanic and inconsistent. It was often difficult to tell the difference. In this new project, Michael Gallope discusses the work of several musicians who played key roles in these...