Dear readers,
This is officially the 100th entry at The Innerspace Connection. I have wonderful things planned for the coming month, featuring more great music and original content. Innerspace has grown significantly in its readership in the last few years, and now I’m looking to you to find out what content you’d like to see in the next 100 posts.
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It was a wonderful weekend. My girlfriend spend it spinning Franz Liszt LPs, and I picked up the next installment of John Cage’s lectures and writings for my library.
I queued up one of my new genre autoplaylists of modern-classical piano works while I read. The list consisted of composers like Zazie Von Einem Anderen Stern, Ólafur Arnalds, Dustin O’Halloran (who you likely know from his collaboration with Adam Wiltzie performing as A Winged Victory for the Sullen), and selections from Reinbert De Leeuv performing the early piano works of Erik Satie.
This put me in a nostalgic Windham Hill mood, so I also threw in George Winston’s simple but enjoyable piano solos into the mix. I finished off the set with the Interludes LP from Mannheim Steamroller which excerpts all the interludes from the Fresh Aire series of albums. All in all excellent “thinking music” for a summer afternoon exploring the compositional processes of John Cage.
I’m still working my way through SILENCE: Lectures and Writings [50th Anniversary Edition] from last year’s Christmas wish-list. My girlfriend and I stopped into our local used bookshop and I was delighted to come upon Cage’s Empty Words: Writings ’73-’78 which picks up right where SILENCE left off.
Empty Words is hardly casual bathroom reading, as you can see from the random page selection below. But in the full context of Cage’s writings it begins to make (some sort of) sense.
I’ve just ordered another reference text – Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner. I came upon the title quite by chance while researching texts on minimalism, and upon reading a particular review of the book I instantly ordered a copy. Here is the review – from CMJ New Music Monthly.
“[Audio Culture] is an indispensable primer full of the theories behind noise, Free-jazz, minimalism, 20th century composition, ambient, avant-garde and all the other crazy shit your square-ass friends can’t believe you actually like. With writing and interviews from all the players in question (quoting Stockhausen is five points in hipster bingo), this book deconstructs all the essential ideas: Cage’s themes, Eno’s strategies, Zorn’s games and Merzbow’s undying love of porno.” –CMJ New Music Monthly, 7/04
The humor and wit of the review sold me 100% before I’d even read the item summary on Amazon. This is particularly noteworthy as I rarely read texts written after the late 1970s. (I have an affinity for Golden Age science fiction and classics of music non-fiction.)
I’ll be certain to post a review of the title, along with a second modern publication which I’ll keep under my hat for the moment.
That’s it for now. Stay tuned for more, and if you haven’t already – Click here and take the survey now!
Happy 100!
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