eBook

Instruments for New Music

Thomas Patteson

2015

Overview

Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film-these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these devices were also the implements of a musical revolution.Instruments for New Musictraces a diffuse network of cultural agents who shared the belief that a truly modern music could be attained only through a radical challenge to the technological foundations of the art. Centered in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, the movement to create new instruments encompassed a broad spectrum of experiments, from the exploration of microtonal tunings and exotic tone colors to the ability to compose directly for automatic musical machines. This movement comprised composers, inventors, and visual artists, including Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, Jörg Mager, Friedrich Trautwein, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttmann, and Oskar Fischinger. Patteson's fascinating study combines an artifact-oriented history of new music in the early twentieth century with an astute revisiting of still-relevant debates about the relationship between technology and the arts.

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Subject: acoustic technology / Cultural and media studies / Electronic musical instruments / Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt / History / History & Criticism / History of engineering and technology / Media studies / MUSIC / Music and technology / Music and technology - History / Musical instruments / Paul Hindemith / Philosophy and aesthetics / Society and culture: general / Society and Social Sciences / Sound film / Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, Industrial processes / Technology: general issues / The Arts / Theory of music and musicology / Timbre
• ISBN: 9780520963122, 0520963121, 9780520288027, 0520288025