Eight Lectures on Experimental Music

Brilliant lectures by the most influential experimental music composers of our time

In this brilliant collection, path-breaking figures of American experimental music discuss the meaning of their work at the turn of the twenty-first century. Presented between 1989 and 2002 at Wesleyan University, these captivating lectures provide rare insights by composers whose work has shaped our understanding of what it means to be experimental: Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young. Collected here for the first time, together these lectures tell the story of twentieth-century American experimental music, covering such topics as repetition, phase, drone, duration, collaboration, and technological innovation. Containing introductory comments by Lucier and the original question and answer sessions between the students and the composers, this book makes the theory and practice of experimental music available and accessible to a new generation of students, artists, and scholars.

ALVIN LUCIER is an American composer of experimental music. He is the author of Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music and co-author, with Douglas Simon, of Chambers: Scores and Interviews. Lucier was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music and received an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from the University of Plymouth, England. He taught at Brandeis University and Wesleyan University, from which he retired in 2011.