Series: California Studies in 20th-Century Music

In this pioneering, erudite study of a pivotal era in the arts, Walter Frisch examines music and its relationship to early modernism in the Austro-German sphere. Seeking to explore the period on its own terms, Frisch questions the common assumption that works created from the later 1870s through World War I were transitional between late romanticism and high modernism. Drawing...

Pierre Schaeffer's In Search of a Concrete Music (À la recherche d'une musique concrète) has long been considered a classic text in electroacoustic music and sound recording. Now Schaeffer's pioneering work—at once a journal of his experiments in sound composition and a treatise on the raison d'être of "concrete music"—is available for the first time in English translation. Schaeffer's theories...

Belle époque Paris adored dance. Whether at the music hall or in more refined theatres, audiences flocked to see the spectacles offered to them by the likes of Isadora Duncan, Diaghilev’s flashy company, or an embarrassment of Salomes. After languishing in the shadow of opera for much of the nineteenth century, ballet found itself part of this lively kinetic constellation....

Treatise on Musical Objects is regarded as Pierre Schaeffer’s most important work on music and its relationship with technology. Schaeffer expands his earlier research in musique concrète to suggest a methodology of working with sounds based on his experiences in radio broadcasting and the recording studio. Drawing on acoustics, physics, and physiology, but also on philosophy and the relationship between...