Experimental Music since 1970. By Jennie Gottschalk.
Lauren Redhead · Music and Letters · 2017
A book such as Experimental Music since 1970 has been long awaited by practitioners and researchers in this area. Publications such as James Saunders’s Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music (Farnham, 2009), Saunders’s and John Lely’s Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation (London, 2012), and recent perspectives on individual musicians such as Daphne Oram (An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, 2016) and Gerhard Stäbler (Live the Opposite Daring: Gerhard Stäbler, Music, Graphic, Concept, Event, ed. Paul Attinello (Büdingen, 2015)), have begun to open up the field of experimental music to scholarly reflection and have covered a spectrum of perspectives. However, until recently there was no general overview of the field as it is today, nor an accessible guide for the undergraduate music student or curious listener. As a result, the publication of Experimental Music since 1970 has been met with a range of responses reflecting the fact that such a book cannot be all things to all readers and all practitioners within its field. Nevertheless, it deals with the most recent near-fifty years of experimental music practice, and the range of descriptions, listings, catalogues, and references presented here make the book an ideal starting point for anyone interested in this music.