Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (review)

I was sitting in a North Texas bar with my copy of Audio Culture on the counter in front of me. A neatly dressed man in his late 30s who had just come to the bar to buy a drink struck up a conversation with my companion and me while he waited for service. When he saw the book, our conversation turned to its contents. Was Karlheinz Stockhausen included? (There are two essays by the composer.) Was there an essay about experimental music in the book? (There is a whole section devoted to experimental music.) Did it contain a good reference section? (There are seven different sections.) Picking up the book, he thumbed through its pages. I watched him scan the various essays. Then he took out his pen and jotted down the ISBN number. An aspiring electronic musician, he said he had been looking for a book "like this one" to read.

I tell this story because it illustrates the kind of reaction many readers will have toward Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner's Audio Culture. I, for one, annotated the book severely—I marked it up in various colors of highlighters and pens and dogeared its pages—so much of what it offers is vital to my work and even those articles that are not fascinated me nonetheless. To be honest, no one looking at the collection of 57 well-chosen essays written by some of the biggest names in music and reprinted from books and publications well noted for their contribution to music theory will be able to resist reading and buying the book.

In fact, there is so much that makes this book valuable that it is difficult to name it all. Both the content and the structure of Audio Culture add to its strength. Essays by futurist Luigi Russolo, musician Edgard Varèse, theorist Marshall McLuhan, several by Brian Eno, Pauline Oliveros, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco, several by John Cage, artist László Moholy-Nagy and, of course, Stockhausen are among the many eclectic readings included in the book. Some of the most interesting essays come from Mary Russo and Daniel Warner ("Rough Music, Futurism, and Postpunk Industrial Noise Bands"), Simon Reynolds ("Noise" and "Post-Rock"), McLuhan ("Visual and Acoustic Space"), Ola Stockfelt ("Adequate Modes of Listening") and Kim Cascone ("The Aesthetics of Failure"). Essays at times reference one another (as in Henry Cowell talking about Varèse in "The Joys of Noise"), engage in debate (as in Iain Chambers and Pierre Schaeffer talking about listening), and build upon others' theories (as in Russo and Warner's talking about Russolo's futurist views). The end result is a complete and cohesive treatment of modern music. Anyone who has edited a collection knows that such an outcome is not an easy one to attain, but it is certainly achieved here.

Divided into two parts, "Theories" and "Practices," containing three and six sections respectively, Audio Culture offers essays that address such topics as definitions and approaches to music, modes of listening, electronic reproduction, types of music, DJ culture and electronica, to name just a few. Included with the essays is, as suggested previously, an abundance of reference material: a chronology of modern music, a glossary, selected discography and selected bibliography, notes for quotations and an index of quotations, as well as a general index. Each section opens with a series of quotes contextualizing the theme or pertaining directly to it. Aldous Huxley's comment about "the twentieth century" being known as "the Age of Noise" helps to kick off the section "Music and Its Others: Noise, Sound, and Silence," for example. Each section and chapter contains an introduction by the editors. Introductions for chapters are set apart from the essay by a gray textbox.

As one would expect from a book on music, no images are included. But it may seem strange to many readers that no CD-ROM accompanies it...