Innovation in Science Education—World-Wide by Albert V. Baez (review)

258 Books He has divided his examples into four groups: (1) Lace that is in design and technique f i d y rooted in tradition. (2) Lace that has been made with the traditional techniques but where the design concepts are new. (3)Lace that showsa breakaway from tradition in every respect. The emphasis is on texture and structure, whilst ornamentation becomes less important. New materials and constructions make their appearance. (4) Lace that goesfar beyond the hitherto accepted boundaries; they take on 3dimensional form and a great increase in size. With the exception of two pieces from the U.S.A., the examples illustrated were made in Europe, with Germany, Czechoslovakia and Italy particularly well represented. Four illustrations are in colour, 200 in black and white. The text is brief and rather sketchy. The historical notes serve to put into perspective the main theme of the book. The diagrammatic drawings of the basic knotsand systemsof threadinterlacing are an aid to distinguishing the various techniques. Essentially this is a picture book of interest to artists and designers who are excited by and involved with making 2- and 3dimensional textile constructions. It is intended to give stimulus to lace makers in search of new ideas. Mind Models: New Forms of Musical EGperience. Roger Reynolds. Praeger, 1975.238pp., illus. $13.50Reviewed by J o b Grayson* Discursiveand written in the kind of quasi-technical jargon that one encounters too often, Reynolds’ book takes up 230 pages and it left me at a loss. The book is on new musical forms; it contains brief descriptions of a number of recent compositions, largely by musicians who are a part of Reynolds’personal past: Ashleyand Mumma, members of the ONCE group, of which Reynolds was a founder and short-time member; Lucier, a kindred spirit; Yuasa and Ichiyanagi-Reynolds met them while on a scholarship to Japan; Johnston and Martirano of ChampaignUrbana , where, at the University of Illinois, Reynolds gavesome lectures that werethe basis of this book. These fewexamples are, in fact chosen by him to be illustrations of his theoretical thesiswhatever it is. There is a superficial coverage of electronic music in the U.S.A., prefaced by some perfunctory descriptions that do not explain enough. The discussion, for example, of computer techniques, new notational practices and multiphonics is poorly treated. But, besides the above cursory technical sections, there is, surprisingly enough, a considerable amount of text devoted to a superficial coverage of the currently fashionable aspects of the workings of the brain: EEG, alpha brain waves, REM, meditation and hypnotism, sensitivity, biofeedback and encounter therapy. Above all, he draws attention to the effect of hallucinogenic drugs, a subject Reynolds seems to be both fascinated by and ambivalent about. The sections on electronics etc. are accompanied by graphs and diagrams that are usually superfluous and sometimes not even referred to in the text. Why this emphasis onthe mental? It turns out that he makes a dogmatic plea for music to develop a ‘new’social function. The ‘old’must ge-since concert, or ‘public’music as Reynolds calls it, ‘is becoming increasingly impossible to support’; the ‘new’ music can ‘provide more easily implemented alternatives to encounter groups, communes, and drugs, “channelizing” aesthetic experience into a servicetailored for specialized, small group tastes or towards more elemental, more apparently fundamental and unadorned manipulations worked upon polyglot audiences’. By ‘more elemental’ he means something like a ‘rock’ music concert, which Reynolds regards as ‘more functionally suited to some of the needs of our era’, since ‘the rock ritual encloses where that of the traditional concert radiates’; the transformation from the old to the new,weare told, ‘could come about through a large scale investment in the expansion of mixed media techniques’. Obviously, the ‘new’ includes electronics, mixed media, Happenings, processmethods, etc., in other words, the approach for which the University of California at San Diego, where Reynolds works, is well-known. To this catalogue he adds the possibilityof direct manipulation of the mind. He ispreoccupied with music that produces strong emotional effects on listeners. Though I find thisa refreshingdeparture from the dry formalism of serial music, I suspect his discussion of mental manipulation, for it is highly speculative...