Music 104/SART 66/68
Graduate Composition Seminar
Polansky/Wilson, Spring, '02

Notes for collaborative assignment with SA 66/68 (taught by Jack Wilson) and Music 104 (taught by Larry Polansky)

Assignment given: April 9
Assignment due: Sometime in the week of May 16-21


Some Suggested Readings and Websites on Sound Sculpture, Sound Art, Soundscapes, Acoustic Ecology

All Readings On Reserve in Paddock Music Library


books

Musical Instrument Design, Bart Hopkin. A collection of practical essays, drawn from Hopkin's many years of editing the journal Experimental Musical Instruments,  on construction of interesting musical instruments, including many non-traditional, installation-appropriate ones.

Environments of Musical Sculpture You Can Build, Phase 1. John Grayson, editor. A landmark and now out-of-print book on experimental sound sculpture, published in 1976 by Grayson's innovative A.R.C Editions in Canada. This is a xerox of the manuscript.

Interviews with Sound Artists. Rene Van Peer. Wonderful collection of interviews with important workers in the field, like Richard Lerman, Joe Jones, Christina Kubisch, and others. A useful book to understand the philosophies and aesthetics of some interesting pioneers (not necessarily all installation artists).

Sound and Structure and Sound and Silence. John Paynter. A very English approach to rethinking music in a kind of post-Cagean fashion, these books may be especially useful to the architectural students in the class as a simple way to become acquainted with some modern concepts of music and sound's redefinition. While there is some information on sonic installation and sculpture, these are more intended to kind of level the linguistic playing field vis a vis "music" and "sound".

The Tuning of the World and Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. Murray Schafer and Barry Truax (respectively). Two of the major texts to emerge from the Canadian-based world soundscape project. Schafer's book has become quite influential, and Truax's is an highly useful work in defining fundamental concepts of sound, acoustics, acoustic ecology, and in fact, the principles of electronic music. These are well-worth reading by both the musicians and the architects in the class.

Installation Art by Nicolas DeOiveira, et. al.

Space, Site and Intervention by Erika Suderburg

From Margin to Center by Julie Reiss
 
 


websites
 

Bill and Mary Buchen

the Mattress Factory (lots of installation art, including the work mary wright showed in class on wednesday)

richard lerman's site (do a google search for lots of other info about richard lerman)

douglas repetto's work and his dorkbot series

mary wright's project arbol

audium in san francisco

daniel goode's sound sculpture (website made by paul botelho)

a trimpin link (do a google search for more on him)

LaMonte Young and Mariam Zazeela

wolf vosteell (fluxus)