The journal Source: Music of the Avant-garde was and remains a seminal source for materials on the heyday of experimental music and arts. Conceived in 1966 and published to 1973, it included some of the most important composers and artists of the time: John Cage, Harry Partch, David Tudor, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, and many others. A pathbreaking publication, Source documented crucial changes in performance practice and live electronics, computer music, notation and event scores, theater and installations, intermedia and technology, politics and the social roles of composers and performers, and innovations in the sound of music.
Larry Austin was the founding editor of Source and is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of North Texas. Douglas Kahn is the author of Noise Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, and a Research Professor at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney.
“Source: Music of the Avant-garde, 1966-1973 brings its extraordinary, historical explorations and experimentations to a new audience of contemporary music devotees, researchers, composers, students, and educators. This welcome volume reproduces Source's original, provocative issues in an unparalleled repository of articles, scores, graphics, photos, editorials, and reviews, featuring contributions by some of the 20th century’s leading experimental and pioneering composers and performers. Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn have provided us with a true gem and an invaluable resource for future study.”
—Elainie Lillios, Associate Professor of Composition at Bowling Green State University
“Source was an audacious piece of new music entrepreneurship that could only have happened in the 1960s. I well recall discovering it in the stacks at the university library, flipping the pages and learning that you could just jump right off the edge of the known musical world. This was not a journal that provided information or mere perspectives on new music: it showed you the music itself. It brought you into direct contact with the excitement, provocation, beauty, audacity, ingenuity, and insight of the leading experimental musicians of the day. You might be offended, intrigued, inspired, amused, baffled, but the point was that you were right in there, seeing what was going on and deciding for yourself what you wanted to make out of it. How wonderful it is for this liberating historical moment to be reincarnated; who knows what musical adventures this re-publication will inspire.”
—James Pritchett, author of The Music of John Cage
“This long awaited reissue of important documents from the late 1960s, including graphic scores, essays, and articles, is an indispensable anthology of cross-disciplinary ideas about music and composition. This is a fascinating treasure trove of musical counterculture, absolutely relevant today.”
—Christian Marclay, visual artist and composer
“Source was an essential document of its time, a music magazine that made beautiful music—and beautiful art. This was one of the reasons why I was delighted to be able to reissue all the recordings on a three CD set on Pogus. This book now puts all the print issues in one’s hand, bringing us as close to having Source again as we are ever likely to get."
—Al Margolis, Pogus Productions (www.pogus.com)
“There was a glorious moment at the cusp of the 1970s when all our musical road maps became obsolete overnight. Young composers relied instead on the accounts of voyageurs, many of which were printed in the pages of Source. Austin and Kahn’s meticulous compendium carries us back to that heady, pre-Web time when anything seemed possible.”
—Nicolas Collins, Editor-in-Chief, Leonardo Music Journal
396 pp.10 x 8Illus: 68 b/w photographs, 128 line illustrations
9780520267459$36.95|£31.00Paper
Jul 2011