Stories about new musical instruments are often told as quests for new kinds of sounds. The Composer's Black Box asks, What happens when new musical instruments produce not only new sounds but also new dynamics of musical agency and control? And what consequences do those new dynamics have for musicality beyond sound? With a focus on five key figures—Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, Donald Buchla, Alvin Lucier, and Sun Ra—this book explores how scientific and technological developments in mid-twentieth-century America galvanized musicians to reconfigure their conceptions of sociality, freedom, and the creative self. Theodore Gordon shows how cybernetic thinking in a range of disciplines, from experimental music to jazz and electrical engineering, has shaped musical techniques and technologies and changed what it means to be a composer—or, more broadly, a music-making human—in an increasingly informational world.
Theodore Gordon is Assistant Professor of Music at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
"How can information systems make music? And when they do what happens to composers? This fascinating book reveals how electronic music cracked open questions of what it meant to be human at the dawn of the digital age. Read it, and you’ll never hear a synthesizer quite the same way again."—Fred Turner, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties
"In this electrifying study, Theodore Gordon convincingly portrays the musical instruments of the 1960s as experimental tools for rethinking creative agency. Reveling in the jetsam of the military industrial complex, this book’s artists, misfits, and dreamers launched new quests for uncertainty that ever deepened the eternal problem of control and chance."—Ben Piekut, author of Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem
"Gordon tells five compelling stories of musical creativity and cybernetics in the Information Age. But this is not a tale of technological determinism. The Composer’s Black Box shows us not how music was shaped by oscillators, circuit boards, and voltage controls but how deeply all of this depended on the imaginations of the people who used these technologies, their diverse notions of agency, and, ultimately, their visions of freedom and control."—Emily I. Dolan, author of The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre
"At last we have a detailed, sophisticated history of the impact cybernetic thinking had on the music of the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. Gordon’s book represents an important intervention into postwar music history—one that is as urgent as ever, given cybernetics’ role in laying the groundwork for contemporary digital culture.”—Eric Drott, author of Streaming Music, Streaming Capital
"The Composer’s Black Box offers a new and significant examination of what it means to be a composer (or 'musicking human subject') in a cybernetic world. The book enriches our histories of music technology while addressing broader questions of composerly subjectivity and identity, showing how these are deeply entangled with musical instruments with agentic capabilities of their own. Bringing new evidence to light on Subotnik, Buchla, Oliveros, Lucier, Moog, and Sun Ra, Gordon revises our understanding of what these figures were up to and navigating at formative points in their careers. His in-depth look at these musicians adds up to a new view of music and the impacts of technoscience on culture."—Deirdre Loughridge, author of Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740/2020
286 pp.6 x 9Illus: 20 b/w figures
9780520410206$29.95|£25.00Paper
Dec 2025