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Noise, water, meat : a history of sound in the arts / Douglas Kahn.

Author(s): Kahn, Douglas, 1951-

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Library Item Details

Main Title

Noise, water, meat : a history of sound in the arts

Author(s)

Kahn, Douglas, 1951-

Publisher

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2001.

Collation

ix, 455 p. : ill.
24 cm.

Summary

"In this, interdisciplinary history and theory of sound in the arts, Douglas Kahn reads the twentieth century by listening to it - to the emphatic and exceptional sounds of modernism and those on the cusp of postmodernism, recorded sound, noise, silence, the fluid sounds of immersion and dripping, and the meat voices of viruses, screams, and bestial cries. Focusing on Europe in the first half of the century and the United States in the postwar years, Kahn explores aural activities in literature, music, visual arts, theater, and film. Placing aurality at the center of the history of the arts, he revisits key artistic questions, listening to the sounds that drown out the politics and poetics that generated them. Artists discussed include Antonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, John Cage, Sergei Eisenstein, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Lugi Russolo, and Dziga Vertov."--Jacket.

ISBN

0262611724

Dewey Class

700

Contents

Listening through History; Prelude: Modernism; Explanations and Qualifications --
pt. I. Significant Noises. 1. Immersed in Noise. 2. Noises of the Avant-Garde --
pt. II. Drawing the Line: Music, Noise, and Phonography. 3. Concerning the Line. 4. The Sound of Music. 5. Ubiquitous Recording --
pt. III. The Impossible Inaudible. 6. John Cage: Silence and Silencing. 7. Nondissipative Sounds and the Impossible Inaudible. 8. The Parameters of All Sound --
pt. IV. Water Flows and Flux. 9. A Short Art History of Water Sound. 10. In the Wake of Dripping: New York at Midcentury --
pt. V. Meat Voices. 11. Two Sounds of the Virus: William Burroughs's Pure Meat Method. 12. Cruelty and the Beast: Antonin Artaud and Michael McClure.

Language

English

Subject

Arts, Modern -- 20th century.
Sound in art.

BRN

9033