Microgroove continues John Corbett's exploration of diverse musics, with essays, interviews, and musician profiles that focus on jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical, rock, folk, blues, post-punk, and cartoon music. Corbett's approach to writing is as polymorphous as the music, ranging from oral history and journalistic portraiture to deeply engaged cultural critique. Corbett advocates for the relevance of "little" music, which despite its smaller audience is of enormous cultural significance. He writes on musicians as varied as Sun Ra, PJ Harvey, Koko Taylor, Steve Lacy, and Helmut Lachenmann. Among other topics, he discusses recording formats; the relationship between music and visual art, dance, and poetry; and, with Terri Kapsalis, the role of female orgasm sounds in contemporary popular music. Above all, Corbett privileges the importance of improvisation; he insists on the need to pay close attention to “other” music and celebrates its ability to open up pathways to new ideas, fresh modes of expression, and unforeseen ways of knowing. 

Product Description: In Planet Beethoven, Mina Yang makes the compelling case that classical music in the twenty-first century is just as vibrant and relevant as ever—but with significant changes that give us insight into the major cultural shifts of our day...read more

Product Description: John Zorn's acclaimed Arcana series, now in its seventh installment, is a major source on new music theory and practice in the twenty-first century. The most varied collection to date, Arcana VII includes personal essays by New Music luminaries Pat Metheny, Bryce Dessner, Irvine Arditti, Thurston Moore, Kenny Werner, Eugene Chadbourne and David Krakauer alongside articles on musical theory and practice by veterans Joe Morris, Matt Shipp, Ben Goldberg, Ches Smith, George Steel, Billy Martin, Hilda Paredes and Gloria Coates and insightful new views by younger musicians Chris Otto, James Moore, Theresa Wong, Shanir Blumenkranz, Jay Campbell, Du Yun, James Ilgenfritz, Chuck Bettis, Aya Nishina and many others...read more

Product Description: The Classical Revolution studies the recent emergence of a new brand of classical music, one rooted in “pre-modern” tonal traditions. Through polemical essays on the conflict between re-emergent tradition and the usual, bland “modern music” in which academic atonalism, process music and attempts to borrow some life from pop and world music form a rather isolated territory, Borstlap examines both the philosophical and aesthetic positions of these new classical composers, positions too often misunderstood because they create a new and unexpected category, not in the margins of music life but directly related to the central performance culture...read more

Product Description: A major resource for new music theory and practice in the twenty-first century, the acclaimed Arcana series looks at the inner workings of the artistic process through manifestoes, scores, interviews, notes and critical papers written by the practitioners themselves, providing insight into the work, mind and methodologies of some of the most remarkable creative minds of our time...read more

Product Description: Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music opens up a new way of thinking about the absence of women's music. It does not aim to find 'a solution' in a liberal feminist sense, but to discover new potentialities, new possibilities for thought and action...read more

Product Description: For centuries musicians have tapped into mysticism, magic and alchemy, embracing ritual, spell, incantation and prayer, and experimenting with esoteric approaches to harmony, pitch and vibration. In recent decades, avant-garde musicians have rediscovered these overlaps, as occultism has reinvented itself--through Buddhist and other Asian influences, Thelema and Chaos Magic--to accommodate cultural strains from psychedelica through Punk and Industrial music...read more

Product Description: Now in its fourth installment, with a fifth in preparation, John Zorn's acclaimed Arcana series provides insight into the work and methodologies of some of the most creative musical minds of our time. Rather than an attempt to distill or define a musician's work, Arcana IV illuminates directly via personal vision and experience, through the undiluted words and thoughts of the practitioners themselves, elucidating through manifestos, scores, interviews, notes and critical papers, composer/performers address composing, improvising, teaching, living, touring and thinking in and through music...read more

Product Description: 20th-century music is characterized by a bewildering multitude of trends and movements. Often several movements co-exist in contradiction to each other, in a reflection of the century’s intellectual currents and social and political changes, and the reactions they prompted...read more