By Andrew Durkin
ISBN-10: 0307911764
ISBN-13: 9780307911766
Decomposition is a bracing, revisionary, and provocative inquiry into music—from Beethoven to Duke Ellington, from Conlon Nancarrow to Evelyn Glennie—as a private and cultural adventure: the way it consists, the way it is idiosyncratically perceived through critics and reviewers, and why we take heed to it the way in which we do.
Andrew Durkin, top referred to as the chief of the West Coast–based business Jazz workforce, is singular for his insistence on asking tricky questions about the complexity of our presumptions approximately song and approximately listening, specifically within the electronic age. during this profitable and lucid examine he explodes the age-old suggestion of musical composition because the paintings of person genius, arguing in its place that during either its composition and reception song is essentially a collaborative company that comes into being in basic terms via mediation.
Drawing on a wealthy number of examples—Big Jay McNeely’s “Deacon’s Hop,” Biz Markie’s “Alone Again,” George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, Frank Zappa’s “While You have been Art,” and Pauline Oliveros’s “Tuning Meditation,” to call just a few—Durkin makes transparent that our appreciation of any piece of song is often knowledgeable by way of neuroscientific, mental, technological, and cultural components. How we hearken to song, he continues, may have as a lot strength to alter it as track may have to alter how we hear.