Radical Experiments in Music Producing: Theory, Philosophy, Practice

Catalog description

Many modern music legends achieved their level of singular greatness by instinctively or intuitively making radical, left-curve artistic decisions. Think of James Brown staying on the "One"; John Cage closing the piano lid and sitting still for 4'33"; David Bowie creating lyrics through a random text generator. Miles Davis committing jazz heresy with cut-n-paste post-production techniques. In some cases, these creative decisions were so galvanizing that they irrevocably shifted entire worlds of music-making and they altered the very possibilities of artistic discourse. Many achieved this not merely by breaking convention or habit, but by some alternative philosophical stance and strategy (often called radical thinking): reimagining creative approaches and musical concepts; avoiding rules by creating new ones; embracing mistakes and inviting happenchance. This hybrid course blends writing/history/emergent media studies and production studies. The dual purpose is to serve as an introduction to a liberating creative strategy based on a philosophical stance, and an invitation to apply that philosophy to actual music-making. The course will familiarize students with a wide stylistic range of music-makers who employed radical-thinking approaches as a means to creating music, engaging with disruptive theories and/or experimenting with technologies and ideologies, from Oliver Messiaen, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Archie Shepp, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Yoko Ono, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Brian Eno, Sun Ra, Laurie Anderson, Meshell Ndegeocello, Oneohtrix Point Never, Blood Orange, and Kanye West. Students delve into diverse histories of artistic improvisation, chance, intuition, free expression, stream of consciousness, and other approaches. Students will read work on musical freedom and risk by writers like David Borgo, David…