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This Life of Sounds by Renée Levine Packer

We're very pleased to be able to offer for sale a limited number of this title in hardback which is unavailable elsewhere in UK.

What the publisher says:

This Life of Sounds portrays an important and previously unexplored corner of the history of new music in America: the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo. Composers Lukas Foss (the Center's founder), Lejaren Hiller, and Morton Feldman were the music directors over the life of "the Buffalo group," during the years 1964-1980. Based on Foss's plan, the Rockefeller Foundation provided annual fellowships for young composers and virtuoso instrumentalists to live in Buffalo for up to two years, thus creating a cadre of like-minded musicians who would spend their time studying, creating, and performing difficult - often controversial - new work. The now legendary group of musicians (some would say "musical outlaws") who participated in the Buffalo group included Pulitzer Prize winner George Crumb, Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Maryanne Amacher, Frederic Rzewski, David Tudor, Julius Eastman, and many more. Composers John Cage, Jim Tenney, Iannis Xenakis and others all figure in the story as well. The book provides valuable accounts of the Center's influential concert series, Evenings for New Music, performed in Buffalo, New York and throughout Europe; its famous recording of Terry Riley's In C ; the political activism of the time; and the intersection of academic, private, and institutional funding for the arts. Life magazine declared in an article about the 1965 Festival of the Arts Today titled, "Can This Be Buffalo?", "Buffalo exploded last month in a two-week avant garde festival that was bigger and hipper than anything ever held in Paris or New York..." The concerts, the festivals, and the adventurous musical climate attracted filmmakers and young visual artists resulting in what one person called "one of those kinds of places the way people talk about Vienna in 1900-1910."

About the Author:
Born in France, raised in New York and Mexico City, Levine Packer worked with Lukas Foss and was co-director with Morton Feldman of the renowned contemporary music group in Buffalo, New York, and a director of the Contemporary Music Festival at the California Institute of the Arts. She was Director of the Inter-Arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts, the producer of Steve Reich and Beryl Korot's multimedia opera The Cave , and a dean at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Product details:
1st edition, hardback
Published by Oxford University Press, 2010
256 pages; 29 illustrations; 6-1/8' x 9-1/4'
ISBN13: 978-0-19-973077-3
ISBN10: 0-19-973077-6
Item #: DD2252
Price: £50

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Prelude: A Study in Sonority

Chapter 1: The Rockefeller Years, 1964-Spring 1968
Creating the center
Getting Their Gongs Wet
Settling In
"Can This Be Buffalo?"
"Adagio" and "Canto"
David Tudor
News For You
Excavating Riches
Composer-Performers
Renewal and International Influence
The Berkeley of the East
Diamonds and Mud
Aquarium

Chapter 2: Make It New, Fall 1968-1972
Technology Rising
Continuance
Illiacs and Oscillators
Music and Theater
A Holiday Angel
Julius Eastman
Fusion
Cornucopia
Turmoil
Early Seventies
Mad Kings and Making Do

Chapter 3: Feldman in Buffalo, Fall 1972
The Tenth Year
Closer To Home
Shakeup
The Continuous Present
June In Buffalo
Boston Harbor
Ultrasonics, Subliminal Light and Sound
A Lecture on the Weather
Late January 1977

Chapter 4: The Final Years, 1977-1980
Music of Changes
A Critical Fall
"It's Like the Love Canal"
HPSCHD and Beyond
Non-Continuance
After Image

Chapter 5: Postscript

Appendix 1: Chronology
Appendix 2: List of Interviews
Appendix 3: List of Creative Associates
Appendix 4: List of Creative Associate Graduate Fellows
Appendix 5: Selected Discography

Endnotes
Bibliography