Book Description
From Leon Theremin to software synths, and from Kraftwerk to gangster rap, the electronic music explosion has made an impact on almost every aspect of the music industry. This book tells the exciting stories of the people and inventions that revolutionized the musical sound palette. Electronic Music Pioneers is an expansive title filled with exhaustive research and useful knowledge about the methods and history of electronic music. The book features an extensive timeline, as well as interviews with synth legends like keyboard designer Dr. Robert Moog and artist Klaus Schulze. Composer, musician and journalist Ben Kettlewell has been involved with almost every aspect of the music industry for over three decades. In the early '80s, he hosted a popular public radio program, Imaginary Visions, which was one of the first electronic music series aired in the United States. He has also written scores for various theatrical and film projects, including Jonathan Morrill's 1992 cult film Johnny in Monsterland. He is currently the editor of Alternate Music Press (www.alternatemusicpress.com), an online music archive. He lives in Marina Del Ray, California.
Customer Reviews:
Fact checking?.......2007-02-25
Here's an example of how a book that was perfectly well written and probably well researched was ruined by poor fact checking. For example crediting Brian Eno with using an instrumement that came out in the early 80's vs. his extremely well known use of an instrument that came out in 1969.
I tried to enjoy this book and did for the most part, possibly due to my not catching every flaw. I am tempted to believe that this book was killed by poor editing or fact checking. The type of mistakes are not likely to have been made by an author wh is as experieced and knowlegable as Mr. Kettlewell
Could have been so much more.......2007-02-24
Summary: Disjoint and Superficial.
The author had access to an outstanding group of individuals and in many cases squandered the opportunity with superficial questions. Instead of getting key insights, I felt like I was getting trivia. The interviews read more like something from People magazine (or maybe a sidebar in a Keyboard/Music magazine) than a highly rated book. Where is the depth that Kettlewell should be able to provide?
I found it impossible to get through section two. The intent may have been to be exhaustive in its list of pioneers, but instead I found it exhausting - dry, dull, superficial and disjoint.
In addition the book is poorly edited, as if rushed to publication.
a great resource.......2006-02-02
This book has information on almost every electronic instrument and related piece of equipment in the history of electronic music. It is a perfect book for EM enthusiasts or even those who know a little about vintage synth history and want to learn more, ... a real find. Well researched.
Enlightening in a number of ways.......2003-04-27
Published by ArtistPro Press, this is unquestionably a scholarly and serious work... yet at times it reads almost like a novel. Kudos to Kettlewell for making this material educational, accessible and enjoyable in all the right ways.
As a "serious" collector of analog synthesizers, I found this book to be enlightening in a number of ways, clearing up many things I'd been wondering about. For anyone interested in "the invention and impact of the synthesizer," this book is a must. Highly recommended.
Magnificent History!.......2003-04-24
In this scholarly work , Kettlewell discusses the work of composers, inventors and performers who shifted the boundaries of music in regard to sound source, notation, time, space, and the roles of the composer, performer and audience. The author seeks to identify and explain a whole body of musical work that existed outside the classical tradition and the avant-garde orthodoxies that flowed from it. Many rare photographs enrich the text and the book concludes with a selected source bibliography, an exhaustive list of related websites, and a bibliography of publications since 1934. Dr. Joel Paradiso, the Director of the MIT MediaLab in Cambridge, Massachusetts has contributed an interesting foreword to this edition. The tome is a detailed account of a radical musical direction that has borne great fruit in the years since it was first analysed in this thorough and scholarly work.
Book Description
Electronic $ Experimental Music is a second edition of a well-known text on the history of electronic music. Holmes' original book, first published in 1985, was a good beginner's introduction both to the theories of electronic sound and sound production and to the history of some of the earliest experiments in instrument building and composition.
Customer Reviews:
Broad approach.......2005-09-30
This book covers a large scope of musicians and technicians who were involved in electronic and electric music from the early 1900's to the present day. It is written in a fairly comprihensive style and centres upon the impacts that technology has had upon c20 music. A facinating read. Highly recommended for broad insights into the intentions of most electronic composers. I was rather happy to see a brief section on DJ Olive actually - this shows that Homles does not merely wish to stick to mentioning composers that the masses often only know by name. Splendid stuff. Couldn't find much wrong with it really. Take a preview of the contents page for yourself for a general idea.
this book is great.......2005-08-04
this book is an incredible study of electronic music. holmes discusses the history of electronic instruments, from the beginning, including the pre-theramin era, and finishing with some information regarding current electronic and experimental music.
although some sections of this book are a little dry, i feel the author did an acceptable job of conveying the excitement and freshness of the early electronic era. the section which discusses the creation of the soundtrack for the movie "forbidden planet" is just excellent. in fact, i purchased the movie (from amazon), so that i could hear the "strange" electronic tones which constitute the soundtrack.
being primarily interested in analog synthesizers, this book opened my eyes to an entirely new world of unpitched music experiments and compositions. in fact, a section is included on stockhausen, who was a heavy inspiration for the german band kraftwerk.
yes, i recommend this book, as a great amount of information is contained therein. in addition to mere data, this book really got me thinking about electronics and electronic music; specifically, the impact of analog synthesis on modern musical society.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Music Trades, published by Thomson Gale on February 1, 2006. The length of the article is 706 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Acoustic pick-up pioneer Fishman celebrates 25th Anniversary.(INDUSTRY FOREFRONT)
Publication:
Music Trades (Magazine/Journal)
Date: February 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 154
Issue: 1
Page: 92(3)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Music Trades, published by Music Trades Corp. on February 1, 1997. The length of the article is 1107 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: A brief history of JBL: tracing the evolution of an audio pioneer.(Company Profile)
Publication:
Music Trades (Magazine/Journal)
Date: February 1, 1997
Publisher: Music Trades Corp.
Volume: v145
Issue: n1
Page: p121(2)
Article Type: Company Profile
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Music Trades, published by Music Trades Corp. on April 1, 1991. The length of the article is 663 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Jerome Markowitz, Allen Organ founder and digital electronics pioneer. (obituary)
Publication:
Music Trades (Magazine/Journal)
Date: April 1, 1991
Publisher: Music Trades Corp.
Volume: v139
Issue: n3
Page: p132(1)
Article Type: obituary
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Music Trades, published by Music Trades Corp. on May 1, 1995. The length of the article is 891 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Karaoke pioneer Pocket Songs celebrates 10th year.(Product Announcement)
Publication:
Music Trades (Magazine/Journal)
Date: May 1, 1995
Publisher: Music Trades Corp.
Volume: v143
Issue: n4
Page: p46(2)
Article Type: Product Announcement
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
"The Production of Culture is timely and relevant. . . . Diana Crane introduces the reader to this busy field of scholarly activity, organizes the strands of theory and empirical research in an orderly fashion, and advances some bold notions about the relationship between organizational 'contexts' and innovation." --Contemporary Sociology "Crane melds numerous sources concisely and clearly in her argument that cultural forms cannot be understood 'apart from the contexts in which they are produced and consumed.' . . . looks like a good start to a useful series." --Communication Booknotes "Crane's overview is clearly written and does an effective job of incorporating concepts and theories from communication, cultural studies, economics, and literature, as well as her home territory, sociology." --Communication Booknotes How does the media shape and frame culture? How does media entertainment vary under different conditions of production and consumption? What types of meanings and ideologies do these modes of production convey, and how do they change over time? How does media culture differ from other forms of recorded culture produced in nonindustrial settings? In The Production of Culture, the inaugural volume in the new Foundations of Popular Culture series, Diana Crane argues that these are the kinds of questions social scientists should concern themselves with. She contends that recorded cultures simply cannot be understood apart from the contexts in which they are produced and consumed. A review and synthesis of the current media literature, Crane's work examines both the popular and elite levels of media production. This investigation allows readers to understand how the notion of production can change depending on the size of the audience and/or the structure of the cultural industry. A systematic and accessible approach to a complex topic, The Production of Culture will have appeal not only to professors and students of cultural studies, but will also interest those studying sociology and art history.
Book Description
Drawing on cultural theory and interviews with fans, cast members, and producers, this book places the reality TV trend within a broader social context, tracing its relationship to the development of a digitally enhanced, surveillance-based interactive economy and to a savvy mistrust of mediated reality in general. Surveying several successful reality-TV formats, the book links the rehabilitation of Big Brother to the increasingly important economic role played by the work of being watched. The author enlists critical social theory to examine how the appeal of the real is deployed as a pervasive but false promise of democratization.
Customer Reviews:
From the New York Times.......2004-02-21
Greeting Big Brother With Open Arms
By EMILY EAKIN
Published: January 17, 2004
For 50 years, Big Brother was an unambiguous symbol of malignant state power, totalitarianism's all-seeing eye. Then Big Brother became a hip reality television show, in which 10 cohabiting strangers submitted to round-the-clock camera monitoring in return for the chance to compete for $500,000.
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That transformation is telling, says Mark Andrejevic, a professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa at Iowa City. Today, more than twice as many young people apply to MTV's "Real World" show than to Harvard, he says. Clearly, to a post-cold-war generation of Americans, the prospect of living under surveillance is no longer scary but cool.
Media critics have frequently portrayed the reality show craze in unflattering terms, as a sign of base voyeurism (on the part of viewers) and an unseemly obsession with fame (on the part of participants). But Mr. Andrejevic's take, influenced by the theories of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, is at once darker and more subtle.
Reality shows glamorize surveillance, he writes, presenting it "as one of the hip attributes of the contemporary world," "an entree into the world of wealth and celebrity" and even a moral good. His new book, "Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched" (Rowman & Littlefield), is peppered with quotes from veterans of "The Real World," "Road Rules" and "Temptation Island," rhapsodizing about on-air personal growth and the therapeutic value of being constantly watched. As Josh on "Big Brother" explains, "Everyone should have an audience."
At the same time, Mr. Andrejevic (pronounced an-DRAY-uh-vitch) argues, the reality genre appears to fulfill the democratic promise of the emerging interactive economy, turning passive cultural consumers into active ones who can star on shows or vote on their outcomes. (The series "Extreme Makeover" takes this promise literally, he notes, "offering to rebuild `real' people via plastic surgery so that they can physically close the gap between themselves and the contrived aesthetic of celebrity they have been taught to revere.")
As seductive as this sounds, in Mr. Andrejevic's view reality television is essentially a scam: propaganda for a new business model that only pretends to give consumers more control while in fact subjecting them to increasingly sophisticated forms of monitoring and manipulation.
As he put it in a telephone interview: "The promise out there is that everybody can have their own TV show. But of course, that ends up being a kind of Ponzi scheme. You can't have everybody watching everybody else's TV show. And since that's not possible, in economic terms, the way it's going to work is according to this model of a few people monitoring what the rest of us do."
Think of TiVo or Replay, he said. These digital recorders allow people to watch the television shows they want when they want to. But in return, he points out, the recorders' manufacturers get a stream of valuable information about viewer preferences. The same principle, he argues, holds true for online shops that offer custom CD's in exchange for data on personal musical tastes. Or Web sites that use "cookies" to track users' movements on the Internet.
Marketers aren't interested in exceptional behavior, he added. They want to know about the routine aspects of daily life, the same material that shows like "The Real World" and "Big Brother" - in which banality passes as authenticity - strive to capture on film.
In short, Mr. Andrejevic said, reality television's true beneficiaries are not the shows' cast members (who can wind up making little more than minimum wage for the hours - or months - they spend before the camera) or ordinary viewers (who don't really choose what happens on their television screens) but the marketers, advertisers and corporate executives who have a large stake in seeing surveillance portrayed as benign.
Of course, he conceded, his students don't necessarily see it this way. Raised on Web logs, Google, cellphones and instant messaging, they "divulge much more information about themselves on a daily basis than previous generations," he said, and they don't associate the idea of surveillance with a totalitarian Big Brother.
"The concern I have is that self-expression gets confused with the inducement to assist in marketing to yourself," Mr. Andrejevic said. "But my students say they've got nothing to hide. And until there are some consequences they perceive as detrimental, they're not going to be concerned."
At least in one respect, he added, reality television does conform to real life. "It portrays the reality of contrivance, the way consumers are manipulated," he said. "I look at it with the fascination of somebody watching a car wreck."
Book Description
Take a fascinating look at the EverQuest game itself, the worldwide following that has grown around it, and the phenomenon of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). Beyond merely dealing with strategies for winning the game, this book offers a glimpse inside the game, offering a chance to understand the history and some of the underlying issues of the game.
Customer Reviews:
Fun reading, but overall weak development.......2007-02-07
Got quite a kick out of seeing the Inns and lands of Everquest made into a story. Would love to see more stories. The writing was somewhat stiff; grammatically in error just enough to be a bit of a pain. Seems like a few words were just looked up in a dictionary for variety - but incorrectly applied in context.
Women characters, a good guideline for fantasy writing calibre, were boringly stereotyped - either weak, pale nothings or horrible vamps. Kind of funny, it was so bad.
Plot - High points for this - I thought the ending was well done, wrapped up nicely with just a bit of a surprise. Overall, worth an afternoon just to see Qeynos again.
this book shows everything.......2004-12-27
if you like everquest or dont know what is it this book is worth a look it tells you every think about this game how the lord of the rings became the best mmorpg of all you should buy this book
Beautiful book about a game that is part of my life.......2003-12-19
Everquest has always been a big part of my life. This is a bit strange, as I haven't played the game in over a year and a half. This might give you an idea of how Everquest and its community can become a part of you. I picked up this book to learn more about the game where the motto is "You're in Our World Now".
This book was a wonderful read. Anyone who has played or hasn't played yet wondered what EQ is all about will gain a thorough understanding of this epic game. It starts out with an introduction of Everquest and how entering its world unveils a whole other life, meeting thousand of other people, from students to housewives to doctors to military people. The game is extremely compelling (understatement perhaps) to play, with its quests, tradeskills, sense of belonging, and sense of accomplishments. You look with pride upon your avatar (your character in the game). You may get to know members of your guild better than your own family. You learn to work with people, to take advantage of their different skills. You learn to cooperate and achieve things that will make you swell with pride for the rest of your life.
The book covers the history of MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), I found this fascinating and had no clue how far back its roots went.
Along the way you meet key Everquest people, the ones who envisioned the game, built it, drew it, expanded it... You see sketches and concept art and screenshots, complete with a full color layout in the middle section. You hear the stories of its players, as well as the ones who've lost a significant other to the game. The book addresses and clarifies the concept of "Evercrack", addiction to playing. You learn about guilds, raids, "mobs", and possible EQ-coined words like "woot". The book concludes with its venturing into other gaming realms, both in genres (RPG, strategy) and mediums (PocketPC, cellphone, Playstation, tabletop version).
As I said, I'm a retired Everquest player (I used to play 80 hours a week). Why do I still consider EQ a part of my life? The community and the belief that this game was such an experience in my life, bringing me to build a site about my favorite bard class, EQDiva.com (even mentioned in the book!). So I continue to keep in touch with its community, keep up with its expansions and patches, so I can do my part to provide information to its player base. That said, I must admit that this game was a bit too addicting for me, so I myself stay away and no longer encourage friends to play. But I understand and empathize with those that still play, and I still think it's a wonderful game.
This is a beautiful book, peppered everywhere with its lore, art, stories, dreams... It is my opinion that this game is the most compelling, intricate and well-thought out game in history, and I'd go so far as to say it's not a "game", it's a virtual life. It's a one-of-a-kind experience, one you will never forget. This book will help you understand...
~ Kocho Divah from EQDiva
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- Fiddler on the Roof: Vocal Selections
- Five Orchestral Pieces (Dover Miniature Scores)
- Floyd Collins
- Follow the Music: The Life and High Times of Elektra Records in the Great Years of American Pop Culture
- Foundations of Music Education
- Gallagher, Marriott, Derringer, Trower: Their Lives and Music
Books Index
Books Home
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Sheet Music & Scores
| Formats
| Books
| Composers
| Forms & Genres
| Historical Period
| Instrumentation
Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer
Electronic and Experimental Music: Pioneers in Technology and Composition (Media and Popularculture)
Vintage Synthesizers: Pioneering Designers, Groundbreaking Instruments, Collecting Tips, Mutants of Technology
Electronic and Computer Music
Modulations: A History of Electronic Music: Throbbing Words on Sound
