John Rahn – författare

Drawn from the influential journal Perspectives of New Music, these essays reflect a variety of artistic viewpoints and critical perspectives. The contributors include composers Pierre Boulez, John Cage, and Milton Babbitt, literary scholar Douglas Collins, anthropologist Eric Gans, philosopher Michel Foucault, and poet Delmore Schwartz. The authors contemplate music's origins and function, the changing relations between music and society, the effects of today's conflicting aesthetic notions on composition, and the relationship between music and other communicative behaviors. Taken together, the essays suggest a working aesthetic that would ensure the continual renewal of artistic tradition in Western culture.

John Rahn's prolific activities as a composer-theorist-teacher, inventor of computer sound-synthesis software, editor of Perspectives of New Music during the 1980s and 90s, and author of an exemplary text on atonal theory are conspicuously in the foreground of the academic music-intellectual world. This collection of essays charts Rahn's progression from the construal of music's data structures to the articulation of its experiential structures, leading to the question of its moral infrastructures and its value systems of the internal and external worlds. This book shows Rahn's remarkable intellectual evolution, culminating in the recognition that the pressure bearing on discourse can only be contained by thought formulated in the non-referential language of the arts themselves. Also includes 18 musical examples.