Andrew Durkin

Decomposition: A Music Manifesto Andrew Durkin

A bracing, revisionary and provocative inquiry into music?from Beethoven to Duke Ellington, Conlon Nancarrow to Evelyn Glennie?as a personal and cultural experience: how it is actually composed, often wrongfully perceived by critics and reviewers, and why we listen to it the way we do.
 
Andrew Durkin, best known as leader of the west coast?s Industrial Jazz Group, is singular for his insistence on asking tough questions about the complexity of our presumptions about music and about listening, especially in the digital age. In this winning and lucid study, he explodes the age-old conception of musical composition as the work of individual genius, arguing instead that in both its composition and reception music is fundamentally a collaborative enterprise that comes to be only through mediation. Drawing on a rich variety of examples?Big Jay McNeely?s ?Deacon?s Hop,? Biz Markie?s ?Alone Again,? George Antheil?s Ballet Mechanique, Frank Zappa?s ?While You Were Art,? or Pauline Oliveros?s ?Tuning Meditation,? to name only a few?Durkin makes clear that our appreciation of any piece of music is always informed by neuroscientific, psychological, technological, and cultural factors, and that how we listen might have as much power to change music as music might have to change how we listen.