David Tudor is remembered today in two guises: as an extraordinary pianist of post-war avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and as a founding figure of live-electronic music. His early realization of indeterminate graphic scores and his later performances using homemade modular instruments both inspired a whole generation of musicians. But his reticence, his unorthodox approaches, and the diversity of his creative output which began with the organ and ended with visual art have kept Tudor a puzzle. Illustrated with more than 300 images of diagrams, schematics, and photographs of Tudor's instruments, Reminded by the Instruments sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor by applying Tudor's own methods for approaching the materials of others to the vast archive of materials that he himself left behind. You Nakai deftly patches together instruments, electronic circuits, sketches, diagrams, recordings, letters, receipts, customs declaration forms, and testimonies like modular pieces of a giant puzzle to reveal the long-hidden nature of Tudor's creative process. Rejecting the established narrative of Tudor as a performer-turned-composer, this book presents a lively portrait of an artist whose activity always merged both of these roles. In reading Tudor's electronic devices as musicological 'texts' and examining his idiosyncratic use of electronic circuits, Nakai undermines discourses on sound and illuminates our understanding of the instruments behind the sounds in post-war experimental music.

David Tudor is remembered today as an extraordinary pianist of post-war avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and as a founding figure of live-electronic music. His bold reinterpretation of Cage's Variations II and his idiosyncratic performances using homemade modular instruments inspired a whole generation of musicians. But his reticence, his unorthodox approaches, and the diversity of his creative output-which began with the organ and ended with visual art-have kept Tudor a puzzle. Reminded by the Instruments sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor by applying Tudor's own methods for approaching the materials of others to the vast archive of materials that he himself left behind. Author You Nakai deftly patches together instruments, electronic circuits, sketches, diagrams, recordings, letters, receipts, customs declaration forms, and testimonies like modular pieces of a giant puzzle to reveal a new perspective on Tudor's creative process. Rejecting the established narrative of Tudor as a performer-turned-composer, this book presents a lively portrait of an artist whose work always merged both of these roles. In reading Tudor's electronic devices as musicological 'texts' and examining his dissection of electronic circuits, Nakai transcends discourses on sound and illuminates our understanding of the instruments behind the sounds in post-war experimental music.

Written for adults, this hands-on guide demonstrates how to make easy musical instruments with children. Detailed instructions are included for making more than 60 unique instruments that are suitable for children as young as five years. Serving as a resource in the classroom or home, this manual is extensively illustrated with drawings and photographs along with an audio sample of the instruments in lively solo and ensemble pieces.

In the 1960s and '70s, collaborations between artists and engineers led to groundbreaking innovations in multisensory performance art that continue to resonate today. In 1966, Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, engineers at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, teamed up with artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman to form a nonprofit organization, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). E.A.T.’s debut event, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, integrated art, theater, and groundbreaking technology in a series of performances at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan. Its second major event, the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan, presented a multisensory environment for the first world exposition held in Asia. At these events, and in the hundreds of collaborations E.A.T. facilitated in between, the participants—including John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and David Tudor—imagined innovative ways for art and science to intersect and enrich society. Sensing the Future tells the story of these collaborations between artists and engineers and how they led to new installations and technology-based artworks. Through the examination of films, photographs, diagrams, and artists’ records from the E.A.T. archive at the Getty Research Institute, this volume provides a new perspective on multimedia art in the 1960s and ’70s and highlights the ways E.A.T. pushed the role of the artist beyond the traditional art world. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center from September 10, 2024, to February 23, 2025.

(Fretted). The Hal Leonard Ukulele Method is designed for anyone just learning to play ukulele. This comprehensive and easy-to-use beginner's guide by acclaimed performer and uke master Lil' Rev includes many fun songs of different styles to learn and play. The accompanying CD contains 46 tracks of songs for demonstration and play along. Includes: types of ukuleles, tuning, music reading, melody playing, chords, strumming, scales, tremolo, music notation and tablature, a variety of music styles, ukulele history and much more.

This volume celebrates the can-do, risk-taking, creative pioneers of Texas Instruments from its inception in the 1930s as a tiny geophysical exploration company working out of the back of a truck in the oilfields of the Southwest, to its status in the world today as one of the world's leading electronics companies. From the determination of its founders--Eugene McDermott, Erik Jonsson, Cecil Green, and Pat Haggerty--to the genius of its inventors such as Nobel prizewinner Jack Kilby, TI has transformed the world in seven and a half decades. In photographs and anecdotes, the book tells TI's history of innovation in products and technologies, including the development of the first commercial silicon transistors, the first integrated circuits, and the first electronic hand-held calculators. Today, this Fortune 500 company is at the forefront of digital signal processing and analog technologies--the semiconductor engines of the Internet age. TIers are currently working on solutions for large global markets such as wireless and broadband access, and for a variety of emerging markets such as digital projection systems and digital audio. The seventy-five vignettes making up this history paint a picture of TI and its people, providing a window into a corporate culture that fosters the creativity and mental toughness to compete in the world semiconductor market. The stories, in addition, show TI's staunch sense of fiscal responsibility, civic mindedness, and high ethical standards in its business practices.

A beautifully illustrated, totally engrossing celebration of the piano, and the composers and performers who have made it their own. With honed sensitivity and unquestioned expertise, Stuart Isacoff—pianist, critic, teacher, and author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization—unfolds the ongoing history and evolution of the piano and all its myriad wonders: how its very sound provides the basis for emotional expression and individual style, and why it has so powerfully entertained generation upon generation of listeners. He illuminates the groundbreaking music of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, and Debussy. He analyzes the breathtaking techniques of Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Arthur Rubinstein, and Van Cliburn, and he gives musicians including Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia, Menahem Pressler, and Vladimir Horowitz the opportunity to discuss their approaches. Isacoff delineates how classical music and jazz influenced each other as the uniquely American art form progressed from ragtime, novelty, stride, boogie, bebop, and beyond, through Scott Joplin, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor, and Bill Charlap. A Natural History of the Piano distills a lifetime of research and passion into one brilliant narrative. We witness Mozart unveiling his monumental concertos in Vienna’s coffeehouses, using a special piano with one keyboard for the hands and another for the feet; European virtuoso Henri Herz entertaining rowdy miners during the California gold rush; Beethoven at his piano, conjuring healing angels to console a grieving mother who had lost her child; Liszt fainting in the arms of a page turner to spark an entire hall into hysterics. Here is the instrument in all its complexity and beauty. We learn of the incredible craftsmanship of a modern Steinway, the peculiarity of specialty pianos built for the Victorian household, the continuing innovation in keyboards including electronic ones. And most of all, we hear the music of the masters, from centuries ago and in our own age, brilliantly evoked and as marvelous as its most recent performance. With this wide-ranging volume, Isacoff gives us a must-have for music lovers, pianists, and the armchair musician.

An ALA Notable Book Kids ages 9-12 will “delight in [the] oddness” of this Home Alone-style tale set in the 1970s—from a prolific children’s author who captures “a magic that’s not like anyone else’s” (Neil Gaiman). With Victor’s parents out of town, he is free to investigate the mysterious lizard musicians who have recently appeared on TV . . . Things Victor loves: pizza with anchovies, grape soda, B movies aired at midnight, the evening news. And with his parents off at a resort and his older sister shirking her babysitting duties, Victor has plenty of time to indulge himself and to try a few things he’s been curious about. Exploring the nearby city of Hogboro, he runs into a curious character known as the Chicken Man (a reference to his companion, an intelligent hen named Claudia who lives under his hat). The Chicken Man speaks brilliant nonsense, but he seems to be hip to the lizard musicians (real lizards, not men in lizard suits) who’ve begun appearing on Victor’s television after the broadcast of the late-late movie. Are the lizards from outer space? From “other space”? Together Victor and the Chicken Man, guided by the able Claudia, journey to the lizards’ floating island, a strange and fantastic place that operates with an inspired logic of its own.

The reggae sound system has exerted a major influence on music and popular culture. Out on the streets of inner city Kingston, Jamaica, every night, sound systems stage dancehall sessions for the crowd to share the immediate, intensive and immersive visceral pleasures of sonic dominance. Sonic Bodies concentrates on the skilled performance of the crewmembers responsible for this signature sound of Jamaican music: the audio engineers designing, building and fine-tuning the hugely powerful "sets" of equipment; the selectors choosing the music tracks to play; and MCs(DJs) on the mic hyping up the crowd. Julian Henriques proposes that these dancehall "vibes" are taken literally as the periodic motion of vibrations. He offers an analysis of how a sound system operates - at auditory, corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. Sonic Bodies formulates a fascinating critique of visual dominance and the dualities inherent in ideas of image, text or discourse. This innovative book questions the assumptions that reason resides only in a disembodied mind, that communication is an exchange of information, and that meaning is only ever representation.