No Such Thing as Silence

Author: Kyle Gann
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300163010
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
First performed at the midpoint of the twentieth century, John Cage’s 4'33", a composition conceived of without a single musical note, is among the most celebrated and ballyhooed cultural gestures in the history of modern music. A meditation on the act of listening and the nature of performance, Cage’s controversial piece became the iconic statement of the meaning of silence in art and is a landmark work of American music. In this book, Kyle Gann, one of the nation’s leading music critics, explains 4'33" as a unique moment in American culture and musical composition. Finding resemblances and resonances of 4'33" in artworks as wide-ranging as the paintings of the Hudson River School and the music of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, he provides much-needed cultural context for this fundamentally challenging and often misunderstood piece. Gann also explores Cage’s craft, describing in illuminating detail the musical, philosophical, and even environmental influences that informed this groundbreaking piece of music. Having performed 4'33" himself and as a composer in his own right, Gann offers the reader both an expert’s analysis and a highly personal interpretation of Cage’s most divisive work.

Silence

Author: John Cage
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819570648
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
John Cage is the outstanding composer of avant-garde music today. The Saturday Review said of him: “Cage possesses one of the rarest qualities of the true creator- that of an original mind- and whether that originality pleases, irritates, amuses or outrages is irrelevant.” “He refuses to sermonize or pontificate. What John Cage offers is more refreshing, more spirited, much more fun-a kind of carefree skinny-dipping in the infinite. It’s what’s happening now.” –The American Record Guide “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away.”

Shouting Won't Help

Author: Katherine Bouton
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
ISBN: 1429953373
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
For twenty-two years, Katherine Bouton had a secret that grew harder to keep every day. An editor at The New York Times, at daily editorial meetings she couldn't hear what her colleagues were saying. She had gone profoundly deaf in her left ear; her right was getting worse. As she once put it, she was "the kind of person who might have used an ear trumpet in the nineteenth century." Audiologists agree that we're experiencing a national epidemic of hearing impairment. At present, 50 million Americans suffer some degree of hearing loss—17 percent of the population. And hearing loss is not exclusively a product of growing old. The usual onset is between the ages of nineteen and forty-four, and in many cases the cause is unknown. Shouting Won't Help is a deftly written, deeply felt look at a widespread and misunderstood phenomenon. In the style of Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, and using her experience as a guide, Bouton examines the problem personally, psychologically, and physiologically. She speaks with doctors, audiologists, and neurobiologists, and with a variety of people afflicted with midlife hearing loss, braiding their stories with her own to illuminate the startling effects of the condition. The result is a surprisingly engaging account of what it's like to live with an invisible disability—and a robust prescription for our nation's increasing problem with deafness. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

The Sound of Silence

Author: Katrina Goldsaito
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0316271292
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 41

Book Description
"Do you have a favorite sound?" little Yoshio asks. The musician answers, "The most beautiful sound is the sound of ma, of silence." But Yoshio lives in Tokyo, Japan: a giant, noisy, busy city. He hears shoes squishing through puddles, trains whooshing, cars beeping, and families laughing. Tokyo is like a symphony hall! Where is silence? Join Yoshio on his journey through the hustle and bustle of the city to find the most beautiful sound of all.

The Sound of Silence

Author: Sumedho
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0861715152
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
Ajahn Sumedho gives insights into some key Buddhist themes like awareness, consciousness, identity, relief from suffering, and mindfulness of the body.

In Pursuit of Silence

Author: George Prochnik
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385533268
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
An "elegant and eloquent" (New York Times) exploration of the frontiers of noise and silence, and the growing war between them. Between iPods, music-blasting restaurants, earsplitting sports stadiums, and endless air and road traffic, the place for quiet in our lives grows smaller by the day. In Pursuit of Silence gives context to our increasingly desperate sense that noise pollution is, in a very real way, an environmental catastrophe. Traveling across the country and meeting and listening to a host of incredible characters, including doctors, neuroscientists, acoustical engineers, monks, activists, educators, marketers, and aggrieved citizens, George Prochnik examines why we began to be so loud as a society, and what it is that gets lost when we can no longer find quiet.

The Rest Is Noise

Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932880
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 706

Book Description
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

Seeing Silence

Author: Pete McBride
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847870863
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Book Description
In a world ever more congested and polluted with both toxins and noise, award-winning photographer Pete McBride takes readers on a once-in-a-lifetime escape to find places of peace and quiet—a pole-to-pole, continent-by-continent quest for the soul. We tend to think of silence as the absence of sound, but it is actually the void where we can hear the sublime notes of nature. In this National Outdoor Book Award winning work, photographer Pete McBride reveals the wonders of these hushed places in spectacular imagery—from the thin-air flanks of Mount Everest to the depths of the Grand Canyon, from the high-altitude vistas of the Atacama to the African savannah, and from the Antarctic Peninsula to the flowing waters of the Ganges and Nile. These places remind us of the magic of being “truly away” and how such places are vanishing. Often showing beauty from vantages where no other photographer has ever stood, this is a seven-continent visual tour of global quietude—and the power in nature’s own sounds—that will both inspire and calm.

Silence

Author: John Cage
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819560285
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292

The Joy of Small Things

Author: Hannah Jane Parkinson
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 178335237X
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
'This book is a not-so-small joy in itself.' NIGELLA LAWSON 'Parkinson has the gift of making you look with new eyes at everyday things. The perfect daily diversion.' JOJO MOYES 'Always funny and frank and full of insight, I absolutely love Parkinson's writing.' DAVID NICHOLLS 'I loved this book . . . Parkinson's writing transports you to unexpected places of joy and comfort . . . these pages contain happiness.' MARINA HYDE 'The twenty-first century feels a lot more bearable in Parkinson's company.' CHARLOTTE MENDELSON Drawn from the successful Guardian column, these everyday exultations and inspirations will get you through dismal days. Hannah Jane Parkinson is a specialist in savouring the small pleasures of life. She revels in her fluffy dressing gown ('like bathing in marshmallow'), finds calm in solo cinema trips, is charmed by the personalities of fonts ('you'll never see Comic Sans on a funeral notice'), celebrates pockets and gleefully abandons a book she isn't enjoying. Parkinson's everyday exaltations - selected from her immensely successful Guardian column - will utterly delight. FEATURES BRAND NEW MATERIAL 'A compendium of delights.' OBSERVER 'Delightful . . . a love letter to those little moments of bliss that get us through the daily grind.' RED