Overview
Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson's Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of ""now"" when time is always moving? How does our experience become memory?Laurie Anderson pioneered new techniques and aesthetics in performance art, becoming its first and most enduring superstar. In this book, author S. Alexander Reed dives into the wonderfully strange making and meanings of this singular album and of its creator's long artistic career. Packed with scrupulous new research, reception history, careful description, and dizzying creativity, this book is an interdisciplinary love letter to a record whose sounds, politics, and expressions of gendered identity grow more relevant each day.
Full Product Details
Author: S. Alexander Reed (Associate Professor of Music and Integrative Studies, Associate Professor of Music and Integrative Studies, Ithaca College)
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 14.30cm
, Height: 1.50cm
, Length: 21.60cm
Weight: 0.322kg
ISBN: 9780190926014
ISBN 10: 0190926015
Pages: 186
Publication Date: 25 March 2022
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: To order
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.
Reviews
Reed's fascinating multi-perspectival account of Big Science is a carefully argued and much needed exposition of this enigmatic work. Historical, contextual, and textual insights deftly examine the intersecting personal, cultural and philosophical themes Anderson explores, both in Big Science and in her work leading to and from it. -- Sean Albiez, Ph.D., Co-editor of Brian Eno: Oblique Music and Kraftwerk: Music Non Stop
[Reed] also doesn't shy away from musicological dissection when it seems useful, but always provides a way in for the uninitiated, using musical examples that almost everyone will know. * Jeremy Shatan, Anearful * Reed's fascinating multi-perspectival account of Big Science is a carefully argued and much needed exposition of this enigmatic work. Historical, contextual, and textual insights deftly examine the intersecting personal, cultural and philosophical themes Anderson explores, both in Big Science and in her work leading to and from it. * Sean Albiez, Ph.D., Co-editor of Brian Eno: Oblique Music and Kraftwerk: Music Non Stop *
Reed's fascinating multi-perspectival account of Big Science is a carefully argued and much needed exposition of this enigmatic work. Historical, contextual, and textual insights deftly examine the intersecting personal, cultural and philosophical themes Anderson explores, both in Big Science and in her work leading to and from it. * Sean Albiez, Ph.D., Co-editor of Brian Eno: Oblique Music and Kraftwerk: Music Non Stop *
Author Information
Dr. S. Alexander Reed is a musician and scholar of subculture, pop, and technology. Author of the acclaimed book Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, he has also published in Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 book series, Slate, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Journal of Musicological Research, Perspectives of New Music, Popular Music and Society, ImageTexT, the Journal of Popular Music Education, and elsewhere. As a musician, producer, and remixer, he has dozens of recording credits. Reed teaches at Ithaca College, and has previously been on faculty at NYU's Clive Davis Institute for Recorded Music, The University of Florida, and The College of William and Mary.
