Overview

A lively compendium of musical practices and compositions that upend notions of creativity and expressivity while diversifying our sense of the musical canon.   An artist draws two octaves of pitches randomly from a hat, just enough to set each syllable of the dictionary definition of imprimer (to score, to print). Trawling the internet for cute videos of cats “playing” piano, an artist splices together a complete, note-perfect performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 11. Half a century after the release of Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue, a jazz quintet spends months of focused practice to reproduce the original exactly. These performances share a common denominator: absolute fidelity to the outcome of a system. From Marcel Duchamp to Yoko Ono, Steve Reich to Sun Ra, The Sound of Thinking brings together a diverse array of musical or sonic works that are algorithmic, automatic, permutational, procedural, or otherwise structured in contrast to the creative expressivity typically associated with artistic production.   In twenty-six short essays, each keyed to a term that begins with a different letter of the alphabet, Dworkin discusses work composed or performed according to a predetermined rule, transforming artistic creation into a system running its course. The pieces detailed here, drawn from more than a century of musical experimentation, offer a fresh perspective on the history of innovative music by decoupling music from expression and by shunting creativity from the level of organizing sounds to the level of devising a system that can do the organizing. Not only does this book spotlight the critical role of music in twentieth-century conceptual art, but it also identifies previously overlooked links among diverse artists and movements.    

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9780226847696

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Reviews

""Craig Dworkin’s new book is a rhizomatic atlas, a poetically mapped room of musical possibilities in which one door leads to a Wittgensteinian room and another onto a whale’s vagina. Whether you’re new to its imaginative possibilities or a long-time resident of its frontiers, The Sound of Thinking’s unique scholarship and textual virtuosity are a perfect introduction to the 'resonant paper' of conceptual music."" -- Nate Wooley, trumpet player and composer

""Craig Dworkin’s new book is a rhizomatic atlas, a poetically mapped room of musical possibilities in which one door leads to a Wittgensteinian room and another onto a whale’s vagina. Whether you’re new to its imaginative possibilities or a long-time resident of its frontiers, The Sound of Thinking’s unique scholarship and textual virtuosity are a perfect introduction to the 'resonant paper' of conceptual music."" -- Nate Wooley, trumpet player and composer ""Declaring that “even the most esoteric music need not be off-limits to nonspecialists,” the practitioner and scholar of conceptual writing Craig Dworkin sets off on an abecedarian’s course through largely uncharted musical practice. The Sound of Thinking is a joy not only due to its vast research and wild associative leaps, but because Dworkin is a brilliant prose stylist whose comic panache pairs well with the deadpan stare of much of the work gathered here."" -- David Grubbs, composer, musician, and vocalist

Author Information

Craig Dworkin teaches literary history and theory at the University of Utah. He is the author of Reading the Illegible, No Medium, Dictionary Poetics, and Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality.  

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