It seems to be high season for companion volumes in our world of experimentation with sound. The season commenced with The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music in 2007 (Collins and d’Escriván Reference Collins and d’Escriván2007; reviewed in Organised Sound 14.1) and continued in 2009 with The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music (Dean Reference Dean2009; not yet reviewed) and the volume discussed in this review, The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimental Music edited by James Saunders.

When publishers send books to the journal, most get sent quickly to specialists in the given field. For once, I decided to review this one myself having written two books with the key focus, experimental music, in their titles: What’s the Matter with Today’s Experimental Music? (Reference Landy1991) and Experimental Music Notebooks (Reference Landy1994). In the former (pages 3–7), I introduced four definitions straight away, choosing the final one (that I had introduced myself) as the most all-embracing:

1. 1. a synonym for avant-garde (e.g., Griffiths, Eimert);

2. 2. music made in studios (e.g., Schaeffer, Hiller);

3. 3. music in which the outcome cannot be foreseen (e.g., Cage, Benitez); and

4. 4. ‘Experimental music is music in which the innovative component (not in the sense of newness found in any artistic work, but instead substantial innovation as clearly intended by the composer) of any aspect of a given piece takes priority above the more general technical craftsmanship expected of any art work’.

In retrospect, I believe that Michael Nyman’s view (Reference Nyman1974) of experimental music being that which came after avant-gardism should have been added at the time.

Which one does Saunders choose thirty-five years after Nyman’s book was published and eighteen years after mine? Based on remarks made by several authors, Nyman seems to be holding the winning cards, but Saunders leaves it open: ‘The book does not aim to define experimental music explicitly, this is an emergent feature of much of the writing, particularly with regard to its location in relation to other contemporary music practices’ (1). On the following page, he takes this one step further. He speaks of it being ‘meaningless to define experimentalism in a closed way: rather a series of indicators might suggest where much of this work is located’ (2). This remark made me wonder how that fourth definition defines experimentalism in a closed way. In a critical essay, I believe that his chosen empirical approach might make sense, but in a Companion volume, one might expect a field to be delineated and exemplified. How did Saunders approach this publication?

The book, itself, consists of two parts, each including an editor’s introduction. The first part is more typical of Companion volumes – that is, authors (in this case nine of them) writing about a specific subject or sub-area of the field being covered. The latter part consists of fourteen artists’ statements that were assembled by way of correspondence or interviews with the editor. The authors are mainly Anglophones (primarily British, but also from the USA and Ireland) and there is also a wink of an eye to German-speaking contributors. Atau Tanaka (who currently works in the UK) forms the single exception. Saunders is based at the UK’s Bath Spa University, but his British focus apparently has other roots as he commences his introduction with a remark from the late Daniel Caux (no source provided) stating that the three major musical developments since the Second World War were the work of Cage, American minimalism and English experimental music (xiii). Having met Caux on a few occasions, I certainly can vouch for the fact that these three were high amongst his personal aesthetic preferences, but I could quote quite a few others who might have made other suggestions. (And there are those who find most minimalism anything but experimental.)

The inner front cover text offers the book’s raison d’être: ‘The recent resurgence of experimental music has given rise to a more divergent range of practices than has previously been the case’. I would have been fascinated to read an article proving that sentence and identifying when this resurgence commenced. But that was not convincingly demonstrated, at least to me, which is a bit of a missed opportunity. Let us turn then to the areas of focus of the nine entries in the book’s Part One. The chapter with the broadest brief is provided immediately by Christopher Fox, who provides a personal statement regarding discoveries he made as a student and moves on to what is essentially the first part of his two-part artist’s portrait (he is the only author in both parts of this volume). The chapter is in a sense a recounting of his personal wrestling match with the whole notion of experimental music. This leaves us, therefore, with eight areas of focus. They are: experimentalism with notation (Michael Pisaro), interpreting experimental scores (Philip Thomas), live electronics, in particular the early years (Ronald Kuivila), live electronics, more recent developments involving improvisation (Andy Keep), improvisation and experimental music reflecting politics (Edwin Prévost), phonography (as a reaction to soundscape composition, Will Montgomery), soundwalking (John Levack Drever) and experimental music and the visual arts (David Ryan).

Fox’s chronology commences in his student days and takes us up to contemporary activities. Pisaro focuses on early experimentation with alternative notations and includes a short postscript related to recent experimentation with scores. Thomas describes the fascinating challenges posed by these notations and understandably suggests that there are issues of authorship given the enormous amount of freedom that some of these scores offer. One interesting remark (94) stated that in many works, including more complex ones, it is about what a performer does, not what (s)he interprets. Kuivila and Keep act in tandem looking at the then and now issues regarding live electronics. Prévost and Keep share improvisation as a focus; Prévost characteristically not only addresses the act of improvisation, but carries this much further by contextualising a great deal of this work within today’s consumer society. One thing that stands out in Prévost’s article is his focus on collective devising of music and how society has yet to come to grips with this truly experimental form of music-making. The Montgomery and Drever texts appear to be related as both are dealing with offshoots of soundscape composition/acoustic ecology. In the former case, Montgomery takes distance from the Schaferian acoustic ecology school, as phonographs exist somewhere outside of pure contextual listening and to an extent are completely compatible with the Schaefferian world of écoute réduite. Drever, on the other hand, is not an opponent of Schafer, demonstrating an interest to stretch Christopher’s Small concept of musicking into the world of soundwalks, where the notion of participation is between the given environment, through the sounds encountered during a soundwalk, and those sharing that experience. Finally, the Ryan chapter focuses primarily on the early years of this period, where two offshoots of John Cage’s work – fluxus and happenings on the one hand, and those in the visual arts influenced by aspects of Morton Feldman’s work on the other – are presented.

It is interesting to note how John Cage seems to be the starting point for most of the above. It is as if we could have an experimental music dating system starting from, say, 1951 and Music of Changes. It is also interesting to note that the awkward subject: to what extent some of the works described in these nine chapters would be accepted as music, even by its primary readership, tertiary-level students, is never addressed. More pertinent to this review are the slightly different approaches of the nine authors, in particular in terms of how they approached their surveys. I, as editor of this journal, know how difficult it is to keep submissions within the area of any issue’s theme; however, I wonder whether offering a slightly more consistent structure might not have aided the consistency of these chapters a bit. Having written that, it is about experimentation after all.

Let’s move on to the choice of subjects. Personally, I have no issue with any of these areas and am pleased by the ability of many of these artists to write a survey that does not overly focus on their own favourite aspects of experimentation. That is laudable. However, to my mind there are interesting gaps, some of which fall within the remit of this journal. Does Saunders not consider those areas that weren’t covered irrelevant or is this simply down to personal preference? In either case, I believe that a more robust delineation (and/or definition) might clarify why these gaps remain.

The fourteen artists’ statements are understandably diverse given this particular tableau de la troupe. Still, one wonders whether combining questions of particular interest to each artist with some common questions would not have led to insights that would have been more compatible with the Companion nature of this volume. The artists span the period from Cage’s early years to younger artists working today. For completeness’s sake, here is the list of those who contributed to Part Two of this volume: Antoine Beuger, Laurence Crane, Rhodri Davies, Christopher Fox, Bernard Günter, Bryn Harrison, Philip Jeck, Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, Evan Parker, Tim Parkinson, Jennifer Walshe, Manfred Werder and Christian Wolff. As you can see, they are presented alphabetically. It is not helpful to map these artists onto those nine chapters in Part One, but most Organised Sound readers will see that Saunders has been quite consistent in his choice. Perhaps Phill Niblock stands out, as a large part of his work is not well covered in the first part of the book. On a separate subject, it appears that experimental music has not improved over the years as far as gender participation is concerned.

What I found interesting in the second part were the different attitudes of the artists – some making much more forceful statements; others concentrating on what they do and why. One remark that will make many of this journal’s readers’ hair stand on end came from Fox (266). He claims that he consciously avoids ‘orthodox electroacoustic transformation of sounds’. Apparently ‘the best pieces using that vocabulary and syntax were made 40 years ago’. Just so that you know.

I have shared this one remark as it raises a fundamental question beyond the definitional one that casts a shadow on this volume. There is a strong aesthetic remark being made here (Fox goes on to reject gesture in music as well), which is fair enough. But the editor and most other authors carefully avoided the subject of aesthetics as it was probably too controversial or awkward. So what is the role of these statements? There is the occasional isolated remark that makes you stop and wonder; for example, Crane suggests that experimental music is about its material whereas mainstream music is about its underlying ideas (244). That is food for thought and most interesting to read. It is a shame, however, that not one single score or sound example was included. That took away from the fourteen statements’ potential impact. They do offer value added to this volume, but they also take away in some measure from the book’s nature as a ‘Companion’ survey. This is a tricky one, as Part Two does succeed in putting some flesh on the bones of items raised in Part One.