ted_gordon

Out December 2025 w/@ucpress : The Composer's Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America ucpress.edu/books/the-comp…

The emergence of electronic instruments in 1960s America destabilized agency and subjectivity in music. Our book of the week traces how Cold War technoscience underwrote radical new visions of what it means to be a composer. By @ted_gordon on @ucpress buff.ly/QHCJJNm

Bertolt Brecht

please do not make the mushrooms play modular synthesizer ever again

this snare goes so hard youtube.com/watch?v=clV5ll…

This is…wildly incoherent? How does Astrud Gilberto grow out of the Dixieland revival? Why does Carla Bley get her own limb (not saying she doesn’t deserve one, but still)? What do the vertical and horizontal axes mean? Why is “jazz today” undifferentiated?

pauline oliveros, 1993

Another passage that needs.... unpacking? "A talented instrumentalist, even though lacking the gift of composition, can achieve a certain 'inventive technique' on his instrument. (This we know from jazz.)" jstor.org/stable/948499

Music studies people: has anyone written about the racialized context/subtext of Lukas Foss's practice of improvisation? e.g. "I like to present the composed and the improvised side by side (but never mixed)" (from this 1962 article: jstor.org/stable/948499?…)

how is this not yet a tzadik album en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorn%27s_…

teaching the history of hip hop to people born in 2006 this week and my ultimate goal is to get them to understand this cultural artifact from 1983 (i'm not sure if i do, still): youtube.com/watch?v=HCBN7l…

of all the people who get name-dropped or referenced in the tortured poets department, why not dan bejar? the lyrical style seems so indebted to him: all the first names, one-off metaphors, unexplained specificity, purple prose...

Student comment after we watched David Tudor perform Cage’s 4’33” in its entirety: “it’s like eating soup with a fork”

How did the bros. Gibb manage to create one of the worst versions of one of the best songs Barry ever wrote? open.spotify.com/track/0w3BOmAf…

@piesaac I do think this has something to do with CD aesthetics and also the pervasiveness of Max/MSP in experimental music in the 00s youtube.com/watch?v=0fvYoh…

Black music is the only force strong enough to save America

Happy 40th Anniversary to this jam 🔥🔥🔥🔥

teaching 'dippermouth blues' to people born in 2006 today wearing my green shirt like seymour