Softcover, 384pp University of Chicago Press, 2026An 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.

paperback  350 pages | 103 color plates | 5 3/4 x 8 1/4 | © 2023Punk Art History examines punk as an art movement, combining archival research, interviews, and art historical analysis. Marie Arleth Skov draws on personal interviews with punk art figures from London, New York, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Berlin, including Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly Doris), members of Værkstedet Værst (The Workshop Called Worst), Nina Sten-Knudsen, Marc Miller, Diana Ozon, and Hugo Kaagman. The book also features email correspondence with Jon Savage, Anna Banana, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Many of these artists shared materials from their private archives with Skov, who examines a wide range of media: paintings, drawings, bricolages, collages, booklets, posters, zines, installations, sculptures, Super 8 mm films, documentation of performances and happenings, body art, and street art. She also discusses scandalous and spectacular public events like the Prostitution exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which spurred walkouts and political debate with its graphic content, and Die Große Untergangsshow (The Grand Downfall Show) in West Berlin, a festival of “ingenious dilettantes.” Skov’s analysis reveals that punks saw themselves as the “rear-guards,” a rejection of the notion of progress inherent to the term “avant-garde.” After all, why would a “no future” movement want to lead the way for a culture they saw as doomed?

Publisher : University of Chicago Press Language :EnglishHardcover :328 pagesISBN-10 :022673207XISBN-13 :978-0226732077Dimensions :15.24 x 2.29 x 22.86 cmSun Ra (1914-93) was one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his Arkestra appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, the keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology that claimed the planet Saturn as his true home. In Sun Ra’s Chicago, William Sites brings this visionary musician back to earth?specifically to the city’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 he lived and relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources? from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to ja ---