An innovative contribution to music history, cultural studies, and sound studies, Avant-garde on Record revisits post-war composers and their technologically oriented brand of musical modernism. It describes how a broad range of figures (including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Toshirō Mayuzumi, Claire Schapira, Anthony Braxton and Gunther Schuller) engaged with avant-garde aesthetics while responding to a rapidly changing, technologically fuelled, spatialized audio culture. Jonathan Goldman focuses on how contemporary listeners understood these composers' works in the golden age of LPs and explores how this reception was mediated through consumer-oriented sound technology that formed a prism through which listeners processed the 'music of their time'. His account reveals unexpected aspects of twentieth-century audio culture: from sonic ping-pong to son et lumière shows, from Venetian choral music by Stravinsky to the soundscape of Niagara Falls, from a Buddhist Cantata to an LP box set cast as a parlour game.

‘Carefully researched, intelligently handled, and enjoyable-to-read … an invaluable contribution to research on postwar modernism'.

Eric Drott - University of Texas at Austin

‘This is a sweeping and impressive book in which Goldman convincingly demonstrates the massive impact that stereo records had on both the production and reception of midcentury avant-garde music.… it becomes clear time and time again that the author listens to and loves the music about which he is writing. This quality is disappointingly rare in writing about music, academic or otherwise, and it is - on top of the many other accomplishments of [the book] - very much worth celebrating.’

David H. Miller Source: Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association.

‘… I was continually impressed by the selection, variety, and imaginative discussion of the book’s 40+ diagrams and figures. I am delighted with this addition to my bookshelf and look forward to seeing Goldman’s ideas circulating in future scholarship across musicology, cultural history, and sound studies.’

Frankie Perry Source: Fontes Artis Musicae