David Grubbs's Critical Reads

David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and author of Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording, also published by Duke University Press. As a musician, he has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 180 commercially released recordings. David Grubbs will discuss Now that the audience is assembled on Friday, 4/13 6pm at the Co-op. 

The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, by Susan Howe - The sound of Susan Howe reading might be my favorite music. Hearing her read from this at the University of Chicago sometime in the mid-1990s was among the most revelatory of listening experiences. In even broaching the subject I find myself replaying those strange toggles in her delivery, those threshold experiences among multiple modes of writing.

Three Poems, by John Ashbery - The Concert from Three Poems is the luminous negative example for "Now that the audience is assembled." This prose poem is largely preamble to a musical performance that suddenly has already taken place; in "Now that . . . " I decided to make a single concert the entirety of the book's universe.

B Jenkins, by Fred Moten - I'm still happily tangling with this one -- a book of poetry that contains some of the finest, most pleasurable writing about music in recent years.

About Now that the audience is assembled: Following his investigation into experimental music and sound recording in Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs turns his attention to the live performance of improvised music with an altogether different form of writing. Now that the audience is assembled is a book-length prose poem that describes a fictional musical performance during which an unnamed musician improvises the construction of a series of invented instruments before an audience that is alternately contemplative, participatory, disputatious, and asleep. Over the course of this phantasmagorical all-night concert, repeated interruptions take the form of in-depth discussions and musical demonstrations. Both a work of literature and a study of music, Now that the audience is assembled explores the categories of improvised music, solo performance, text scores, instrument building, aesthetic deskilling and reskilling, and the odd fate of the composer in experimental music.