Fear Of Music

Fear Of Music
David Stubbs
O Books
ISBN: 978-1-84694-179-5
Non-Fiction, Modern Art, Music
Reviewed by Michael Woodhead

“Why has avant garde music failed to attain the audience, the cachet, the legitimacy of its visual equivalent?” So begins this small book of six chapters and just over 130 pages. It endeavors to help the reader understand why modern society seems to have embraced avant garde and experimental art, but not the same in music, even though they both mirror the psychological, spiritual and societal breakdown of Man.

Chapter one takes an overall view of the apparent “schism” between modern art and music. Chapter two looks at the roots of both, beginning with the original friendship between Schoenberg and Kandinsky; the rise of the Futurist movement; and the relationship of art and music with Nazi Germany. Chapter three highlights the beginnings of musique concrete and electronic music, as well as the evolution of jazz. Chapter four focuses on pop art and pop music, and the early experiments of Paul McCartney and the free form group, AMM, and then on to the music of Derek Bailey.The fifth chapter takes a look at some European groups like Can, Faust, and Kraftwerk, then to the music of Frank Zappa, punk and post-punk work, and then on to rave and ambient. Chapter six wraps things up by taking another overview of the art and music, and the author explains that, “One of the great reasons avant garde music needs to exist is that it does not need to exist.” It is the threat it notionally poses to civilization that makes it so supremely civilized. It is its refusal to be co-opted by the forces that drive us on towards eventual death that makes it so affirmative. Fear Of Music, I feel, is a much needed resource in our appreciation of the arts regardless of our own tastes in music or art.