In recent decades, experimental music has flourished outside of European and American concert halls. The principles of indeterminacy, improvisation, nonmusical sound, and noise, pioneered in concert and on paper by the likes of Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Ornette Coleman, can now be found in a vari[...]

In "Experimental Otherwise", Benjamin Piekut takes the reader into the heart of what we mean by 'experimental' in avant-garde music. Focusing on one place and time - New York City, 1964 - Piekut examines five disparate events: the New York Philharmonic's disastrous performance of John Cage's Atlas E[...]