The music we hear is always inhabited by voices of previous performances. Because listening is now so often accompanied by moving images, this process is more complex than ever. Music videos, television and film music, interactive video games, and social media are now part of the contemporary
listening experience.
In An Eye for Music, author John Richardson navigates key areas of current thought -- from music theory to film theory to cultural theory - to explore what it means that the experience of music is now cinematic, spatial, and visual as much as it is auditory.
Richardson maps out the terrain of recent audiovisual production over a wide array of styles and practices, and sketches out a set of common structures that inform how we experience sound and vision. Whether examining Philip Glass or The Gorillaz, Richard Linklater's Waking Life or Michel Gondry's
Be Kind Rewind, Richardson's arguments are both fascinating and provocative.
1. Introduction
2. Navigating the Neosurreal: background and premises
3. Neosurrealist Tendencies in Recent Films
4. Neosurrealist Metamusicals, Flow and Camp Aesthetics
5. In Tandem with the Random: Loose Synchronisation and Remediation in Philip Glass's La Belle et la Bête and
The Dark Side of Oz
6. The Surrealism of the Virtual Band in the Digital Age: Gorillaz' "Clint Eastwood" and "Feel Good Inc."
7. Back to the Garden? Performing the Disaffected Acoustic Imaginary in the Digital Age
8. Concluding thoughts: All that is solid melts into air?
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John Richardson is Professor of Musicology at the University of Turku in Finland and author of Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass's Akhnaten (1999).
