Music and the Open Work

A new book from the Arketonses series:
Music and the Open Work

Arketon Publications' latest book from the Arketonses series is Music and the Open Work. The book, consisting of a series of interviews with Aykut Köksal and Mehmet Nemutlu, presents and discusses the emergence of "openness," a paradigm-founding concept of modernist music, in different musical schools and the production of different composers, through their music.

Music and the Open Work emerged from the transformation of a 29-interview program series conducted by Köksal and Nemutlu on Açık Radyo into a book format. The book presents examples of open works with different forms of representation, supported by rich visual documentation.

The interviews begin with three introductory programs that examine the first products of modernism in the early 20th century in the context of openness, followed by a discussion of Umberto Eco's conceptualization of the open work and the works he presented as examples in his book of the same name. These initial interviews are followed by American experimentalists who were pioneers of the open work. The music of Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, John Cage, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman, who, with the ease of not being burdened by historical baggage, pushed openness to its limits, created new sound environments, and explored new representation possibilities instead of traditional notation, is discussed in the interviews by examining individual works.

In the third section of the interviews, the doctrinized state of the open work determines the main theme in European modernists of the 1950s. This time, the works of Luciano Berio, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and Luigi Nono, which both utilized developing electronic possibilities and met with the spatial music of the period, are examined. The music of these composers, who, instead of making free experiments, transferred original conceptualizations to the sound environment and drew defined doctrinal frameworks, becomes the main topic of discussion in the interviews.

In short, Music and the Open Work conveys the historical story of a concept that enabled the birth of the most brilliant products of 20th-century music.