Jennifer Iverson

Bio

Jennifer Iverson is an Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she teaches in sound studies and disability studies. Her first book is Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Contributions

Unstable Modernism in the Barron Studio

Peer Reviewed

Print Plus Exclusive

Mid-century modernism in music largely flowed in two streams. One was the austere, hermetic music of composers such as Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Their “serialist” music was built from refined, logical, even mathematical systems, but listeners often experience it as the opposite: haphazard, frustrating, incomprehensible. [1] Akin to the flat, polished surfaces of mid-century architecture, such music offers few graspable sonic hooks by way of melody, harmony, or...

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collaboration music