"Essays on pretty much everything I think about: my years in the NYC music scene, my work in El Salvador and Nicaragua, my thoughts about technology, about art and politics, and sexuality". Così Bob Ostertag annuncia l'uscita tra poche settimane del suo libro Creative Life: Music, Politics, People and Machines, pubblicato da University of Illinois Press.
E così lo presenta nelle note di copertina George Lewis, storico membro dell'AACM e professore di musica americana alla Columbia University, autore l'anno scorso del voluminoso A Power Stronger Than Itself: "Nothing like Creative Life has ever been produced by a major publisher. Few chronicles of the lives of late-twentieth-century American composers or improvisers exist, and even fewer first-person narratives exist in which the composer takes the time to critically examine his or her life practice. Bob Ostertag's brand of politics, however, demands that he do just that.
Ostertag adopts a clear-eyed, forthright stance concerning the integration of radical politics and radical music through his own experiences at the center of an important New York musical scene and in historically and politically crucial regions of the world. He refuses to appropriate sounds and gestures unreflectively from his surroundings, despite the technological ease with which he could have done so as an expert in electronic media technique. Perhaps he regards this as just one more way in which the people whose life-and-death struggles he chronicles so sensitively--people with whom he has lived, worked, and shared danger--need not fear appropriation from him.
One sees how Ostertag's political thinking is clarified through his involvement with music; in fact, this book shows how music can be deployed as a tool for actually theorizing the social world. One even dares to imagine that Creative Life will bridge the divide between Ostertag's two theaters of operations, and help them to radicalize each other."
E così lo presenta nelle note di copertina George Lewis, storico membro dell'AACM e professore di musica americana alla Columbia University, autore l'anno scorso del voluminoso A Power Stronger Than Itself: "Nothing like Creative Life has ever been produced by a major publisher. Few chronicles of the lives of late-twentieth-century American composers or improvisers exist, and even fewer first-person narratives exist in which the composer takes the time to critically examine his or her life practice. Bob Ostertag's brand of politics, however, demands that he do just that.
Ostertag adopts a clear-eyed, forthright stance concerning the integration of radical politics and radical music through his own experiences at the center of an important New York musical scene and in historically and politically crucial regions of the world. He refuses to appropriate sounds and gestures unreflectively from his surroundings, despite the technological ease with which he could have done so as an expert in electronic media technique. Perhaps he regards this as just one more way in which the people whose life-and-death struggles he chronicles so sensitively--people with whom he has lived, worked, and shared danger--need not fear appropriation from him.
One sees how Ostertag's political thinking is clarified through his involvement with music; in fact, this book shows how music can be deployed as a tool for actually theorizing the social world. One even dares to imagine that Creative Life will bridge the divide between Ostertag's two theaters of operations, and help them to radicalize each other."
A settembre Ostertag presenterà il libro in Europa con incontri pubblici e concerti in solo: sarà ospite anche del festival Le Arti in Città a Perugia, dal 20 al 27.
