Books by Robin Maconie

Other Planets draws on over fifty years of the author's close study of Stockhausen and functions as a catalogue raisonee of Stockhausen's complete output. The updated edition extends the range of the volume's contents to include the 25 works Stockhausen composed between 2004 and his death in 2007.

Hear the name ';Igor Stravinsky' and the first thing that comes to mind is a composer of ponderous, ';serious' music. But did you know that Stravinsky lived much of his life in Hollywood? That he collaborated on musical projects with Pablo Picasso and George Balanchine? That his work subtly espoused deeply held political views and reflected key literary influences? That he was not only interested in the modern communication technologies of his timesound recording, radio, television, even early computersbut wrote music that echoed their impact?In Experiencing Stravinsky, music historian Robin Maconie takes a fresh approach to understanding this great composer's works, explaining what makes Stravinsky's sound unique and what we, as listeners, need to know in order to appreciate the variety and brilliance of his compositions. Experiencing Stravinsky is more than just another work of music appreciation. In the author's deft hands, Stravinsky's long musical career is a guided tour through 20th-century history, from Czarist Russia and two world wars to the height of the Hollywood era and the birth of the information age. Maconie has provided nothing less than an operating manual to getting the most out of Stravinsky's music.

In Musicologiameaning musical reasoning as distinct from a mere love of musicauthor and composer Robin Maconie takes aim against the fashionable misconception that music is empty of meaning, or auditory cheesecake. Fresh and penetrating insights draw attention to the influence of musical analogy in the history of science and philosophy from ancient Greece to modern times. Since music has always existed, it is an expression of human consciousness. The discoveries of Pythagoras, Zeno, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein would not have been possible without a tradition of musical acoustics. The story of Musicologia unfolds in thirty-one chapters from primordial considerations of silence, communication, selfhood, balance, and motion to focus on more recent and specific issues of chaos, order, relativity, and artificial intelligence, showing that even the most controversial aspects of modern art music form part of a wider endeavor to engage with universal propositions of science and philosophy.