Readings for Inventing Systems, Spring 2006

• Readings Packet [PDF file, 4.9 Mb]
• Readings Packet 2 (ToMaTo) [PDF file, 9.9 Mb]

Teaching Through Performance [2004-05]

• Friedrich Engels: Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Pages on Chile under Allende (1970-73)

Allende's Chile, 1972 (John Foran)

History of Chile under Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity (1970-73) (Ewin Torre)

• Welcome
• Allende wins the elections
• The Popular Unity government
• El Tanquetazo: June 29, 1973
• The definitive coup
• Resources and links

CIA Covert action in Chile: 1963-1973 (Ralph McGehee)

Chile 1964-1973 (William Blum)

Scripts and Texts by Students
Peformance Pictures from March 9 2005 and from March 10 2005
Performance pictures from June 1 2005 Recital Hall and
from June 2 2005 Green Hill Juvenile Prison

Readings that Matter to Me

Cybernetics

• Stafford Beer:
  1. Designing Freedom
  2. Fanfare for Effective Freedom
  
  
• Heinz von Foerster:
  1. Perception of the Future and The Future of Perception
  2. On Constructing a Reality
  3. Interview with Heinz von Foerster
  4. Thoughts and Notes on Cognition [extract]
  5. Disorder/Order: Discovery or Invention?
  6. Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics
  7. Cybernetics of Cybernetics
  8. Communication Amongst Automata (1962)
  9. Biological Principles of Information Storage and Retrieval (1967)
  10. Perception of Form in Biological and Man-Made Systems (1962)
  11. Responsibilities of Competence (1972)
  12. Notes on An Epistemology For Living Things (1972)
  13. Heuristics: A Report on a Course on Knowledge Aquisition (1970)
  14. From Stimulus to Symbol: The Economy of Biological Computation (1966)
  15. Logical Structure of Environment and Its Internal Representation (BCL 096)
  16. Metaphysics of an Experimental Epistemologist (1996)
      (on Warren McCullough)
  17. Form: Perception, Representation and Symbolization (1962)
      
  
  
• Warren Weaver: Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication
  
  
• Claude Shannon: A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948)
  
  
• Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Julian Bigelow: Behavior, Purpose and Teleology (1943)
  
  
• J.Y. Lettvin, H.R. Maturana, W.S. McCulloch, W.H. Pitts: What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain (1959)
  
  
• Humberto Maturana:
  1. Cognitive Strategies (1974)
  2. Ontology of Observing (1988)
  3. The Nature of Time (1995)
  4. The Biology of Language (1978)
  5. Cognition (1978)
  6. Biology of Cognition (1970)
  
  
• W. Ross Ashby:
  
  1. An Introduction to Cybernetics (complete book)
  2. The Contribution of Information Theory to Pathological Mechanisms in Psychiatry (BCL #164) [1968]
  
  
  
• Gregory Bateson: The Position of Humor in Human Communication (1952)
  
  
• Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead: Conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (1976)
  
  
• Arun Chandra: Poetry for Puppets
  
  
• Marianne Brun: Designing Society

Articles by Herbert Brun

1. The Listener's Interpretation of Music
2. Teaching the Function of Time in Art
3. Wayfaring Sounds
4. ... to hold discourse---at least---with a computer...
5. Drawing Distinctions Links Contradictions
6. Existentialism and the Arts (two fragments)
7. Gustav Mahler and the Virtues of Ambiguity (two fragments)
8. Musical Ideas for Synthetic Sound (1964)

Composition

• Mark Enslin:
  • When is Audience?
  • Teaching Composition: Facing the Power of the Respondent
    • PDF file
    • HTML file
    
    
    
• Susan Parenti
  1. The Relationships Between An Objectivity-Conditioned Language And the Present State of New Music
     • HTML file
     • PDF file
  2. Self-Reference and the Language About New Music
     • HTML file
     • PDF file
  3. Touchy, in eight parts, for four voices
     • HTML file
     • PDF file
  4. Proposals for a Feminist Composition Curriculum
  
  
  
• Mark Sullivan:
  1. Questions to Ask a Piece of Music (Poem)
  2. The Performance of Gesture: Musical Gesture, Then, And Now (1984)
  
  
  
• Elie Siegmeister: Music and Society
  
  
• Arnold Schoenberg:
  • New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea
  • English translation of Pierrot Lunaire poems
  
  
  
• Leon Botstein: Schoenberg and the Audience
  
  
• John Cage
  • Experimental Music
  • Experimental Music (Doctrine)
  
  
  
• Kenneth Gaburo: Whole Language Language
  
  
• Hector Berlioz: Program notes to "Symphony Fantastique"
  
  
• Iannis Xenakis and Morton Feldman: In Conversation
• Suggested Listening List
• Suggested Readings List
  
  
• Stefan Wolpe:
  1. To Understand Music (1953)
  2. On Proportions (1960)
  3. Recollections of Stefan Wolpe (Austin Clarkson, Ed.)
  
  
  
• Liberetto to Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld
  
  
• Alban Berg:
  1. What is Atonality?
  2. Why is Schoenberg's Music So Difficult to Understand?
  3. A Guide to "Wozzeck" (by Willi Reich)

Composition and Technology

• Pierre Boulez: Technology and the Composer
• Gottfried Michael Koenig: Compositional Processes

Theater

• Bertolt Brecht:
  1. Writing The Truth: Five Difficulties
  2. The Street Scene
• Franco Rame:An Introduction to Dario Fo's "We Won't Pay!"
• David Greenspan:The Myopia
• William Gillespie, Mark Enslin, Rick Burkhardt, Joe Futrelle:Theater Therapy

Aesthetics and Social Criticism

• Walter Benjamin:
  1. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
  2. The Storyteller
• Theodor Adorno
  1. Education after Auschwitz
  2. Commitment
  3. Music and Language
  4. The Culture Industry (with Max Horkheimer)
  5. Elements of Aesthetics (with Hanns Eisler)
• Herbert Marcuse:
  1. Repressive Tolerance
  2. The Language of Total Administration (from "One-Dimensional Man")
• Roland Barthes: Elements of Semiology

Writers

• Arundhati Roy
  1. Come September
  2. Confronting Empire
• Sherman Alexie Relevant Contradictions
• Lewis Carroll: The Mad Gardener's Song
• Oscar Wilde
  1. On the Decay of Lying
  2. The Soul of Man Under Socialism
• Franz Kafka:
  1. The Hunger Artist
  2. The Trial
• Heinrich von Kleist: On the Marionette Theater
• Karl Kraus: The Artist, the Public, and the Fool
• Gertrude Stein
  1. Tender Buttons (excerpts)
  2. Composition as Explanation
• Toni Morrison On Contemporary Racism
• Kurt Vonnegut Interview
• Michael Holloway Hyper Post Meta
• Adrienne Rich Divisions of Labor
• Jonathan Swift: A Modest Proposal
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Chap. 5)

Politics

• Marianne Brun: Paradigms: The Inertia of Language
• Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian: Collateral Language
• Eric Foner: Not All Freedom is Made in America
• Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Economic Bill of Rights (Jan. 11, 1944)
• Friedrich Engles:
  1. The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man
  2. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)
• Karl Marx:
  1. Wage Labor and Capital (1849)
  2. The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof (1890)
• Leo Huberman:
  1. The ABC of Socialism
  2. How to spread the word
• Major General Smedley Butler: War Is A Racket
• Bertrand Russell:
  1. In Praise of Idleness
  2. Why I am not a Christian
  3. What Desires Are Politically Important?
• Theodor Adorno: Excerpts from "The Authoritarian Personality"
  1. Prejudice in the Interview Material
  2. Politics and Economics in the Interview Material
  3. Some Aspects of Religious Ideology As Revealed in the Interview Material
  4. Types and Syndromes