Book Launch: The Composer’s Black Box with Ted Gordon

In this book event, Ted Gordon will read from his recent book The Composer's Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America (University of California Press, 2025), which examines how human musicians and their electronic musical instruments negotiate agency, creativity, and selfhood through cybernetic pathways of control. Through five historical case studies—chapters on early cybernetic electronic systems developed by Morton Subotnick, Donald Buchla, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, and Sun Ra—Gordon’s book develops a concept of “ex-composition” that accounts for experiences of playing with instruments that play themselves, and the consequences those experiences hold for understanding the musical self in an increasingly informational world. The presentation will also involve an improvised performance with a small Buchla modular electronic music system, one of the instrumental systems examined in the book.  

Ted Gordon is Assistant Professor of Music at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America (University of California Press, 2025), as well as several book chapters and articles that explore frictions between experimental music, electronic instruments, and contemporary science & technology. As a musician, he improvises with the Buchla Music Easel and other objects of historical study as a means towards producing a critical, embodied understanding of musical technologies.

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