David Grubbs: Three Experiments in Music Writing

In his book Good night the pleasure was ours (Duke University Press, 2022), David Grubbs melts down and recasts three decades of playing music on tour into a book-length poem that brings to a close the trilogy that includes Now that the audience is assembled (2018) and The Voice in the Headphones (2020). These works spring from the idea of literature as a medium for writing about music; they represent through close description three sites of musical experience: the concert, the recording studio, and the tour, opening up music writing to greater experimentation while at the same time serving a documentary function amidst changing musical cultures.

Where the first two books in the series each apply a microscopic focus to a single day of musical activity, Good night the pleasure was ours skips forward with the refrain “different group this time,” careening from one mode of music-making and its attendant subculture to the next. The world outside the tour filters in with eccentric sparseness. From teenage punk bands to ensembles with no fixed membership to solo performance to a group augmented by digital avatars, touring is presented as a series of daily dislocations that provides an education distinctly its own.

For this presentation, Grubbs will present excerpts from these books, together with a discussion of literature as a means of documenting changing spaces of musical production.

Bio:

David Grubbs is Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Good night the pleasure was ours, The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (all published by Duke University Press) as well as the collaborative artists’ books Simultaneous Soloists (with Anthony McCall, Pioneer Works Press) and Projectile (with Reto Geiser and John Sparagana, Drag City).

Grubbs has released sixteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 releases. In 2000, his The Spectrum Between (Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Josiah McElheny, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, Jan St. Werner, the Red Krayola, and many others. He is a recipient of the Berlin Prize and a Foundation for

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