Henry Kaiser, "Aquirax Aida"

From henrykaiser.net

SPECIFIC SUGGESTED READING:

It is inspiring and educational to read biographies and critical studies of famous musicians from B.B. King to Eddie Van Halen to Iannis Xenakis. It is certainly useful to study method and theory books. However, in this list I'm trying to point out some fairly obscure books that you might never come across on your own. My reading of these books has helped me to create the ways that I think about music and music making. Many of these books are not directly about music. But if you listen to me play, the music that you will here will have been radically affected by some of the things that I have learned here. Some of these books are fairly expensive and difficult to find. I suggest that you try a large library, particularly a university library. Many of these books are old and valued friends and it is my pleasure to introduce them to you.:

Musics of Many Cultures, edited by Elizabeth May, University of California Press, 1980. Twenty essays on different musics of our planet: China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, India, Indonesia, Polynesia, Australia, Africa, Iran, Alaska, South America, etc. This can turn you on to many new musical sounds, ideas and feelings. Useful discographies and bibliographies are included.

Improvisation - Its Nature and Practice in Music, by Derek Bailey, Moorland, 1980. Improvisation is one of the most widely practiced and yet least documented and understood aspects of music. This excellent volume is the only book that I know of that discusses improvisation in any kind of philosophical detail. It includes interviews on this subject with musicians from many different styles: Indian, flamenco, baroque, classical organ, rock (Steve Howe) and jazz. Bailey gives a very good history of the British-European free improvisation movement of the 60's and 70's that inspired me to pick up guitar. Unfortunately this book is now out-of-print. So, try your library for it. You might be able to get it by mail from Derek Bailey, 14 Downs Road, London E5, England.

Sound Structure in Music, by Robert Erickson, University of California Press, 1975. There are countless books on the subjects of melody, harmony and rhythm. This is about the only generally readable book that I know of on the subject of an area of music that is just as important: timbre. This book helped provide a framework for a lot of my thoughts on this subject. What is the exact difference between the guitar sounds of Hubert Sumlin, Otis Rush and Albert Collins? What is the difference between a note, a chord, a sound and a noise? Why does it mean something very different when Albert King and Eric Clapton both bend an A up to a C#? How can I make my solo guitar playing sound like a large orchestra? These are the kind of thoughts that this book encouraged for me. Very inspiring but also a bit academic and orientated towards 20th century classical music.

Mind Tools - The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality, by Rudy Rucker, Houghton Mifflin, 1987, The Mathematical Tourist, by Ivars Peterson, Freeman, 1988 & Silicon Dreams, by Dr. Robert Lucky, St. Martins, 1989. I was one of those kids who enjoyed mathematics a lot in school. If you hated math you might not like these books. They are full of clear explanations for the general reader of what is happening on the far frontiers of mathematics today. The emphasis of Mind Tools and Silicon Dreams is on a fairly new branch of math/science called information theory. The "thought tools" of information theory have proven to be very useful to me for thinking about and making music. To me, all music that I have heard is just one tiny drop from an infinite ocean of music that could be. Reading these books could give you a good handle on how to think about what music might be in the depths or on distant shores of that ocean. There are many books that directly relate math and music. Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, for instance, is a popular book that I do not recommend. I find its ideas to be extremely culture bound and limited.

The Science of Musical Sound, by John R. Pierce, Scientific American Library, 1983. The scientific view of music. The basic physics and mathematics of music are set forth in this well-illustrated volume. The author is a professor at Bell Laboratories who was involved with the first computer-generation of music about 25 years ago. If you are getting into MIDI and synthesizers/samplers, then this would be an excellent book to read to get an overall understanding of the scientific views of what music and sound are.

Grammatical Man - Information, Entropy, Language and Life, by Jeremy Campbell, Touchstone-Simon and Schuster, 1982. An excellent, popularized introduction to information theory as mentioned above. Some sections on the structure of language that relate well to the structure of music. Some interesting discussions of music, too. I suspect that information theory and music will become a very fashionable subject during the 1990's. I was exposed to information theory at the same time that I started to play guitar in the early 70's. I have thought about music from this point of view from the very first day that I picked up a guitar in 1972 and still information theory completely colors the way that I think of music today.

Mind and Nature, by Gregory Bateson, Bantam, 1980. This book is concerned with Bateson's theory that how we think and learn is governed by the same sort of system that governs the evolution of ecology of all life on earth. I like to compare systems and this book provides interesting system models to apply to art and music. Since the human mind produces music, it is interesting to look at how it might work and think about how that affects music. While directed towards a general audience this book is a challenging pleasure to read. It certainly challenged my assumptions about many things.

The Lore of the Chinese Lute, by R.H. Van Gulik, Sophia-Tuttle, 1969. The chin or Chinese lute of this volume has the most sophisticated and varied right hand picking techniques of any instrument that I know. I have applied a lot of this book's information directly to guitar technique.

Micromotives and Macrobehavior, by Thomas C. Schelling, Norton, 1978. I took a course from this guy in College. It was probably worth more than all of the time that I spent in all my other classes combined. He deals with a special area of his own where economics meets human behavior meets unanticipated results. How does behavior in the aggregate become more than the sum of simple individual behavior? How do a group of musicians playing and improvising together create music that transcends their individual contributions? Why are artists who nobody likes so popular? Why does the music industry behave the ways that it does...often in ways that are bad for music? This work, for me, provides an interestingly different starting point for discussing such subjects (while of course the book never mentions music).

The Society of Mind, by Marvin Minsky, Simon and Schuster, 1986. Minsky is one of the chief pioneers in the development of artificial intelligence in computer science. In this book he attempts a unified theory of the mind and the nature of thought. It can also be looked at as a new conception of human psychology. Some possible unifying concepts for all that has been discussed above are provided here.

Does God Play Dice? :The Mathematics of Chaos, by Ian Stewart, Blackwell, 1989. Fractal mathematics, something very important to me since the late 70's is suddenly becoming very fashionable. For me this is probably even more relevant to the music of the future than information theory. This is by far the best, and most accessable book that I know of on chaos and fractals.