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Modernism

1) Other Minds Archive (AUDIO) - Programs from the San Francisco new music organization. Many of the episodes feature interviews with the composers. There are some sound poetry programs too.
Highlights:

George Antheil
Pierre Boulez
Henry Brant
Anthony Braxton - interview
John Cage - an intro to Cage; short piece for toy piano; Cage & Feldman in conversation
Elliott Carter
Alvin Curran/MEV
Brian Eno - includes samples from his tape collection
Lou Harrison - on gamelan; music for tack piano; his 78 rpm record collection
Alan Hovhaness
Mauricio Kagel
Conlon Nancarrow - interview; music
Pauline Oliveros
Leo Ornstein - his music and a phone conversation on his 100th birthday
Charlemagne Palestine
Harry Partch
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Ned Rorem
Nicolas Slonimsky - musicology lecture; on Frank Zappa
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji
James Tenney
Ivan Wyschnegradsky
La Monte Young - work for a gong struck 42 times
John Zorn
New Music Seances - recorded at the San Francisco Swedenborgian Church, these concerts offer an imaginative mix of contemplative piano miniatures.
Other Minds Festival - recordings of the annual concert series

2) Improv:21 series (MOVING IMAGES) - A series of discussions and performances with leading artists of today’s improvisational music scene, organized by the ROVA Saxophone Quartet. New programs are being added to the Archive and eventually this series will reside in the Other Minds collection.

ROVA Saxophone Quartet
Oliver Lake
Fred Frith
Nels Cline
Ned Rothenberg
Carla Kihlstedt
Miya Masaoka
Gino Robair

3) John Ronsheim (AUDIO) - History of contemporary Western classical music lectures with the Antioch College (Ohio) Professor. More than twenty lectures. According to one citation, Prof. Ronsheim lived in Italy after the war, attended Darmstadt, and met many of the composers whom he discusses. Lecture of November 28 covers Dallapiccola, Goethe Lieder, early Musique Concrète, electronic music by Boulez and Stockhausen, early Nono, Webern’s Op. 21. Classroom administrative content has been edited from the recordings. See www.ronsheim.org for more details.

Of related interest…

Naxos “Classical Music Spotlight” - a series of short podcast documentaries: John Adams, Bartok, Cage, Copeland, Philip Glass, Hovhaness, Ives, Mahler, Arvo Part, Shostakovich, Takemitsu, and more.

4) The Conet Project (AUDIO) - An unusual audio document originally released as a 4 CD set in 1997, which quickly became popular among collectors of Outsider music. Found sound art, in the form of shortwave radio broadcasts of various anonymous voices reading what seems to be random non-sequential numbers: “1, 5, 7, 2, 8.” Alternative music stars have expressed their admiration and samples have found their way into mainstream films and albums. See other recordings on Archive from the Irdial label.

Of related interest, from the Netlabels subcollection…

La P’tite Maison - French label of electroacoustic & ambient music.
Nexsound - Wayward Music - Ukrainian experimental music.

5) Naropa Poetics Archive (AUDIO) - Poetry readings and lectures, from the Beats to Language poetry: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Harry Smith, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Joanne Kyger, Robert Creeley, Jerome Rothenberg, Pierre Joris, and more.

6) LibriVox (AUDIO) - Public Domain recordings of classic literature. Sometimes it’s acceptable to hear, rather than read the classics. Many works are available in their original language. (I’ve omitted text media from this list, for inclusion in a future post.)

I’ve tried to select recordings that use a single reader, not a group reading.
Recommended:

T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land
Sigmund Freud - Dream Psychology; Reflections on War and Death
Hegel - Introduction to the Philosophy of History
Karl Marx - Eleven Theses on Feuerbach; Wage-Labour and Capital; The Communist Manifesto
Nietzsche - The Twilight of the Idols
Ezra Pound - Cathay
Santayana - Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy
Gertrude Stein - Tender Buttons
Wallace Steven - Poems
Virginia Woolf - Night and Day

7) Lutz Mommartz (MOVING IMAGES) - Over 60 short works by this veteran German experimental filmmaker. Many of the films are without dialogue, but even those with non-subtitled German conversation can be appreciated for their poetic visuals and use of sound. New works are being added.

Samples:

8) San Francisco Cinematheque Program Notes (TEXT) - The SF Cinematheque is a longstanding organization devoted to exhibiting experimental film. Here are their collected program notes, from 1984 - 2000, as part of the Prelinger text collection. The programs originally took the form of photocopied pages handed to patrons as they entered the screening room at the SF Art Institute. The programs offer commentary on the works of leading experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Ken Jacobs, and others. Some of the notes are by the filmmakers themselves and some are handwritten.
Sample: 1984 Program Notes

Items of related interest…

The making of a George Kuchar film.
Found footage filmmaker Craig Baldwin.
Paul Malcolm’s “Notes Towards a Project on Citizen Kane.“

9) The Power of Nightmares (MOVING IMAGES, 2004) - This is not another 9/11 conspiracy theory film, but a thoughtful BBC production. Filmmaker Adam Curtis is noted for a career of ongoing 3-part 3-hour essay films that all argue about the influence of ideas and beliefs upon the shaping of history. Some of his other films can be found on Archive and elsewhere on the internet you can easily find “The Trip - What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom,” which was probably one of the better films of 2007.