My doctoral dissertation, “‘The Kind of Music We Play’: A Study of Self-Idiomatic Improvised Music and Musicians in Boston,” is available on the website of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Folsom Library. Users may download and share copies with attribution in accordance with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. This version is complete and includes audio and video samples as well as graphics and images.
PhD dissertation: “The Kind of Music We Play”
The BSC “Manual” book and downloads
I’ve been a member of the 8-piece improvising ensemble The BSC since its inception in 2000. It was founded by Bhob Rainey in Boston, and though several of us (including Rainey) have moved to other towns, it’s still a group closely associated with the Boston area’s fertile experimental music scene. Finally, after 11 years and only one full-length release, The BSC comes on strong with three – three! – new releases spanning most of the band’s history, accompanied by a book full of essays and drawings. One of the recordings is a collaboration with Pauline Oliveros, which I organized in 2009 while I was at Rensselaer.
The book features an essay and an analysis by me, as well as several of my drawings. It also contains essays by Rainey, Ben Hall, and Aaron Philip Tate, and prose poetry from Damon Krukowski, of Damon & Naomi.
You can order Manual on Bhob Rainey’s Bandcamp page. The book is available for a limited time only as a hardcover (8 copies left as of this posting), but is also available as a PDF download, and you’ll be able to get it as a paperback once the hardcovers are gone. The music is available as a lossless download, or if you get the hardcover you can also get a limited edition CD-R.
