Sounds Beyond

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"In Sounds Beyond, Kevin C. Karnes illuminates the unofficial and interconnected music and art scenes in the USSR during the second half of the 1970s through the work of Arvo Pärt, one of the most successful and widely known contemporary classical composers with a large international following. Karnes shows how Pärt's work of the 1970s took shape in dialogue with a community of alternative musicians and as part of a vital yet forgotten culture of collective experimentation Karnes calls the 1970s Soviet Underground. Using a combination of archival research and oral history, Karnes carefully situates modes of experimentation in the late socialist contexts out of which they emerged, and he also shows the degree to which experimental scenes in the East and West were in dialogue and shared several common goals. Karnes also unveils the deeply communal nature of experimental projects in music and the visual arts, from John Cage to Morton Feldman, and in dislodging the mythology of the solitary genius cultivated in the official biographies of Pärt and many others; as he writes, his work was impossible without community"--