The Composer’s Black Box — Book Launch with Theodore Gordon and Eliot Bates
Please join us for a book launch event to celebrate the publication of The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America (University of California Press, 2025) by Theodore Gordon, Assistant Professor of Music at Baruch College and the Graduate Center.
The Composer’s Black Box shows how scientific and technological developments in mid-twentieth-century America galvanized musicians to reconfigure their conceptions of sociality, freedom, and the creative self. By following five musicians (Morton Subotnick, Donald Buchla, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, and Sun Ra) through technoscientific encounters in the 1960s, the book shows how cybernetic thinking in a range of disciplines, from experimental music to jazz and electrical engineering, has shaped musical techniques and technologies and changed what it means to be a composer—or, more broadly, a music-making human—in an increasingly informational world.
Gordon will be joined by Eliot Bates, Associate Professor of Music at the Graduate Center and co-author with Samantha Bennett of Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies (MIT Press, 2025), to discuss the book, and will also demonstrate concepts explored in the book on a Buchla Modular Electronic Music System.
The Composer’s Black Box can be ordered directly from the University of California Press here: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-composers-black-box/paper