Elliott Sharp IrRational Music Reading & Performance - Free!
TR Crandall Guitars - Wednesday May. 22 at 8pm
We are happy to announce we will host a book reading and performance by Elliott Sharp from his recent memoir.
Elliott Sharp will read from his new book IrRational Music as well as present a short solo performance on the 8-string guitarbass built for him by luthier Saul Koll.
IrRational Music is a mix of memoir, cultural discussion, and music theory and is published by TerraNova Books and distributed by MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/irrational-music
“Elliott Sharp’s writing, like his music, recombines the scrupulously discursive with the deeply humane and reflective. What a joy it is to be informed by this remarkable account of the coming-of-age of his psyche, his curiosity, and his methodology. Sharp paints a picture of lost kingdoms of the avant-garde which aren’t really lost, but continuous in our present if we’re inclined to notice them. With this book, a reader joins Sharp in the step-by-step reinvigoration of intentional sound itself – sound as culture, as science, as art -- a process that can never be finished.” – Jonathan Lethem
"Reminiscent in many ways of the few especially great musical autobiographies that come to mind since maybe the original, Artie Shaw's *The Trouble With Cinderella,* Elliott Sharp's extremely enjoyable, extremely informative memoir is one of the most perceptive and (piercing) looks at how the working life and day-to-day existence of a professional musician blends (or meshes) with the day-to-day musical mind of a, let's be honest, genius. Sharp's writing is clear, precise, and realistic. Having worked with him in one way or the other many times over the past quarter-century, I not only look forward to continuing to do so but to also read and understand, later, about what he (and the rest of us) was actually doing now." - Jack Womack
“Elliott Sharp was born in 1951, a year when we still had rotary telephones and the first jets flew across the Atlantic costing 1/3 of the average worker's annual salary; a year where there was only one recording of Anton Webern available and Schoenberg was thought to be a mathematician rather than a composer. Sharp is of the first generation of composers to come of age in a musical environment when everything seemed connected; Gregorian Chant to John Cage's chance. His book, IrRational Music, is a fascinating window into that moment in time when music opened up to everyone and all things became possible.” - Morton Subotnick
"This has been Sharp's path, as revealed in his graceful and insightful first book—digging deep into these varied genres has been the path of a musician searching for and making the music he loves, not constrained by any one idea or purpose, dipping into everything that means something to him. IrRational Music is a musical autobiography from a man who thinks critically about his own music and all that he hears around him. It's not that he loves music, which of course he does, but that making music is the way he understands his own place in the world." - George Grella, Brooklyn Rail