Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace

"Aiding Robin in his efforts to weave the history of Bang on a Can through these broader vistas are his tremendous skills as a writer, honed through his experience as a professional music critic. The result is a book that is not only illuminating but also a genuine pleasure to read." -- Eric Drott, Journal of the Royal Musical Association

"This book is a tribute to the survival of emerging musical forms." -- S. Lenig, CHOICE

"Ready-made for introducing scholars, students, and the general public to the culture of new music in the late twentieth-century. Accessible and informative, Robin--in the spirit of his subject--has written scholarship that nonetheless just might reach new people." -- Journal of Musicological Research

"This book is a tribute to the survival of emerging musical forms. Summing Up: Highly recommended." -- CHOICE

"This is an excellent book. It tells a series of interwoven stories - a tale of three composers and their music, a tale of a festival and its house band, a tale of new music in New York and how that music configured itself in relation to state and corporate funding. Industry is a reminder that a book with real scholarly significance can also be a good read." -- Christopher Fox

"Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace, by William Robin, an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Maryland, is a colorful, insightful, and admirably evenhanded study of Bang on a Can in its early years and, by extension, of the creative upheavals in the music world at the end of the twentieth century." -- Tim Page, New York Review of Books

"Sparks vital conversation about what music based on solidarity might one day look like." -- The Wire

"In the past decade, William Robin has established himself not only as one of America's most formidable younger musicologists but also as an incisive, eloquent writer in the public sphere. His study of Bang on a Can gives lavish evidence of his multisided brilliance: it is at once an absorbing historical narrative and an exacting work of critical analysis. No scholar or fan of contemporary American music can do without it." -- Alex Ross

"William Robin breaks important new ground with this thick historical and ethnographic description of how networks of ensembles, institutions, listeners, and new technologies come together to forge new experimental music communities and marketplaces. Much more than a history of a new music ensemble, this book incisively chronicles a larger movement aimed at revitalizing expression, reception, and diversity in contemporary American classical music." -- George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: Â The AACM and American Experimental Music

"One thing that becomes clear over the course of Industry is the degree to which the group's embrace of the market in practical terms amounted to an embrace of marketing." -- Eric Drott, Journal of the Royal Musical Association