For a decimated post-war West Germany, the electronic music studio at the WDR radio in Cologne was a beacon of hope. Jennifer Iverson’s Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde traces the reclamation and repurposing of wartime machines, spaces, and discourses into the new sounds of the mid-century studio. In the 1950s, when technologies were plentiful and the need for reconstruction was great, West Germany began to rebuild its cultural prestige via aesthetic and technical advances. The studio’s composers, collaborating with scientists and technicians, coaxed music from sine-tone oscillators, noise generators, band-pass filters, and magnetic tape. Together, they applied core tenets from information theory and phonetics, reclaiming military communication technologies as well as fascist propaganda broadcasting spaces. The electronic studio nurtured a revolutionary synthesis of science, technology, politics, and aesthetics. Its esoteric sounds transformed mid-century music and continue to reverberate today. Electronic music–echoing both cultural anxiety and promise–is a quintessential Cold War innovation.
The Healing Power of Music
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This book is part on-the-ground college insider tell-all memoir and part study skills bible. It’s brutally honest, relatable, entirely free of jargon, and alerts parents/students to a huge problem in American education today—high school doesn’t prepare students to thrive in college. This Book Will Not be on the Test shows students how to learn more and earn better grades in less time so that they can make the most of their college investment.
Not only is there more of a challenge in college than high school, but there’s also the fact that there is more information easily accessible with a few clicks of a button now than in Shakespeare’s time. When we are flooded with so much information, not only is it difficult to study in general, but there are added problems of how to figure out what’s good information, what’s important, finding the time to read it, and then trying to remember what’s been read. It can be a bit like trying to drink from a firehose.
Bruce Craven does so in his book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones. As stated in the front flap, “One of the great joys of Game of Thrones is strategizing, from the comfort of our sofas, about the bold moves we would make to succeed in the bloody, volatile, epic world of empire-building. As we watch the characters battle for survival, it hits us that even if we don’t face the dire fate of Ned Stark, our real-world leadership challenges can be brutal—and our offices bring little comfort. Every day in our professional lives we are presented with opportunities and challenges. We must decide which roads to follow, which risks to confront, and when to pursue the call to adventure.”
