Now! Writings 1982–2021 brings together nearly four decades of texts, reflections, interviews, and work commentaries by Austrian composer Peter Ablinger. This extensive English edition — edited by Gisela Gronemeyer — offers an illuminating introduction to one of the most singular voices in contemporary music.

Through aphoristic essays, poetic fragments, and precise analytical notes, Ablinger explores listening as an artistic act in itself. Noise, language, writing, perception, repetition, and convention form recurring themes throughout the writings, as do engagements with philosophy, visual art, and literature.

The volume also includes commentaries on key works from Weiss/Weisslich to Opera/Werke and Stadtoper Graz, revealing how deeply interwoven music, thought, and language are in Ablingers practice. One look at the Table of Contents will say more than this blurb here!
A landmark book for anyone interested in sound, conceptual art, and the expanded field of contemporary composition.

Softcover, published in 2022, 320 pages
includes music examples, drawings and photos.

Table of Contents

Quick, quick, now, now! To the Reader
The World and Its End
Expression/Sonata
Metaphors
Listening to See
More Reality 2
Culture and Catastrophe
White Noise/Key Words
Noise/Hypotheses
Gnosis (what is)
In the Space of Presence
Nearing
Ones Single Piece
Recitative and Aria
Snow
Untitled
Inverted Perspective
Music’s Conventionality
Once
Snow (2)
Motet (2000)
Defeat

From the Text Folders, 2001-2008
Transgression
Art and Culture
Twelve Tones in Exile. Hauer and Conceptual Art
Recession, Now!
“Sounds do not interest me”
An e-mail initerview by Trond Olav Reinholdtsen
Theory of Polyphony
Saying ans Showing. Variations on a Difference
The Superfluous
Head-hearing. Notes on Perceptioin
The Woods (Composition)
The Orchestra
Presence and Representation. Fra Angelico’s San Marco Frescoes
Cezanne and Music. Perception and perceptual Deficiencies
Black Square and Bottle Rack. Noise and noises
The concert and the Canvas

A Music that Withdraws. Interminable Repetitions of RRepetitions and Readings,
from Meillassoux to Lacan (from Notebooks 2013-2015)
Music and Negativity
Boundaries, and what they show us of what lies behind them
“Hearing hearing 2″or: Thinking Without Words
Heinz von Foerster Lecture 2019
Hearing Holes
“I can continue dancing”
Anser to a Question from the Czech Music Information Centre

Index