National Endowment of the Humanities award for Benjamin Piekut
Southampton Music lecturer Benjamin Piekut has been awarded a summer stipend from the National Endowment of the Humanities (USA).
Benjamin will use the grant to work on his new book project, No More Songs, which analyses the history of British experimental music in the 1970s through the lens of the ensemble Henry Cow. The band, which included Chris Cutler, Tim Hodgkinson, Fred Frith, Lindsay Cooper, Dagmar Krause, John Greaves, and Georgina Born (among others), forged associations with rock musicians, classically trained composers, and European 'free' improvisers.
This broad network of cultural production evidences a web of attachments characteristic of British experimentalism in this period, and prefigures a similar arrangement of global experimentalism today. Establishing the history of Henry Cow - and its position in the field of experimental music in the 1970s - is essential to understanding the contemporary landscape of global, 'post-genre' experimental music, which owes as much to histories of rock and jazz as it does to those of art music.