The 1950s and 1960s saw a profusion of avant-garde works that employ some degree of mobility, the best-known being Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI and Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 3. This chapter surveys discourse on indeterminacy, open works and mobility in order to test the hypothesis that the existence of recordings created a new ontology that allowed in part for mobile works to come on the scene. Since the work’s “essence” would henceforth be assured by recordings, scores were freed from their role as guarantors of a work’s ontology, allowing them to become more playful and open-ended. This chapter focuses on the way contemporary listeners may have understood this connection. In this light, mobile works can be viewed as a “phonograph effect” (in Mark Katz’s sense), and some of the basic historiographic presuppositions about musical modernism, one that sees an autonomous avant-garde isolated from a burgeoning record industry, are thereby interrogated.

Three interrelated productions take their cue from the architecture of Venice’s famed San Marco Basilica: Igor Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum ad Honorem Sancti Marci Nominis (1956), French nouveau roman writer Michel Butor’s literary prose poem Description de San Marco (1963), and Columbia Masterworks producer John McClure’s production of the LP “The Glory of Gabrieli” (1969), recorded in San Marco and dubbed “a stereo spectacular.” This chapter explores homologies between the architecture of San Marco, the polychoral music of Venetian composers, the polyvocal literature of Michel Butor and the stereophonic relief of McClure’s “stereo spectacular” in order to gauge the parallels between sound, space and phonography in these works. Exploring Butor’s photographically inspired writing leads to an examination of a “stereophonic étude” that he devoted in 1965 to another familiar monument, Niagara Falls, and the way this poetic text then got translated into a spatialized cantata by French composer Claire Schapira.

Sebald’s literary life began in Manchester. The short period he spent there (1966-70) left a lasting imprint on his writing, which this essay will explore through the three texts most directly inspired by the city: his 1967 poem ‘Bleston: A Mancunian Cantical’, the long prose poem Nach der Natur, and the fourth section of The Emigrants (‘Max Ferber’). These works reveal the aspects of Manchester most significant to Sebald: his encounters with an ‘industrial wasteland’, the Mancunian Jewish community, and Michel Butor’s 1956 novel, set in a fictionalized version of Manchester, L’Emploi du temps.