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Jennifer Iverson, Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), ISBN: 9780190868192 (hb).

In Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the ColdWarMusical Avant-Garde Jennifer Iverson brings a new dimension to the well-worn territory of the post-war Western avant-garde. The book focuses primarily on the role of electronic music and the studio at the Westdeutcher Rundfunk (WDR) in German cultural reconstruction after the Second World War. By identifying complex webs of connection among composers, scientists, technology, literature, intellectual and aesthetic discourses, andmilitary technologies, Iverson revises common narratives about sole authorship, influence, and conflict among composers of early electronic music in Western Europe and the United States. Throughout Electronic Inspirations, Iverson traces three main themes. First, how the WDR was central to a Cold War musical ecosystem, developing the techniques and sounds that became emblematic of Cold War aesthetics. Iverson examines how WDR affiliates steered the intellectual and aesthetic developments in the West through their use of novel technologies, formalist aesthetics, and scientific concepts in search of new sounds and compositional paradigms. Second, the WDR studio propagated a heterogeneous, laboratory-like environment that brought together musical, aesthetic, scientific, administrative, political, economic, and intellectual resources contributing to the success of the studio. Iverson highlights how this heterogeneity facilitated interdisciplinary collaboration, often by ‘invisible collaborators’ in the form of humans, machines, and discourses, that are often glossed over or left out of discussions of the WDR and associated composers. Third, the WDR contributed to a cultural process of reclamation in which composers repurposed military technologies for aesthetic purposes, as Iverson explains, ‘to embrace midcentury electronic music was to implicitly reckon with past traumas and threats of future violence’ (3). These themes are studied throughout the book’s six chapters, which operate as intersecting case studies. Chapters one, three and six focus on the intellectual, aesthetic and cultural milieu of the WDR with an emphasis on collaborations between technologists, scientists – mainly WDR co-founder Werner Meyer-Eppler – and composers. In chapters two and five, Iverson discusses the relationship between the New York School – primarily John Cage and David Tudor – with the European serialists. In chapter four, Iverson investigates the proliferation and influence of information theory in the Western post-war avant-garde; and the focus of chapter five is the debate surrounding aleatoric approaches to composition. Taken as a whole, Electronic