Lébl, Vladimir and Milena Černohorská, editors; Milan Grygar, design.

[ELECTRONIC MUSIC IN THE EASTERN BLOC – NOT IN WORLDCAT] Konfrontace: měsíčník pro soudobou hudbu [Confrontation: a monthly magazine for contemporary music]. Nos. 1, 2 (of four published).

Prague: Svaz českých skladatelů, 1968–1970. Large octavos (29.8 × 21 cm). Original decorative staple-stitched wrappers: 53, [2] pp. Illustrated from photographs. Very good. Item #55631

Two issues (of four published) of this rare periodical on electronic music edited by the musicologist and pioneer of electronic music Vladimir Lébl (1928–1987), and published by the Union of Czech Composers. The issues include reproductions of works of Hans Hartung, Piet Mondrian, and Alison Knowles among others, highlighting the connection between music and visual arts – which was key for the Czechoslovak audiovisual artist Milan Grygar, who designed the issues. Each issue had a thematic focus, with the first two issue themes being “Composer and the world” and “Avant-garde yesterday and today” respectively. The topics of the remaining issues were “Experiments” (3) and “Analyses” (4). Two more issues “Young generation” (5) and “Music and speech” (6) were planned but never published due to the suppression of the periodical after the fourth issue.

Lébl's work was crucial to establishing experimental electronic music in Czechoslovakia. He organized conferences on New Music in 1964 and 1965, and helped equip studios such as the Experimental Studio of Czech Radio Pilsen. In 1966 he published Elektronická hudba [Electronic music], a monograph on the history and methodology of electronic music, which was one of the first sources on the topic available in socialist Czechoslovakia. In his book Lébl discussed experiments by Pierre Schaeffer, Werner Mayer-Eppler, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the Studio für elektronische Musik in Munich and Studio Eksperymentalne in Warsaw. The first issue of this periodical was released two years later, continuing many of the themes of the monograph. Likely due to the suppression of the publication, issues of the journal are extremely rare.

As of March 2026, not in KVK, OCLC.

Price: €750.00

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