TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 803 Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the MusicalAvant-Garde. By Georgina Born. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Pp. xv+390; illustrations, ta bles, notes, index. $55.00 (cloth), $18.00 (paper). “IRCAM? Isn’t this that highly subsidized institute where they pro duce strange noises which few people want to hear?” This is a twoline description of IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordina tion Acoustique/Musique, a large computer music research and production institute) in a guide to Paris, and it is good news that we now have a book on it. The author is a lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmith College, University of London, and an accomplished avant-garde musician. In her book on IRCAM she draws on a wide range of disciplines: anthropology, cultural history and sociology ofculture, semiotics, and psychoanaly sis. Her ethnographic study is about the internal dynamics ofIRCAM and is based on field work at the institute carried out mainly during the year 1984. The author succeeds admirably in her objective. IRCAM, as one of the prestige objects of the Pompidou govern ment, opened in 1977 with Pierre Boulez, the eminent French com poser, as its founder and director until 1992. Boulez called IRCAM a “utopian marriage of fire and water,” of music and science, of art and technology. His aim was to bring music, science, and technology together in a collaborative dialogue and thereby advance musical composition. With Boulez’s name in the title of the book it is some what puzzling that Georgina Born gives us no interview-based infor mation on the great man himselfand instead is content to list assess ments of his role in IRCAM gained from interviews with his collaborators. But she has acceptable reasons for this, because it is quite possible that a closer contact with Boulez himself might have made it difficult for the others to speak freely in interviews. Boulez was, as Born makes clear, indeed the dominating figure in IRCAM. Combining productive and reproductive skills as an emi nent composer, conductor, musical theorist, and educator, he man aged to control musical production, reproduction and, as educator, legitimation. A happy state indeed for somebody who enjoys exercis ing influence. Institutionalizing the avant-garde was obviously a difficult under taking. Born analyzes this process in a theory-informed manner, drawing on a wide range of literature. It is no surprise that in her analysis she discovers all sorts of tensions, oppositions, and institu tional conflicts. This approach makes for a clear structure of the book and for stimulating reading. There was rivalry between Boulez and his fellow avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis, tension be tween high-tech modernist admirers of the awe-inspiring 4X, the most powerful real-time digital synthesizer, and low-tech postmod ernists who favored small-systems projects. Born explores conflicts 804 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE between people inside and outside IRCAM, between the proponents of composed “art music” such as Boulez himself, who would not have liked to be seen dead with ajazz musician or—heaven forbid— a rocker, and champions of improvised music. There was opposition between the musical and scientific sides ofIRCAM, between software and hardware, mental and manual labor, between those who con ceived of their work as rationalist and mathematical and others who regarded it as an art. Still, many presentable compositions were achieved at that time, and the question arises how representative IRCAM is as an institu tion for advancing music research and composition. Lacking similar studies we have only a rough idea but hopefully will be better in formed in the foreseeable future when other researchers feel tempted to undertake similar tasks. This book offers a host of stimu lating insights into an institution which so far has been largely shrouded in mystery. The fact that Born’s study has a sound theoretical basis and takes a systematic approach to the subject results in some repetitions which could perhaps have been avoided, even if repetition is a common musical device. Historians, who are mainly interested in develop ments, will miss the development aspect in Born’s study but...