What's the Matter with Today's Experimental Music? is based on the premise that contemporary music is suffering from a distinct lack of attention. It inspects and evaluates what is happening to musical experimentation, where things might have gone wrong and what can be done to resolve the problem. Intended as a supplement to surveys of music of the last forty years, it discusses not only the problems of musical content, but also problems of an extra-musical nature. Today's education and communications media are seen to be the main cause of the anonymity of contemporary music and suggestions are made to improve this situation. Leigh Landy investigates audio-visual applications that have hardly been explored, new timbres and sound sources, the discovery of musical space, new notations, musical politics, and the 'musical community' in an attempt to incite more composers, musicians and musicologists to get this music out into the works and to stimulate the creation of new experimental works.

Leigh Landy (www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/~llandy) holds a Research Chair at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) where he directs the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre. His scholarship is divided between creative and musicological work. His compositions include several for video, dance and theatre. He has worked extensively with the late playwright, Heiner Müller, the new media artist, Michel Jaffrennou and the composer-performer, Jos Zwaanenburg and was composer in residence for the Dutch National Theatre during its first years of existence. Currently he is artistic director of Idée Fixe – Experimental Sound and Movement Theatre. His publications focus on the studies of electroacoustic music, including the notion of musical dramaturgy, contemporary music in a cross-arts context, access and the contemporary time-based arts, and devising practices in the performing arts. He is editor of “Organised Sound: an international journal of music technology” (Cambridge University Press) and author of five books including “What’s the Matter with Today’s Experimental Music?” and “Experimental Music Notebooks”. “Understanding the Art of Sound Organization” (MIT Press) and “La musique des sons/The Music of Sounds” (Sorbonne MINT/OMF) both appeared in 2007. He directs the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS) project and is a founding member of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network (EMS).