Maconie - Avant Garde: an American Odyssey from Gertrude Stein to Pierre Boulez

Born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1942, Robin Maconie studied piano with Christina Geel and majored in English literature and contemporary music at Victoria University under Don McKenzie, Frederick Page and Roger Savage. As a graduate he studied under Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire during 19631964, and the following year in Cologne as a DAAD scholar with composers Karlheinz Stockhausen, Herbert Eimert, Bernd-Alois Zimmermann, the pianist Aloys Kontarsky, and other distinguished tutors. He has held teaching appointments at the universities of Auckland, Sussex, Surrey, Oxford, and The City University, London, and over five years developed a unique course in music appreciation, acoustics, and critical listening as a tutor at Savannah College of Art and Design.

As a London based music columnist for The Daily Telegraph, The Times Educational Supplement and Literary Supplement during the 1970s he gained a reputation as a combative spokesperson for new music while also assisting John Mansfield Thomson editorially in the formative years of the quarterly Early Music. His wider reputation as a writer and music is as a specialist in the philosophy and technology of music with special reference to the avant-garde music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, on whom he has written and assisted in a number of titles, most recently Other Planets, published in 2005 by Scarecrow Press. In other writings including The Second Sense (2002) and The Way of Music (2006) Maconie takes delight in defending modern art music and aesthetics against the doctrinaire criticisms of philosophy, music education, linguistics and cognitive science. His books are praised for their conceptual boldness, clarity, and freedom from jargon. He returned to New Zealand in 2002 and lives and works in Dannevirke.

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