Rating: 
Summary: Best all-around history of this subject.........
Review: Prendergast is a thoughtful and thorough writer......his book on Irish music (Isle of Noises) was comprehensive and superb. This one is similarly definitive......it is hard to imagine anyone significantly surpassing it for coverage of the field up to this point (it missed the boat carrying Autechre, Oval, Stereolab, Mouse on Mars, and "glitch" techniques). But whatever blanks are to be noted here can be filled in by any intelligent reader with access to a search engine.
Rating: 
Summary: More like a band recommendation list
Review: Really isn't anything beyond a list of records the author enjoys. Extremely noticable gaps in artist's careers (Focuses entirely on the "ambience" in Miles Davis' "Miles Ahead" and completely ignores the fusion years. Listen to Summertime and then listen to Yesternow. How is Summertime even remotely close to ambient?) and even completely lacking artists (If the Residents don't qualify for "Eskimo" but Jimi Hendrix does for "Electric Ladyland" then I've been grossly misinformed).
Book has almost nothing to do with Ambient music as a genre and everything to do with the records the author enjoys. All Music Guide does just as well at explaining it and that's just plain sad. Interesting only for fairly good record recommendations to new fans, and perhaps those interested in production.
Rating:
Summary: Encyclopedic, Insightful, yet inaccurate.
Review: The "family tree" of 20th Century music that Prendergast draws is deep in thought, yet lacking correctness on the minutiae. These failings leave the reader at times frustrated with these inaccuracies. Hopefully, a second edition can be drafted to allow the mistakes to be corrected. It seems that they slipped through the cracks, simply because the book is so encyclopedic, that tiny (yet important) facts get left either unsaid, or misstated.Intellectually, it's a masterpiece meal, but unfortunately, the detail and factual wine's been kept next to the oven, and the bread is burnt. Fortunately for the book, its breath of fresh air in insight makes up for this. If the facts were fixed this book would be off the scale.
Rating:
Summary: Encyclopedic, Insightful, yet inaccurate.
Review: The "family tree" of 20th Century music that Prendergast draws is deep in thought, yet lacking correctness on the minutiae. These failings leave the reader at times frustrated with these inaccuracies. Hopefully, a second edition can be drafted to allow the mistakes to be corrected. It seems that they slipped through the cracks, simply because the book is so encyclopedic, that tiny (yet important) facts get left either unsaid, or misstated. Intellectually, it's a masterpiece meal, but unfortunately, the detail and factual wine's been kept next to the oven, and the bread is burnt. Fortunately for the book, its breath of fresh air in insight makes up for this. If the facts were fixed this book would be off the scale.
Rating:
Summary: Replete with biographical information
Review: The Ambient Century: From Mahler To Trance - The Evolution Of Sound In The Electronic Age is a significant and seminal contribution to music history. Mark Prendergast has compiled a comprehensive group of artists to reflect and represent more than one hundred years of change, evolution (and at times revolution) as electronic invention impacts upon the creation, production, and performance of music. Replete with biographical information, as well as each individual artist's effect on ambient and electronic music, The Ambient Century is an amazing work of research and scholarship that is so well written as to be entirely accessible to the non-specialist general reader with an interest in the subject. No personal, academic or community library music history collection would be complete without the inclusion of Mark Prendergast's The Ambient Century as a core reference title.
Rating: 
Summary: Ambient soup
Review: The title alone ought to be enough to suggest the daunting scope of Mark Prendergast's exploration of sound in the 20th Century. Prendergast argues that an "Ambient" tendency links together most of the musical output of the century, from Debussy to Derrick May and beyond. Rather than a single narrative, The Ambient Century is pieced together out of biographical segments and overviews of genres. And he squeezes it all in, beginning with the electronic pioneers (Theremin, Stockhausen, Subotnick) moving through Minimalism, "Ambience in the Rock Era" (encompassing the Beach Boys and the Stones but also the Dead, Krautrock, New Wave and even Enya), and ending with 100 pages on house, techno, and the broader scope of popular electronic music. While the earlier chapters may provide interesting background for readers interested in the 20th Century avant garde, the book ultimately proves a disappointment. For anyone immersed in house, techno, drum'n'bass, or any other form of contemporary electronic music - commercial or experimental - the reading seems cursory at best. Prendergast sticks to the big names - in drum'n'bass, for instance, he dwells on Goldie and LTJ Bukem, ignoring less famous originators and more recent developments. To devote a page to DJ Rap at the expense of more influential producers seems short-sighted at best. House and techno are both treated as dead genres, barely breaking out of the historical contexts (early 90s Chicago and Detroit) with which they're associated, and with little insight into the subsequent fragmentation of genres and subgenres. (His earlier chapters, while more informed, suffer from similar flaws - Subotnick's entry barely hints at the philosophy behind the composer's music; La Monte Young's follows the official Youngian party line in casting Tony Conrad as bit player). Ultimately, even greater methodological flaws mar Prendergast's account. His valorization of individual auteurs ignores the labels which often did as much, if not more, to further the development of particular sounds. He suffers from a lack of fact-checking. His historicism is simplistic at best - his treatment of the Compact Disc seems cribbed straight from a Philips corporate backgrounder, emphasizing the format's alleged superiority with little heed for its drawbacks, ignoring the corporate strongarm strategies (like price-fixing) that led to its dominance, and falling back on utopian pronouncements akin to a kind of digital "end-of-history." Sure, after the advent of the CD "there was just more music around for everybody," but how much is this due to the medium - and how much to the majors' aggressive marketing and enforced obsolescence of vinyl? Where Simon Reynolds has developed a complex (if controversial) linkage between drug consumption and music production, Prendergast - without citing him - falls back on a simplistic determinism, resulting in statements like "Trip-Hop was the product of post-club marijuana consumption." And he suffers from the habit of capitalizing neologized non-genres like "Trip Jazz," as if to grant them legitimacy. Finally, Prendergast's very thesis is barely spelled out. Presumably, his concept of the Ambient refers to the ascendancy of sound-for-sound's-sake in the 20th Century. He probably has something in this, but without a more rigorous examination of the technological, sociological, economic and above all formal aspects linking, say, John Cage, the Beach Boys, King Tubby, and Aphex Twin, his book remains a collection of half-developed snapshots.
Rating:
Summary: Very Light
Review: This is much more of a "who I think is cool" book than one with any information or analysis. Good for those who want to name-drop, but not for real students of music.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't believe those who denigrate this work!
Review: This is not a review but an an author's response to some of the negative reviewing by Derek Pierece of Bath and particularly by Fred Bidwell from Norman USA whose " historically innacurate" and "almost worthless" is the most spiteful and rubbish review I've ever read in my life. Ambient Century is 300,000 words long and took four years to write. The bulk of the information comes from the horses' mouths ie the musicians themselves. There is no proof that those citing examples like Wendy Carlos's synth modules have the correct information. Every single source is different but I feel the horse's mouth has the true facts. It took me ten years to interview all the participants for the Ambient century. Yes every book has a small amount of editing and proof errors but these people exaggerate beyond necessity. In many cases the printed information about say EMS synthesizers is in error over many publications and the writer who instanced the Portabello and Putney as an error obviously doesn't know that both synths were produced and these were really nicknames for what was a standard VCS3. I mean this is making an error not describing one. And in many cases the date information about record releases is innacurate on the CDs and records themselves over years. Also many so called "mistakes" are interpretations. In general over the UK and US the reviewers have been very generous giving three to five stars. Featured book of the month in Q, reviewed in The Times, Financial Times, Uncut and across the mainstream press in the US. So do not believe vicious individuals like Fred Bidnell with his "almost worthless" call. I would never, as a reviewer say this about a piece of art. I passionately believe in my book and that I've wedded together disparate musics over 100 years. I did not write this for trainspotters or people into so-called facts. What these people need is a manual. What my book atempts is a social, economic and musical history of sound over a century. This I think I've achieved and I'm proud of that achievement. Regards to all the positive people. Mark Prendergast
Rating:
Summary: Ambience explored...
Review: This is not some gratuitous little fanboy picture-book along the lines of countless tomes churned out to cater to the prepubescent fans of Britney, N-Sync et-al. Rather, it is the story of the development of 'Ambient' music over the past 100 years, as the subtitle puts it, "from Mahler to Trance - the evolution of sound in the electronic age." Mark Predergast is a respected author and critic, born in Dublin and now living in London, who has written extensively and authoritatively about ambient and electronic music for over two decades. This book is about what he considers to be the "classical music of the future;" Ambient. The book is divided into four main parts: Part I: The Electronic Landscape
Part II: Minimalism, Eno and the New Simplicity
Part III: Ambience in the Rock Era
Part IV: House, Techno, and 21st Century Ambience The book starts with a Forward by Brian Eno, the British pop/rock/avante-guard/neo classical musician who actually invented, and coined the term, "Ambient Music;" music that should be, in his words, "as ignorable as it is interesting." "Part I" charts the move away from rigid, Germanic orchestrations, to Romanticism and Modernity, first seen in Gustav Mahler's "Symphony No. 3," written in 1895. It details the works of some of the greatest composers of the last century, not only Mahler, but Debussy, Ravel - without whom Torvil and Dean would have hard a hard time winning their Olympic Gold! - Delius, Schoenberg, Stokowski, Messien, and many others. He also explores the development of electronic instrumentation, vital to the production of what we now know as Ambient Music. It looks in detail at the work of Leon Theremin, who's other-worldly sounding "Theremin," was used to such wonderful effect on the Beach Boys "Good Vibrations," and the soundtrack to "Forbidden Planet." Also explored are the developments of Maurice Martenot, Daphne Oram, the coming of the true synthesizers, first the monophonic "Moog," then the endless range of polyphonic synthesizers that went on to revolutionized the creation and production of modern rock and Ambient Music. It also looks at the career and work of one of the first great interpreters of the electronic keyboard, Wendy (Walter) Carlos, the Worlds most famous transsexual composer and performer of classical and neo-classical music! "Part II" investigates the influence of American Minimalism, exemplified by Philip Glass and Steve Reich, on modern 70's rock, specifically Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon," and Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells." These two seminal albums greatly influenced Brian Eno in his search for an alternative way forward in modern music. This part also investigates, in great detail, Eno's use of the studio itself as an instrument, as much responsible for the final sound of a recording as the acoustic/electric/electronic instruments actually played by the performers. As well as Eno, Glass and Reich, other important composers/performers careers and works are explored in detail, these include La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Michael Nyman, Arvo Part, Henryk Gorecki and John Tavener. Also investigated is the influence of the two recording labels ECM (Editions of Contemporary Music) in Germany, and Windham Hill in the USA, on shaping the public awareness, and acceptance of, Ambient/Minimalist Music. "Part III," the largest part of the book, fully explores, in detail, the development and influence of Minimalism and Ambience on 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's rock music. This starts with the "Innovators," Leo Fender and Les Paul, who, between them, changed forever the sound of the electric guitar, and what discussion of instrumental innovators would be complete without a look at the work of Robert Moog, who gave his name to the ubiquitous Moog Synthesizer. It then looks in detail at the musical innovators of the times; The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, Ravi Shankar, The Velvet Underground and Nico. And then there was the all too brief but incendiary career of Jimi Hendrix, who single-handedly redefined what exactly could, and could not, be done with a Fender or Les Paul. Then there are the Germans, or "Kraut Rockers." There is an enormous amount of the book devoted to the likes of Tangerine Dream, who practically invented modern electronic rock, Kraftwerk, Can, and Klaus Shultz. The influence of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulz, especially, cannot be overlooked, with their experimentation in hardware and soundscapes, they created entirely new musical worlds and experiences. There is also a complete mini-biography of Pink Floyd and Mike Oldfield, plus a discussion of the rampant excesses of British Progressive Rock, which reached its bloated nadir with the release of "Tales from Topographic Oceans" by Yes... and before you say a word, I'm a Yes fan! "Part IV" explores the latest evolutionary step in Ambience and Minimalism, rooted in the "Club Culture" of London and Europe. This is traced in detail from the Disco world of 70's and 80's gay bars and clubs in New York, to the "Aciiiid!" fueled mega-raves of the late 80's and 90's in the British countryside. From crazed clubbers dancing for 24+ hours straight, fueled by a veritable cornucopia of drugs and alcohol, to the blissed-out "E" generation, chilling to continuous trance/trip-hop and minimalist mixes, Ambient music continues to evolve in endlessly surprising ways. "The Ambient Century" is an incredibly rich and detailed book, written in an immediately accessible style for the listener of Ambient; you DON'T need a doctorate in musical theory to enjoy this work!!! There are many criticisms of this book in other reviews; these tend to focus on minutia of detail such as the EXACT model of synth Wendy Carlos played, or the accepted name of a particular synth module. For anyone with a serious interest in Ambient/Minimalist music, I can't recommend this book highly enough; the nitpickers will ALWAYS find something to criticize!
Rating:
Summary: Awesome book about Ambient music!!
Review: This was an awesome book! [...] Besides, anyone who wrote a well-done book about Tangerine Dream, deserves special recognition from me. I especially enjoyed the entries on Brian Eno, David Bowie, The Orb, Aphex Twin, Mike Oldfield, Enya, Klaus Schulze, etc. I love this kind of music a lot and Mark Prendergast did an excellent job in writing and researching this book.
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