New Books In Music

Presenting eclectic, irreverent marathons of experimental music in crumbling venues on the Lower East Side, Bang on a Can sold out concerts for a genre that had been long considered box office poison. Founded in 1987 by three composers who met while students at Yale--David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe--Bang on a Can has become a multifaceted organization with a major record deal and a virtuosic in-house ensemble that changed the landscape of avant-garde music in the United States. Will Robin's book, Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace (Oxford University Press, 2021), tells the story of Bang on a Can's first fifteen years. He contextualizes Ban on a Can's development in a time when traditional funding sources for classical music were disappearing and major institutions were often unwilling to take a chance on contemporary music. In the wake of the unexpected popularity of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, classical presenters looked to contemporary music for relevance and record label

In Rebel Music in the Triumphant Empire (Oxford University Press, 2020), musicologist David Pearson explores the changing landscape of punk in the United States in the 1990s. Pearson examines how the 1990s underground punk renaissance transformed the punk scene into a site of radical opposition to the American empire. Nazi skinheads were ejected from the punk scene; apathetic attitudes were challenged; women, Latino, and LGBTQ participants asserted their identities and perspectives within punk; the scene debated the virtues of maintaining DIY purity versus venturing into the musical mainstream; and punks participated in protest movements from animal rights to stopping the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal to shutting down the 1999 WTO meeting. Punk lyrics offered strident critiques of American empire, from its exploitation of the Third World to its warped social relations. Numerous subgenres of punk proliferated to deliver this critique, such as the blazing hardcore punk of bands like Los Crudos, propagandistic cr

During the mid-19th century, the works of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner sparked an impulse toward German cultural renewal and social change that drew on religious myth, metaphysics, and spiritualism. The only problem was that their works were deeply antisemitic and entangled with claims that Jews were incapable of creating compassionate art. By looking at the works of Jewish composers and writers who contributed to a lively and robust biblical theatre in fin de siècle Vienna, Caroline A. Kita's Jewish Difference and the Arts in Vienna: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater (Indiana UP, 2019) shows how they reimagined myths of the Old Testament to offer new aesthetic and ethical views of compassion. These Jewish artists, including Gustav Mahler, Siegfried Lipiner, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Stefan Zweig, and Arnold Schoenberg, reimagined biblical stories through the lens of the modern Jewish subject to plead for justice and compassion toward the Jewish community. By tracing responses to antise

(Re:) Claiming Ballet (Intellect Books, 2021) by Dr. Adesola Akinleye explores the history of movement through ballet, representation, and the future of dance. Though ballet is often seen as a white, cis-heteropatriarchal form of dance, in fact it has been, and still is, shaped by artists from a much broader range of backgrounds. This collection looks beyond the mainstream, bringing to light the overlooked influences that continue to inform the culture of ballet. Essays illuminate the dance form’s rich and complex history and start much-needed conversations about the roles of class, gender normativity, and race, demonstrating that despite mainstream denial and exclusionary tactics, ballet thrives with “difference.”  With contributions from professional ballet dancers and teachers, choreographers, and dance scholars in Europe and the United States, the volume introduces important new thinkers and perspectives. An essential resource for the field of ballet studies and a major contribution to dance scholarship m

In Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke UP, 2017), Alex E. Chávez explores the contemporary politics of Mexican migrant cultural expression manifest in the sounds and poetics of huapango arribeño, a musical genre originating from north-central Mexico. Following the resonance of huapango's improvisational performance within the lives of audiences, musicians, and himself—from New Year's festivities in the highlands of Guanajuato, Mexico, to backyard get-togethers along the back roads of central Texas—Chávez shows how Mexicans living on both sides of the border use expressive culture to construct meaningful communities amid the United States’ often vitriolic immigration politics. Through Chávez's writing, we gain an intimate look at the experience of migration and how huapango carries the voices of those in Mexico, those undertaking the dangerous trek across the border, and those living in the United States. Illuminating how huapango arribeño’s performance refigu

What do you do when you're not asleep and when you're not eating? You're most likely waiting--to finish work, to get home, or maybe even to be seen by your doctor. Hold On is less about how to manage all that staying where one is until a particular time or event (OED) than it is about describing how we experience waiting. Waiting can embrace things like hesitation and curiosity, dithering and procrastination, hunting and being hunted, fearing and being feared, dread and illness, courting and parenting, anticipation and excitement, curiosity, listening to and even performing music, being religious, being happy or unhappy, being bored and being boring. They're all explored here. Waiting is also characterized by brain chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine. They can radically alter the way we register the passing of time. Waiting is also the experience that may characterize most interpersonal relations--mismanage it at your own risk. Hold On: The Life, Science, and Art of Waiting (Oxford UP, 2020) contains adv

A room’s acoustic character seems at once the most technical and the most mystical of concerns. Since the early Enlightenment, European architects have systematically endeavored to represent and control the propagation of sound in large interior spaces. Their work has been informed by the science of sound but has also been entangled with debates on style, visualization techniques, performance practices, and the expansion of the listening public.  Echo's Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) explores how architectural experimentation from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries laid the groundwork for concepts of acoustic space that are widely embraced in contemporary culture. It focuses on the role of echo and reverberation in the architecture of Pierre Patte, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Carl Ferdinand Langhans, and Le Corbusier, as well as the influential acoustic ideas of Athanasius Kircher, Richard Wagner, and Marshall McLuhan. Drawing on interdisciplinary

Told in personal interviews, A Punkhouse in the Deep South: The Oral History of 309 (University Press of Florida, 2021) is the collective story of a punk community in an unlikely town and region, a hub of radical counterculture that drew artists and musicians from throughout the conservative South and earned national renown. The house at 309 6th Avenue has long been a crossroads for punk rock, activism, veganism, and queer culture in Pensacola, a quiet Gulf Coast city at the border of Florida and Alabama. In this book from Aaron Cometbus and Scott Satterwhite, residents of 309 narrate the colorful and often comical details of communal life in the crowded and dilapidated house over its 30-year existence. Each voice adds to the picture of a lively community that worked together to provide for their own needs while making a positive, lasting impact on their surrounding area. Together, these participants show that punk is more than music and teenage rebellion. It is about alternatives to standard narratives of li

Intellect’s Global Punk Series (2019-present) has produced edited collections of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work into local, national, global, and trans-global punk scenes. Series editors, Russ Bestley, Mike Dines, Alistair “Gords” Gordon, and Paula Guerra discuss the inception, creation, and production of the series in this New Books Network Interview. In addition to the punk series, they discuss the Punk Scholars Network, additional books on punk coming out on the imprint, and DIY Academic publishing. Volumes 1 and 2 of the series are currently available and the next two titles will be out this fall. Scholars interested in participating in the series or learning more about the PSN can contact Dines (M.Dines@mdx.ac.uk) or Bestley (r.bestley@lcc.arts.ac.uk).   The Punk Reader: Research Transmissions from the Local and the Global (2019) is the first edited volume to explore and critically interrogate punk culture in relation to contemporary, radicalized globalization. Documenting disparate interna

Anne Bogart's The Art of Resonance (Methuen Drama, 2021) locates the essence of theatre in the experience of resonant vibration among performers and between performers and audience members. The point of art, Bogart argues, is not to express oneself, but rather to create the conditions for "re-sounding," a process that requires both fully engaged performers and a fully engaged audience. Bogart draws on examples from music to physics to neuroscience in a book of essays that is animated by the same restless curiosity that characterizes her ground-breaking directing. This is a book for anyone interested in the profound question of why we are drawn to the theatre both as artists and as audiences. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcas

Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora (University of Michigan Press, 2021) explores the legacy of the Great Catastrophe—the death and expulsion from Turkey of 1.5 million Greek Christians following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922—through the music and dance practices of Greek refugees and their descendants over the last one hundred years. The book draws extensively on original ethnographic research conducted in Greece (on the island of Lesvos in particular) and in the Greater Boston area, as well as on the author’s lifetime immersion in the North American Greek diaspora. Through analysis of handwritten music manuscripts, homemade audio recordings, and contemporary live performances, Dr. Panayotis League traces the routes of repertoire and style over generations and back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, investigating the ways that the particular musical traditions of the Anatolian Greek community have contributed to their understanding of their place in the global

Washington, DC is known as the birthplace of hardcore punk. The raw, innovative, new sound coming out of the nation’s capital in the late 1970s is examined in Shayna Maskell’s Politics as Sound: The Washington, DC, Hardcore Scene, 1978-1983 (U Illinois Press, 2021). Maskell examines the DC hardcore scene between 1978 and 1983, focusing on the bands Bad Brains, Minor Threat, State of Alert (S.OA.), Government Issue (G.I.), and Faith. She explores the culturally, historical, and political impact of DC as the site for the emergence of hardcore punk. A brief history of Washington DC situates the scene in a broader cultural narrative that moves beyond just the music’s aesthetics. Focusing on race, class, and gender in the hardcore scene and specifically on the ways in which the scene embodied and embraced white, middle-class masculinity, Maskell presents the complicated and at times contradictory representations of these signifiers that were born out of hardcore. Maskell uses interviews with participants, albums,

Hamilton: An American Musical made its record-breaking Broadway debut in 2015—but the musical has reached far beyond typical Broadway audiences to pave a path into political discourse, pop culture, classroom curriculums, and the broader conversation about contemporary American politics. What led to this chain reaction of popularity, and how does it continue to influence these cultural and political dynamics? Jeffery and Sara Mehltretter Drury work to answer these questions using the tools of rhetorical criticism by bringing together a collection of essays in their book, Rhetoric, Politics, and Hamilton: an American Musical (Peter Lang, 2021). This volume is part of the Frontiers in Political Communication series at Peter Lang Publishers—a book series that aims to produce timely scholarship at the very cutting edge of political communication, emphasizing “how citizens, governments, and the media interact is the communication process.” Dr. Sara Mehltretter Drury is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, and the Di

Franz Nicolay's Someone Should Pay for Your Pain (Gibson House Press, 2021) is a moving, funny, and sometimes brutal novel about the life of a touring musician. Rudy Pauver is a punk-turned-singer-songwriter now roughly ten years past his peak. He draws a small but steady crowd in bars and venues far from the beaten track, all while enduring the thundering success of his one-time protege Ryan Orland. Nicolay brings his decades of experience as a musician to this novel, which teems with perfect tiny details of the rigors of touring. This is a coming of middle age story for anyone who's ever wondered what goes on in the van during the long stretches between the glamorous heights of a musician's life. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.suppor

Mary Gauthier was twelve years old when she was given her Aunt Jenny’s old guitar and taught herself to play with a Mel Bay basic guitar workbook. Music offered her a window to a world where others felt the way she did. Songs became lifelines to her, and she longed to write her own, one day. Then, for a decade, while struggling with addiction, Gauthier put her dream away and her call to songwriting faded. It wasn’t until she got sober and went to an open mic with a friend did she realize that she not only still wanted to write songs, she needed to. Today, Gauthier is a decorated musical artist, with numerous awards and recognition for her songwriting, including a Grammy nomination. In Saved by a Song: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting (St. Martin's Essentials, 2021), Mary Gauthier pulls the curtain back on the artistry of songwriting. Part memoir, part philosophy of art, part nuts and bolts of songwriting, her book celebrates the redemptive power of song to inspire and bring seemingly different kinds o

Baylor University musicologist and the author of Hearing Beethoven Robin Wallace chats with Howard about the magic of Beethoven, weaving personal sentiments with professional insights to explore his unparalleled musical legacy. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Caseen Gaines' Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way (Sourcebooks, 2021) is a rollicking, entertaining, and fascinating cultural history of the 1921 Broadway musical Shuffle Along. Created by Black writers and composers and performed by an all-Black cast, Shuffle Along was one of the early cultural milestones of the Harlem Renaissance, not least because it launched the career of Josephine Baker. While it was beloved in its time, the humor of Shuffle Along came to be seen as offensive in subsequent decades, and it has not been staged in its original form since it closed almost 100 years ago. Gaines makes a compelling case for Shuffle Along's place in the American musical theatre canon as a flawed but inspired work of Black creativity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Janaki Bakhle's book Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Oxford UP, 2005) is a provocative account of the development of modern national culture in India using classical music as a case study. The author demonstrates how the emergence of an “Indian” cultural tradition reflected colonial and exclusionary practices, particularly the exclusion of Muslims by the Brahmanic elite, which occurred despite the fact that Muslims were the major practitioners of the Indian music that was installed as a “Hindu” national tradition. This book lays bare how a nation’s imaginings—from politics to culture—reflect rather than transform societal divisions. Dr. Pankaj Jain is a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at FLAME University, where he is heading the Indic Studies Initiative in the FLAME School of Liberal Education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Although hip hop culture has widely been acknowledged as a global phenomenon that has spread far beyond its roots in American African-Caribbean-Latinx cultures, there are few studies that have examined the participation of women in global hip hop, and even fewer that examine the reception of female artists by other women.  Angela Williams's book Hip Hop Harem: Women, Rap and Representation in the Middle East (Peter Lang, 2020) explores the social reception of seven prominent female rappers from the region: Shadia Mansour (Palestine), Malikah (Lebanon), Soultana (Morocco), Soska (Egypt), Myam Mahmoud (Egypt), Amani (Yemen), and Justina (Iran), who use their music and personal styles to give voice to themes of self-determination and liberation within their own lives. Easily accessibly by undergraduates, Hip Hop Harem is an important work that allows Middle Eastern Muslim women to participate in knowledge creation about themselves in the western academic tradition, rooted in Third Wave Feminism and post-colonial

Crisis? What Crisis? At a time where there are repeated claims of the impending demise of art criticism, The Ends of Art Criticism (Lund Humphries Publishers, 2021) dispel these myths by arguing that the lack of a single dominant voice in criticism is not, as some believe, a weakness, but a strength, allowing previously marginalised voices and new global and political perspectives to come to the fore. Patricia Bickers speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about her time as the editor of Art Monthly, the changing role of art criticism, the politics of speaking and writing about art, the art school, the relationship between artists and critics, the academicisation of critical discourse, the relationship between art history and criticism, and.. the art of the interview. Some of the works mentioned in the conversation: The Freeze exhibitions That Jerry Saltz tweet Richard Serra, Weight and Measure Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Black Trans Archive Pilvi Takala, The Trainee Cameron Rowland, 3 & 4 Will. IV c. 7