New Books In Music

Video games are a significant part of popular entertainment in the twenty-first century. From Words with Friends to Grand Theft Auto, most people spend at least some of their leisure time with video games. In his book, Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music (Oxford University Press, 2018), William Gibbons examines the intersection between video games and classical music. From close readings of the scores of specific games to an analysis of games with characters related to classical music, Gibbons asks what happens when highbrow art meets lowbrow entertainment. Often classical music enhances the visual and storytelling elements of a game by sonically marking characters or situations as wealthy or sophisticated, as also happens in film and TV scores. Gibbons finds unexpected connections and layering of signification as video game scores exploit musical references from sources as far flung as Stanley Kubrick’s films to Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. He ends the book with an account of how orchestras are

In Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (Dey St. Books, HarperCollins, 2017), Ann Powers explores the rich and, at times, unexpected intersections of love, sex, race, gender, sexuality, and American popular music. This heavily-researched book features colorful stories about sex, eroticism, and American music, while engaging source material in the realms of African American and American history, black feminist and womanist theory, American dance, and more. Good Booty begins in the 19th century in New Orleans’ Congo Square, and it ends with a discussion of Britney Spears and Beyoncé as cyborg and avatar, respectively. In other chapters, Powers engages early 20th-century American music and dance, eroticism in gospel music, sexuality and teen-girl rock and roll fandom, rock groupie culture, popular music in the early years of the AIDS crisis, and more.Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the Univ

Microhistories are an important method of investigating an historical moment with a fine-grain focus that can puncture holes in the generalizations that historians sometimes make. In her new book, Charleston Belles Abroad: The Music Collections of Harriet Lowndes, Henrietta Aiken, and Louis Rebecca McCord (University of South Carolina Press, 2019), Candace L. Bailey uses a close reading of the music owned and performed by three prominent women in antebellum Charleston to demonstrate the varied experiences and perspectives of figures who also had much in common. All three women were sophisticated, well-traveled, and moved in the highest social circles of the planter class in Charleston. Yet, each woman had unique educational backgrounds, upbringings, and musical choices. They all experienced the Civil War and its aftermath quite differently. Rather than confining herself simply to an analysis of the musical repertoire each woman owned, Bailey examines the scores with the attention often reserved for Medieval m

The art and antics of rebellious figures in 1950s American nightlife―from the Beat Generation to eccentric jazz musicians and comedians―have long fascinated fans and scholars alike. In The Rebel Café: Sex, Race, and Politics in Cold War America’s Nightclub Underground(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), Stephen R. Duncan flips the frame, focusing on the New York and San Francisco bars, nightclubs, and coffeehouses from which these cultural icons emerged. Duncan shows that the sexy, smoky sites of bohemian Greenwich Village and North Beach offered not just entertainment but doorways to a new sociopolitical consciousness.This book is a collective biography of the places that harbored beatniks, blabbermouths, hipsters, playboys, and partisans who altered the shape of postwar liberal politics and culture. Throughout this period, Duncan argues, nightspots were crucial―albeit informal―institutions of the American democratic public sphere. Amid the Red Scare’s repressive politics, the urban underground of New Yor

There has been a recent trend in books that explore one year in detail: 1914, 1927, and 1968 have all received this treatment. E. Douglas Bomberger’s new book Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture from Oxford University Press (2018) is new twist on this phenomenon. Rather than primarily trace historical events while touching on cultural matters as many of these books do, Bomberger follows the events in jazz and classical music during this crucial year while framing them within America’s entry into World War One.Written for the general public as well as a scholarly audience, each chapter puts the events of one month in conversation with each other, allowing readers to grasp the busy cultural landscape in the period. Bomberger focuses on eight key figures. Classical musicians Fritz Kreisler, Karl Muck, Walter Damrosch, Olga Samaroff, and Ernestine Schumann-Heink contended with the fallout from mounting anti-German feeling within the United States in different ways as audiences turned aga

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Communication at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Bryan McCann (he/his)--Associate Professor of Communication at Louisiana State University--on a dope new work of cultural criticism The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era (University of Alabama Press, 2017). The Mark of Criminality positions the work of key gangsta rap artists--Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur--as well as the controversies their work produced, squarely within the law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings of crime and criminality were incredibly unstable. McCann argues that, among other well-circulated meanings, the mark of criminality was a source of power, credibility, and revenue. By understanding gangsta rap as a potent, if deeply imperfect, enactment of the mark of criminality, we can better understand how crime is always a site of struggle over

Music has always been integral to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, with songs such as Kendrick Lamar’s "Alright," J. Cole’s "Be Free," D’Angelo and the Vanguard's "The Charade," The Game’s "Don’t Shoot," Janelle Monae’s "Hell You Talmbout," Usher’s "Chains," and many others serving as unofficial anthems and soundtracks for members and allies of the movement. In Fernando Orejuela and Stephanie Shonekan's collection of essays, Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection (Indiana University Press, 2018), contributors draw from ethnographic research and personal encounters to illustrate how scholarly research of, approaches to, and teaching about the role of music in the Black Lives Matter movement can contribute to public awareness of the social, economic, political, scientific, and other forms of injustices in our society. Each chapter in Black Lives Matter and Music focuses on a particular case study, with the goal to inspire and facilitate productive dialogues among sc

In Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song and Verse, London, 1884-1914 (Wayne State University Press, 2018), Vivi Lachs, social and cultural historian, Yiddishist, performer, and associate research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, looks at London's Yiddish popular culture. She positions it in historical perspective within Anglo-Jewish history, English socialist aesthetics, and music-hall culture. This book breaks lots of new ground, and is an exciting, entertaining and revealing peek into this vibrant and noisy world.Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though she died in 1847 at a young age, Marie Duplessis inspired one of the greatest operas ever composed. In The Real Traviata: The Song of Marie Duplessis (Oxford University Press, 2015), René Weis recounts the life of the remarkable woman who overcame poverty and abuse to become the toast of Parisian society. Born Alphonsine Plessis, as a young girl she was sexually assaulted by her own father before she escaped to Paris. Initially finding work as a laundress, Duplessis’s beauty soon won her the attention of wealthy admirers, whose interests gave her access to the social elite. As Weis demonstrates, her success as a courtesan was not just because of her physical attractiveness, but also due to her intelligence, her charm, and her generous spirit, all of which won her a range of friends and lovers that included some of the greatest artistic talents of her time. Among them was the younger Alexandre Dumas, whose novel La Dame aux Camélias was based on Duplessis’s life and which, in turn, inspired the Italian

I was immediately drawn to the book The Devil’s Music by Dr. Randall Stephens, Associate Professor of British and American Studies at the University of Oslo. Dr. Stephens and I came across one another online and the book, which combines part rock n’ roll history, part American Christianity history, was an absolute delight for me. The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock n’ Roll out now from Harvard University Press (2018), tells the story of how my experiences with rock music in the 1990’s came to be. From the inside cover of the book, “When rock n’roll emerged in the 1950’s, ministers denounced it from their pulpits and Sunday school teachers warned of the music’s demonic origins. The big beat, Billy Graham believed, was “ever working in the world for evil.” Yet by the early 2000s Christian rock had become a billion-dollar industry. The Devil’s Music tells the story of this transformation. Enjoy our conversation. Greg Soden is the host “Classical Ideas,” a podcast about religi

Islam in American has been profoundly shaped by the Black Muslim experience. However, Black Muslims are often marginalized both within their own religious communities and in public discourse about Muslim Americans. Su'ad Abdul Khabeer, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, attends to this erasure by centering Black Muslims to investigate the relationship between race, religion, and popular culture. In Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States (NYU Press, 2016) she offers a rich ethnography of Muslims in Chicago, many of whom are involved with the Inner-City Muslim Action Network. IMAN and members of its community regularly perform “Muslim Cool,” a blueprint for being Muslim in America that is steeped in Blackness. Abdul Khabeer’s research helps us understand how Black Muslims have shaped Islam in America in general despite intra-communal tensions around anti-Blackness. In our conversation we discuss new approaches to Hip Hop, the loop of Muslim Cool, opinions about music

The story of popular entertainment in American immigrant communities is only just beginning to be told. Chinatown Opera Theater in North America by Nancy Yunhwa Rao from University of Illinois Press (2017) addresses the history of Cantonese Opera performed in Chinatowns in cities across North America with a primary focus on San Francisco, New York City, and Vancouver during the 1920s. Using a wealth of archival material, including extensive records from the U.S. Immigration Service, Rao provides an enormous amount of information about the theaters, companies, performers, and repertoire of this operatic genre. She contextualizes the performance of Cantonese Opera within the cultural life of Chinese communities, explains the print materials and recordings that circulated the music, and details the significant impact that exclusionary governmental immigration policies had on this theatrical tradition and Chinese immigrants in Canada and the United States. Rao’s book not only offers information about this perform

How does music link people across time and space? How do singers modulate their repertoires to forge links with audiences both within and across local, regional and national borders? What are the consequences of these developments? In Song King: Connecting People, Places and Past in Contemporary China (University of Hawaii Press 2018), Dartmouth College Assistant Professor Levi S. Gibbs seeks to answer these and other questions through an examination of the life and music of Wang Xiangrong, the Folksong King of Western China. As a folksong king, Wang is both folk and elite, and in this capacity he simultaneously is tasked with representing the local, the regional, and the national both in performances within China, and—in the case of one chapter looking at his performance at the Dow Chemical Plant in Midlands Michigan—around the world. Born and raised in a rural area of Northern Shaanxi Province, Wang grew up listening to shamanic songs and bawdy songs, but grew into other contexts in which he now represents

People have always sought ecstatic experiences - moments where they go beyond their ordinary self and feel connected to something greater than them. Such moments are fundamental to human flourishing, but they can also be dangerous. Beginning around the Enlightenment, western intellectual culture has written off ecstasy as ignorance or delusion. But philosopher Jules Evans argues that this diminishes our reality and denies us the healing, connection and meaning that ecstasy can bring.In his book, The Art of Losing Control: A Philosopher's Search for Ecstatic Experience (Canongate Books, 2017) he sets out to discover how people find ecstasy in a post-religious culture, how it can be good for us, and also harmful. Along the way, he explores the growing science of ecstasy, to help the reader - and himself - learn the art of losing control.Evans’ exploration of ecstasy is an intellectual and emotional odyssey drawing on personal experience, interviews, and readings from ancient and modern philosophers. From Aristo

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices w

Given its expanding multimedia presence in Asia and around the world for many years now, K-pop is a phenomenon that is hard to ignore. This “animal that thrives on excess,” as Suk-Young Kim puts it (p. 6) is more than just music, however, as it offers us a way of looking at a host of fascinating and important subjects in politics, economics, anthropology and performance studies.Suk-Young Kim's book K-Pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance (Stanford University Press, 2018) transports us into K-pop's dizzying world of production, consumption, participation and neoliberal commerce. As well as navigating the geopolitical and technological conditions that have enabled K-pop’s emergence and success, Kim takes us up close to the fans and stars themselves through her ethnographic work at gigs, conventions and TV recordings. Combining all the passion of a true fan with clear-headed analysis of postmodern subjects' interactions with big business and the state, this is a must-read for anyone curious about con

The Lied is one of the most important genres of nineteenth-century Romantic music, and one of the most intriguing. Balanced between public and private performance, an expression of both poetic and musical meaning, musicologists have tended to study Lieder by analyzing the connections between the music and text. In her new book Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century published by Indiana University Press in 2018, Dr. Jennifer Ronyak studies a set of Lieder with texts she identifies as “intimate lyric poetry” through the lens of performance using methodologies culled from literary studies, philosophy, and musicology. Delving deeply into German Romantic ideas about interiority and the self, Ronyak considers Lieder as an intimate expression of meaning for composer, lyricist, singer, and audience. She contextualizes this act of performance within the salon culture of several important German cities. By centering a philosophical inquiry into the paradox of the Lieder as the outward expre

Nick Soulsby's most recent book, Sacrifice and Transcendence: The Oral History of Swans was published in 2018 by Jawbone Press and is a collection of extensive and revealing interviews regarding the US experimental rock band Swans. Soulsby talks to key players in the band’s history and traces their evolution from noise rock provocateurs in New York’s 1980s underground music scene to one of the most intense, and must see live attractions of recent years.Stephen Lee Naish is a writer and author of several books on the subjects of film and popular culture. He lives in Ontario, Canada. Follow him on Twitter @riffsandmeaning.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Music lovers and researchers alike have long been fascinated by the story of Ludwig van Beethoven who became profoundly deaf as an adult and could not hear some of his most famous compositions including the Ninth Symphony. Many people have written about Beethoven’s deafness and speculated how he might have been able to compose despite his disability. Robin Wallace, however, is the first musicologist to write about Beethoven’s life and music who has had an intimate experience with deafness. Hearing Beethoven: A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery published by University of Chicago Press in 2018 pairs a new consideration of the effects of Beethoven’s deafness on his life and music with a loving memoir of the last years of Wallace’s first marriage after his wife, Barbara, suddenly lost her hearing. Written for a general audience as well as musicologists, in Hearing Beethoven, Wallace applies what he learned from Barbara’s experiences to Beethoven’s life. Wallace focuses on three main areas: Beethoven’s social li

In Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Algonquin Books, 2018), Tim Mohr examines East Germany punk rock and its role in the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Starting in the late 1970s, a small group of East Berlin teens started listening to the Sex Pistols through British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin. Punk became life-changing. With so much future dictated for teens by the East German dictatorship, punk was a revolutionary philosophy that gave the youth a way to reject the society around them and build a new one. In Burning Down the Haus, Mohr shares the stories of the early punk scene as it formed in East Berlin, as youth formed bands and created sites of resistance. Mohr relates how the youth endured torture by the Stasi (East German secret police), being spied on by friends and their families, being fired from jobs and expelled from school, and imprisoned and beaten by police. The punks fought back, pushing to bring down the East Germ