New Books In Music

The origins of world music can be found in early ethnographic recordings as anthropologists and ethnomusicologists sought to record the songs of lost or dying cultures. In Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015), Roshanak Kheshti explores how these origins shape how listeners hear world music today. Kheshti did fieldwork at Kinship Records, a pseudonym of a world music label, and examined how world music gets record, produced, marketed, and sold. Full of theoretical insights, Modernity’s Ear focuses on how listening and the ear have become key sites for the production of racial and gender identities and how listeners come to hear their own desires. Kheshti challenges earlier scholarly studies that criticize world music for appropriating ethnic sounds. Instead, she considers how music allows listeners to incorporate a wide range of sounds into their own culture. For example she discusses how Vampire Weekend, an alternative rock band, drew on Afro pop in their

The competition seems to be a crucial part of the classical music world. In Performing Civility: International Competitions in Classical Music (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Dr. Lisa McCormick, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh, offers a unique insight into the history, function and meaning of the classical music competition. The book offers both a rich history of competitions along with a detailed ethnography of competitors, juries and audiences. McCormick uses a detailed engagement with contemporary cultural sociology to grapple with one of the core questions facing the study of culture, of how performances can be measured, codified and judgements ultimately made. The book also engages with gender, comportment and the body, to think through the interaction of performer, judges and audiences, giving an insight into not only the classical competition, but the nature and function of culture in contemporary society. The book will be important reading beyond sociology, for music scholar

El Sistema, the massive Venezuelan youth orchestra program, has been hailed in some quarters as the next big idea in music education (if not as the savior of classical music itself). Any who have found the press coverage of El Sistema suspiciously rosy, however, will find quite another account in Geoffrey Baker‘s engrossing and at times sharply critical book, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth (Oxford University Press, 2014). Baker takes an ethnographic approach to El Sistema, investigating the daily lives and experiences of students and teachers, while simultaneously drawing on recent research in music pedagogy to subject the structure and history of the program to an ideological critique. El Sistema describes itself as an organization devoted to the “pedagogical, occupational, and ethical rescue” of children through orchestral music, dedicated to protecting and healing the most vulnerable ranks of Venezuelan society. To this, Baker raises troubling questions. Is it really th

George Cotkin is an emeritus professor of history at California Polytechnic State University. In his book Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (Oxford University Press, 2015) he has given us cultural criticism through a set of provocative portraits of creative Americans at mid-twentieth century who defied convention, pushed the boundaries of aesthetics and forged a new sensibility of personal liberation. From John Cage, who in 1952 explored the musical possibilities of silence in the composition 4′ 33″ to Chris Burden’s 1974 performance piece Trans-fixed nailing him to a Volkswagen; both challenged the standing categories of art and aesthetics. Two-dozen dramatic vignettes demonstrate the excess of violence, sex, and madness that blurred the boundaries between art, artist and audience. Creatives such as Marlon Brando, Lenny Bruce, Andy Warhol, and Anne Sexton populate his pages. The fascination with excess cut across diverse expressions taking art and audiences into unc

Hildegard of Bingen was many things: a religious leader, a prolific letter-writer, a visionary prophet, possibly a compiler of medical lore, and certainly one of the most important composers of the 12th century. In recent years, Hildegard’s reception in academic circles has, for good and compelling reasons, focused on her status as a powerful, educated, and brilliantly creative woman in an era when few women were afforded such opportunities. But this has not been Hildegard’s only legacy. Jennifer Bain‘s recent book, Hildegard of Bingen and Musical Reception: The Modern Revival of Medieval Composer (Cambridge University Press,2015), charts the 19th-century reception of Hildegard’s life and music, and in doing so provides valuable perspective on the version of Hildegard that we know and love today. As Bain demonstrates, Hildegard has been in an almost constant state of revival since the early 19th century, and at every turn she has meant something different: depending on the interests of

Is hip hop defined by its artists or by its audience? In Home With Hip Hop Feminism, Aisha Durham returns hip hop scholarship to its roots by engaging in an ethnographic and autoethnographic approach to studying hip hop. Rooting her study in the Diggs Park Public Housing Project in Norfolk, Virginia, Durham examines what hip hop means to ordinary and everyday women who see themselves as hip hop, equals to the rappers and other artists who receive greater recognition and scholarly attention. By focusing on gender and social class, Durham explores the sexual scripts that women find and negotiate within hip hop and how hip hop continually navigates socio-economic boundaries. She also considers how the very act of studying and writing about hip hop can turn a hip hop “insider” into an outsider. The book spends considerable attention looking at Queen Latifah and Beyonce as key figures who both reinforce and interrogate dominant representations of African American women. Aisha Durham is Associate Profes

In the late 1980s, the Baltic Soviet Social Republics seemed to explode into song as Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian national movements challenged Soviet rule. The leaders of each of these movements espoused nonviolent principles, but the capacity for violence was always there – especially as Soviet authorities engaged in violent repression. In The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution (University of Washington Press, 2015), Guntis Smidchens tackles the question “of whether it is possible to reconcile nonviolent principles with a pursuit of nationalist power” and his answer is yes. As evidence, Smidchens presents the events of 1988 to 1991 in the Baltic countries and their national song cultures, considering them through the lens of principles of nonviolence. Smidchens analyzes the role of choral, folk and rock music in the national movements, demonstrating that choral music provided mass discipline, folk songs pulled in people not already involved in s

What is hip? Can a piece of music be hip? Or is hipness primarily a way of engaging with music which recognizes the hip potential of the music? Or primarily a manner of being, which allows the hip individual to authentically engage with the hip artwork? Whatever the case may be, we know that the hip is meant to be authentic. We know that it is opposed to the square:all that is inauthentic, conformist, and authoritarian. And we know that attempts to understand hipness tend to locate it in the sonorous immediacy of musical experience. Phil Ford‘s, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013) uses these attempts to understand hipness as an entry into the altogether more intractable problem of defining hipness itself. Ford traces the hip sensibility from its roots in the African-American subcultures that arose in cities such as New York and Chicago in the aftermath of the Great Migration, through its adoption (or appropriation) by the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture mov

Many people assume that music, especially classical music, is a universal language that transcends racial and class boundaries. At the same time, many musicians, fans, and scholars praise music’s ability to protest injustice, transform social relations and give voice to the marginalized. There is a tension between the ideas of music as a universal language and the voice of the oppressed. In her new book Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race Through Musical Performance (Duke University Press, 2015), Grace Wang explores how the music and sound, not simply appearance, produces and reinforces racial and ethnic stereotypes and inequality about Asian Americans. Examining classical and pop music in the United States and in Asia, Wang reveals how music and attitudes toward music are essential in crafting identities and navigating racial and class boundaries. Wang uncovers that while music and the discourses around it can reify harmful and limiting stereotypes about Asian Americans, music also provides s

“Pop pop pop pop musik” -M Jonathyne Briggs‘ new book, Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958-1980(Oxford University Press, 2015) makes music the historical focus of the Fifth Republic’s first two decades. What made certain sounds “French,” and how did different cultural communities come together, expressing themselves in a variety of musical forms? From Francoise Hardy to Serge Gainsbourg, to the sounds of free jazz, Brittany folk, and punk, the book considers French musical production and consumption in global cultural context. Exploring the relationship between audio and national identities and communities, Briggs tracks both the influences from outside France on a range of scenes in and beyond Paris, and the reach of “French” sounds beyond the nation’s borders. Sounds French is a book that examines the contributions of artists and listeners, reading “the noise” of (and surrounding) the music treated in its

John McMillian‘s Beatles vs. Stones (Simon and Schuster, 2013) presents a compelling composite biography of the two seminal bands of the 1960s, examining both the myth-making and reality behind the great pop rivalry. More than just a history of the bands, Beatles vs. Stones explores the complex role both groups played in popular culture during the tumultuous decade of the 1960s. Although the “feud” was initially fodder for fan magazines and publicity stunts, as the bands and their audiences matured musically and politically, the divide came to reflect many of the key cultural divisions of the age. McMillian charts the makeover of the leather-clad Beatles from their early days in Germany to the “four loveable lads” who became an international sensation, and then that of the Rolling Stones, initially styled similarly to the Beatles, but quickly rebranded as their bad-boy antithesis. Beatles vs. Stones takes a critical look at both the actual artists and the image they portrayed, de

In her transformative text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua referred to the U.S.-Mexico border region as “una herida abierta (an open wound) where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country–a border culture.” To Anzaldua the “open wound” or new culture of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands resulted from “the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (i.e., the imposition of the U.S.-Mexico border in the mid-19th century). Since the establishment of the U.S.-Mexico border, politicians, local officials, businessmen, and residents have competed over the definition, control, and memory of the region. In Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, Deborah R. Vargas deconstructs the dominant narrative tropes th

What do Aretha Franklin, Rodney Dangerfield, and desegregation in New Orleans have in common? Perhaps, surprisingly, the answer is Playboy. Playboy magazine served as a guidebook for young people in the post-war era and taught this upwardly mobile generation how to live a modern, sophisticated, and cool lifestyle. It also supported the Civil Rights movement and the careers of many musicians and comedians. In her new book, Playboy Swings: How Hugh Hefner and Playboy Changed the Face of Music (Beaufort Books, 2015),Patty Farmer explores how Playboy Enterprises, through its magazine, clubs, festivals, and record label, promoted and continues to promote jazz. The podcast discusses how Playboy gave many musicians, including Aretha Franklin and Al Jarreau, some of their earliest stage experience. Farmer also talks about how Heffner’s passion for jazz and racial justice caused him to be a strong advocate for integrating the stage at the Playboy Jazz Festival and in his many clubs. Farmer also shares quite a fe

Following the Civil War, Memphis emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment, after a period of turmoil. Preston Lauterbach joins host Jonathan Judaken for an in-depth discussion in advance of the launch of Lauterbach’s latest book, Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis (Norton, 2015). Robert Church, Sr., who would become “the South’s first black millionaire,” was a slave owned by his white father. Having survived a deadly race riot in 1866, Church constructed an empire of vice in the booming river town of post-Civil War Memphis. He made a fortune with saloons, gambling, and–shockingly–white prostitution. But he also nurtured the militant journalism of Ida B. Wells and helped revolutionize American music through the work of composer W.C. Handy, the man called “the inventor of the blues.” In the face of Jim Crow, the Church fortune helped fashion the most powerful black political organization of the early

Much of the scholarship on heavy metal has assumed that the primary audience is straight white males, who are likely sexist and homophobic. In her new book, Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent (Routledge, 2015), Amber Clifford-Napoleone challenges these assumptions through her ethnographic study of self-identified queer performers and fans of heavy metal. She also reveals some surprising links between queer and heavy metal communities. In this podcast, we discuss the history of heavy metal, its connection to the post-World War II leather scene, and how heavy metal’s embrace of non-normative lifestyles and cultures has allowed queer fans and performers an accepted space within heavy metal. In the interview, Clifford Napoleone explores why heavy metal has been a welcoming space for queer fans. We also talk about the role of particular musicians and acts, such as Judas Priest and Joan Jett. Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Nance Collections at the Uni

Who is David Bowie? Fans and critics have debated this question throughout his lengthy and storied career. Chris O’Leary, in his new book Rebel Rebel (Zero Books, 2015) meticulously examines Bowie’s earliest recordings and provides crucial insight into how Bowie wrote and recorded these songs. O’Leary considers Bowie’s influences and how his desire for commercial success caused him to experiment with a wide range of styles. These early years provide crucial clues of understanding who Bowie is. The podcast explores these questions and more. O’Leary also recommends a number of “lost” Bowie songs that are worth a listen. Chris O’Leary is a writer and editor. He also writes a blog dedicated to David Bowie.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Felicia McCarren‘s latest book, French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop (Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the fascinating evolution of this urban dance form in the French context. Following the choreography and performances of key figures from the hip hop world in France, McCarren’s is a history that pays close attention to dancers and their moves, and especially to the ways in which contemporary dance is informed by-and responsive to-social and political concerns and change. Tracing the history of le hip hop as a form that arrived in France from the United States in the 1980s, French Moves examines the ways this cultural import came to “speak French”. Dance has occupied a privileged place in French national culture historically.French hip hop benefited from the outset from the support of a Socialist government interested in encouraging this meeting of street and stage in performances that embody youth, cultural diversity, and a mouvement social on a number of levels.

How are contemporary pop culture ideas about resilience used by Neoliberal capitalism? Robin James addresses this question using philosophy of music (and by doing philosophy through music) in her new book Resistance and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism, and Neoliberalism (Zero Books, 2015). The book opens with a discussion of Calvin Harris (& Florence Welch’s) Sweet Nothing as a way into theargument that ‘resilience discourse is what ties contemporary pop music aesthetics to neoliberal capitalism and racism/sexism’. James combines musicological analysis of specific techniques, such as soars, stutters and stops, with an exploration of the aesthetics of pop videos and a critical theoretical framework. In particular the book connects theories of biopower and biopolitics, along a critical take on gender and ethnicity, to the work of Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Rihanna. The text also offers a consideration of alternatives, whether those that have already been incorporatedinto contemporary pop, such

Discussions of punk tend to focus on groups, like the Ramones, Sex Pistols, The Clash, and the punk scenes of New York, London, and Los Angeles. Punk, however, was a broader musical cultural movement and sprung up in multiple locations. The Dead Kennedys hailed from the San Francisco punk scene...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can sociology explain punk? In a new book, Networks of Sound, Style, and Subversion: The Punk and Post-Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool, and Sheffield, 1975-80 (Manchester University Press, 2015), Nick Crossley from the University of Manchester offers an important new perspective on the birth of punk and post-punk in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield in the mid to late 1970s. Crossley uses social network analysis (SNA) to show why punk developed in specific places in specific ways. This is in contrast to existing work that seeks to ground punk in the strains of adolescent life in the crisis ridden 1970s, or in the actions of specific individuals. The book seeks to account for punk and post-punk in the four cities as a series of musical worlds, all of which have similarities shown by the SNA. Indeed, by concentrating on the networks that facilitated the rise of punk, the book shows how punk can be explained through networks of connected and sometimes competing sets of enthusiasts, before