New Books In Music

In Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins (Duke University Press, 2017), David García reminds us that how culture is understood and interpreted not only reflects the political and social discourses of the day, but also shapes those discussions. Drawing on figures as diverse as academics like Melville Herskovitz, performers such as Duke Ellington, and those like dancer/anthropologist Katherine Dunham who filled multiple roles, García lays bare the ways that people in the Americas from the 1930s until the 1950s understood the African origins of black music and dance. He is particularly interested in how the discourse about African retentions in black diasporic culture intensified cultural, political, and social dichotomies: primal vs. civilized, science vs. magic, black vs. white, and most importantly, modernity vs. primitivity. García argues these concepts were defined in terms of each other through the discourse he analyzes, with the politically dominant group

Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946 (University of Wisconsin Press) first appeared in 2015 when it comprised of a hardback book, five CDs, and one DVD. It went on to win the “Best Historical Research in Folk or World Music” award from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, was nominated for a Grammy for “Best Album Notes,” received universally superlative reviews, and sold out within a year.  The project has now been re-issued as a paperback, albeit without any accompanying discs; instead the related tracks and film footage are now available for online access care of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library. It’s not hard to fathom why this monumental work received so much acclaim. A groundbreaking multimedia endeavor, Folksongs of Another America is the product of decades of work by the distinguished folklorist, James P. Leary.  Leary is, amongst other things, Professor Emeritus of Folklore and Scandinavian Studies and Cofounder of the Center for the S

Naomi André’s innovative new book, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (University of Illinois Press, 2018) is an example of a concept she calls “engaged musicology.” Positioning herself within the book as a knowledgeable and ethical listener, André seeks to understand the resonances and importance of opera to today’s audiences, performers, and scholars. To do this, she focuses on seven works and two continents. André places opera in the United States in conversation with opera in South Africa, the only country in Africa that has a continuous operatic tradition from the nineteenth century until the present day. Her work in South Africa began when she traveled with renowned opera singers George Shirley and Daniel Washington to that country as part of a project through the African Studies Center at her home institution of the University of Michigan. There she found a rich operatic life that included the performance of new works, such as Winnie: The Opera by Bongani Ndodana Breen as well as new interpretatio

In The Blue Series: The Story Behind the Color (Third Man Books, 2017), Ben Blackwell invites readers behind the scenes for the making of Third Man Records’ 7-inch single Blue Series. Founded in 2009 in Nashville by songwriter, musician, and producer Jack White—formerly of the White Stripes—TMR has released dozens of Blue Series singles by an eclectic group of artists, including Beck, Dwight Yoakam, Wanda Jackson, Stephen Colbert, Insane Clown Posse, and Tom Jones. Beginning with a foreword by Rolling Stone senior writer David Fricke, and an interview with White, Blackwell includes artist accounts, biographical information, and recording credits for 40 7-inch singles. The Blue Series also features an interview with Jo McCaughey who shot the photos for each release, as well as the recollections of some of the songs’ key session players. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. Her book, Fade to Black: Blues Music and the A

Most of us have heard of the math-music connection, but Eli Maor’s Music by the Numbers: From Pythagoras to Schoenberg (Princeton University Press, 2018) is THE book that explains what that connection is, and how both math and music connect to both physics and biology.  There are wonderful anecdotes detailing the lives and creations of many of the great musicians, mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers who have contributed to creating music and our understanding of it.  If you love music – and who doesn’t – you’ll enjoy reading this book, even if you don’t love math.  And maybe, even if you don’t love math, you’ll have a greater appreciation of it after you finish the book.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Featuring twenty entries on subjects such as music, voice, noise, shape and the body Keywords in Sound (Duke, 2015) pushes at the boundaries of ‘sound studies’ through its intellectual overviews and suggested openings on each of the key words. In this podcast we speak to the book’s editors David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny. David Novak is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara whilst Matt Sakakeeny is Associate Professor of Music at Tulane University. Ian Cook is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University, Budapest and also the host of Online Gods: A Podcast about Digital Cultures.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1989, Time magazine pronounced “Feminism is dead.” It seemed to mainstream culture that the conservative era, marked by Regan and Thatcher, had killed the lingering energy that began with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. And yet, as Rebekah J. Buchanan notes in her new book, Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018), a group of girls and young women were about to start making their own waves. We now call them “the riot grrls,” after one of the zines that they created of the same name. In 1991 Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe were members of the punk band Bratmobile, and Wolfe explained why they chose this name: “we had thought about Girl Riot and then we changed it to Riot Grrl with the three ‘r’s’ as in growling. It was a cool play on words, and also a kind of expression about how there should be some kind of vehicle where your anger is validated.” That growl started a movement—of youth culture, of music and print culture, of political activism, and of a new pu

In Heaven Was Detroit: From Jazz to Hip-Hop and Beyond (Wayne State University Press, 2016), M. L. Liebler curates an exhaustive collection of essays about Detroit music by a diverse group of music scholars, journalists, and musicians. Instead of relying on familiar narratives about Motown and rock and roll, this anthology engages a vast array of musical genres and sub-genres, while sharing the oft-surprising hidden histories of artists, institutions, and communities integral to Detroit’s unique sound. Heaven Was Detroit begins with former California Poet Laureate Al Young’s meditation on his childhood obsession with early to mid-20th-century Detroit jazz and ends with an essay by Jarrett Koral about Jett Plastic Recordings, the 21st-century vinyl-only record label he runs out of his parents’ basement. In between are a mix of new and classic essays about Detroit jazz, blues, pre-Motown soul, Motown, rock, hip-hop, techno, and more. Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Pro

There are few living American classical composers for whom an academic biography has been published, but Libby Larsen deserves this type of study. At the opening of her book, Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Denise Von Glahn describes her subject’s life as a “polyphony”—made up of multiple strands of music, career, and family. In order to make sense of Larsen’s long and accomplished career (and her hundreds of pieces of music), Von Glahn divides the biography into a close examination of the factors that most influenced Larsen’s life and music: family, religion, nature, the academy, gender, technology, and her collaborations. In each chapter, Von Glahn weaves a consideration of Larsen’s life with analyses of some of her major compositions. Larsen grew up and still lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has always considered herself something of an outsider in the world of classical music. She does not live in New York City (the epicenter of American classical music);

What happened in popular entertainment when African Americans could access the stage after the Civil War? In Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Sandra Graham tells the complex story of how folk spirituals composed by enslaved people but transformed for the stage became the core repertoire for the emerging black entertainment industry after 1865. She begins by telling the familiar story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers who first popularized the concert spiritual during their successful tours of the United States and Europe in the 1870s. She expands this narrative, however, by including the crucial contributions of choirs that followed in Fisk’s footsteps especially the Hampton Institute Singers and the Tennesseans. The truly ground-breaking work in the monograph, however, is her study of commercial spirituals and the performers who popularized them in all-black minstrel shows and, at the end of the nineteenth century, in plays with music, such as Uncle T

Today on the New Books in Music podcast James Cook discuses his book, Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s (Unbound, 2018). The book details the author’s own adolescent musical obsessions from The Beatles to John Barry from Led Zeppelin to The Waterboys that led him to form his own band Flamingoes with his twin brother, Jude, and move to London in the early 1990s and begin the long the often perilous road to becoming a full-time working musician. The book is part memoir, part music criticism, part social history, and a vivid tale of life lived on the periphery of a vibrant era in British cultural history. Originally a musician and songwriter, James Cook released two albums with his band Flamingoes: the acclaimed “Plastic Jewels” in 1995 and “Street Noise Invades the House” in 2007. Present from the start of the Britpop boom, The Flamingoes toured the UK and Europe extensively, selling 20,000 records worldwide. In 2009, one of James’ short stories wa

As America changed in the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, the Southern music industry was changing as well. The music studios of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals–known as the “country-soul triangle”–began producing some of the most important music of the 1960s and 1970s. In Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), Charles Hughes chronicles the ways in which inter-racialism, cultural appropriation, racism, and racial politics affected the musical studios and the country and soul industry. How could two separate musical sounds, one white and country, and the other Black and soul, be considered completely separate when many of the musicians and producers worked in the same buildings? Charles Hughes explains all! Adam McNeil is PhD student in History at the University of Delaware where he is an African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Scholar. He received his M.A. in History at Simmo

What sort of inequalities characterize classical music today? In Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work: The Classical Music Profession (Routledge, 2018), Christina Scharff, a senior lecturer in culture, media and creative industries in the department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London, offers a detailed analysis of the way the classical music profession is marked by race, class, and gender inequalities. Drawing on contemporary debates in feminism, the work of Michel Foucault, and a critique of the entrepreneurial self, the book offers a comparative study of London and Berlin. In doing so it positions classical music as a crucial site for understanding not only cultural and creative industries, but the entirety of our unequal, post-feminist economy and society. It will be required reading and citation for all creative industries scholars, as well as an important text for cultural and media studies, sociology, music, and anyone interested in the relationship between cultu

The pursuit of a musical career crosses the mind of most children. But, for most, a vocation is nothing more than a farfetched fantasy that will never come true. Music is often considered more appropriate as a leisure activity that need be abandoned when a person enters adulthood. How are men and women to forge a career as a musician when it is largely considered taboo to pursue such a position as a lifetime career? In Destined for Greatness: Passions, Dreams, and Aspirations in a College Music Town (Rutgers University Press, 2018), sociologist Dr. Michael Ramirez examines the lives of 48 independent rock musicians who sought out a music career in a college town that is renowned for its music scene. Ramirez used a life-course approach to understand the wealth of experience that led to some, but not all, individuals to fashion careers in the music industry. Ramirez recommends a nuanced understanding of factors—focusing on the intersections—that enable some people to pursue musical careers well into their adult

In the 1870s, one of the most popular forms of entertainment attended by American working-class men was variety—a succession of unrelated bawdy acts that preceded its tamer later nineteenth-century cousin, vaudeville. Gillian M. Rodger, author of Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage (University of Illinois Press, 2018), introduces the reader to some of the stars of these shows—male impersonators, women who dressed and performed as men on stage. Focusing on the period between about 1870 and World War I, Rodger traces how their acts changed over time as American ideas about gender and class also changed. Along the way, Rodger presents a fascinating cast of characters who defied social and sexual norms on stage and off. A few women even managed to marry their same-sex partners. But Rodger’s book is about more than just an obscure theatrical performance practice because her work illuminates the intersections and connections between class, sexuality, and gender. Histori

In his book, Flavor and Soul: Italian America and Its African American Edge (University of Chicago Press, 2017), scholar John Gennari examines the intersectionalities between African American and Italian American cultures in the United States. Using an auto-ethnographic lens, Gennari explores this relationship, what he calls “the edge”, between the two cultures. Gennari examines the intersectionalities in music, film, sports, and foodways, spotlighting the edge as a way to highlight the ways in which the relationship between Italian American and African American cultures has been both joyous and beneficial as well as fraught with violence and suspicion. He posits that an Afro-Italian sensibility has vitalized American culture, even with the conflicts over urban spaces, political and personal respect, and overlapping histories of exclusion. Through his personal connections as well as critical and well-researched chapters on the intersections between these two cultures, Gennari gives readers a deeper understand

Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem in August 2016 prior to a preseason game reopened a national conversation about public performances of patriotism. What does a national anthem do to promote unity in a nation with a long running history of racial slavery, lynching, and segregation? Imani Perry answers this question in her recent book May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Through her history of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” Perry powerfully shows how and why throughout the Black liberation struggles in the twentieth and twenty-first century, Black Americans adopted the song as the “Black National Anthem.” Adam McNeil is a soon-to-be Ph.D. in History and Colored Conventions Project Fellow at the University of Delaware. He can be reached on Twitter @CulturedModesty.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2013), Marc Hertzman revisits the history of Brazil’s quintessential music and dance genre to explore the links between popular music, intellectual property, law, racial democracy and nation formation. Charting more than a century of samba’s development, Hertzman challenges simplistic narratives of the all too often romanticized form, focusing instead on the material conditions under which this cultural powerhouse came to be produced. So doing, he highlights the complex social, cultural and political processes at the heart of making samba, and indeed, making Brazil. Mark Hertzman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois. His first book, Making Samba, was awarded Honorable mention by the Latin American Studies Association for the Bryce Wood Book Prize. He is currently working on his next book project, titled The Death of Zumbi: Suicide, Slavery and Martyrdom in Brazil and the Black Atlantic. Pr

The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance, and Reception in Contemporary Fiction (Camden House, 2014; a new paperback edition has recently come out (Boydell and Brewer, 2018)) examines a variety of music and literature interconnections. Readers are invited to ask what these collaborations that arise at the crossing points of various fields offer for engaging in reading and writing. Relying on an extensive overview of theoretical works that substantiate the overlapping of disciplines, Emily Petermann’s research provides additional coordinates for the definition of intermediality that underpins her examination of novels that embrace music. As the title of the book suggests, Petermann considers multiple ways in which music is incorporated in literature: structure, performance, and reception. An extensive segment of this research is devoted to the discussion of musical structures that writers bring to their texts. In this regard, Petermann takes a step forward in the examination of music and

Pedagogue, composer, and conductor Nadia Boulanger was a central figure in Igor Stravinsky’s life during the middle part of his career, providing him with support, advice, and a discerning analytical and editorial voice when he was writing some of his most important compositions including the Symphony of Psalms and Persephone. Dr. Kimberly A. Francis has recently published two books related to the complicated and tangled relationship between these two people. The first, released in 2015 by Oxford University Press, is Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon. Just last month, Boydell and Brewer published Francis’s edition of their letters in Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys: A Selected Correspondence. In other hands, Teaching Stravinsky might have been a simple joint biography, but Francis grounds her work within a theoretical framework that promotes a new approach to musicology and other fields. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on cultural produc