In The Sonic Episteme Robin James examines how twenty-first-century conceptions of sound as acoustic resonance shape notions of the social world, personhood, and materiality in ways that support white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on fields ranging from philosophy a…
"Living Genres in Late Modernity reassesses the role of genres in musical practice and experience. Exploring stylistic developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, including soul, funk, disco, pop, the nocturne, and the concerto, Charles Kronengold treats genres as …
"In The Politics of Vibration, cultural theorist Marcus Boon offers both an anthropological and theoretical account of vibrational ontology. Boon focuses on the work of three contemporary musicians-Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Swedish drone composer and philos…
"In this book, Tom Beghin examines the French piano Beethoven famously acquired from the Erard firm in Paris in 1803. The Erard piano is one of only three extant instruments belonging to Beethoven and is housed in a museum in Austria. Beghin argues that the piano sonatas Beethov…
"Founded on Chicago's South Side in 1965 and still thriving today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is the most influential collective organization in jazz and experimental music. In Sound Experiments, Paul Steinbeck offers an in-depth historical …
The world-renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin has devoted much of his career to helping listeners appreciate Russian and Soviet music in new and sometimes controversial ways. Defining Russia Musically represents one of his landmark achievements: here Taruskin uses music, toge…
"The fascinating story of America's national anthem and an examination of its powerful meaning today. Most Americans learn the tale in elementary school: During the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key witnessed the daylong bombardment of Baltimore's Fort McHenry by British navy ships…
"As recent scholarship has begun to register, music during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries occupied a much wider intellectual and cultural position than it did in later centuries, including the present one. Linda Austern's study aims to restore music to its former scope …
"In Sentinel Musicians of the Ethiopian American Diaspora, Kay Kaufman Shelemay shares more than forty years of research among Ethiopian musicians in the midst of a widespread and evolving diaspora. Beginning on the eve of the Ethiopian revolution in 1974 all the way up to the p…
"William T. Sites details the life of visionary musician Sun Ra in Chicago, from 1946 until 1961. Sun Ra's South Side was a site of unorthodox religious and cultural activism where Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold "dream-book bibles," and Elijah Muha…
"Emerging in the 1850s, elocutionists recited poetry or drama with music to create a new type of performance. The genre ... dominated by women ... achieved remarkable popularity. Yet the elocutionists and their art fell into total obscurity during the twentieth century. Marian W…
By mixing personal memoir, criticism, and journalism, Hyden explores the ways that classic rock changed the culture -- how it established the album as music's answer to the novel, and rock concerts as the secular equivalent to church -- and asks whether any of these signposts ca…
"In recent decades, experimental music has flourished outside of European and American concert halls. The principles of indeterminacy, improvisation, nonmusical sound, and noise, pioneered in concert and on paper by the likes of Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Ornette Coleman, can …
"The social connotation of jazz in American popular culture has shifted dramatically since its emergence in the early twentieth century. Once considered youthful and even rebellious, jazz music is now a firmly established American artistic tradition. As jazz in American life has…
"Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has long thrived in American popular music. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses of media, orchestration, and arranging. He travels from…
"Marianne Faithfull has been an actress and model as well as a musician who has released more than a dozen albums over five decades. She first entered the public sphere in 1964 with the song "As Tears Go By," which also was recorded by the Rolling Stones, and she is still best k…