New Books in Music

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 was featured in the collection Vagabond Holes alongside work by Nick Cave and ManBooker winner D. B. C . Pierre. James has written about music for The Guardian and Litromagazine among others, and is currently working on a new book. He lives in London. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer, independent researcher, and cultural critic. Originally from Leicester, UK, he now resides in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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 Simmons College in 2018 and his B.S. in History at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in 2015. Follow him @CulturedModesty on Twitter to learn more about upcoming interviews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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 culture and social inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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 adulthood. Michael Ramirez, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Women and Gender Studies Program at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi. He teaches courses and conducts research in the areas of gender, work, aging and the life course, film, as well as courses in Women and Gender Studies. Ramirez is currently working on a study about fatherhood in twenty-first century America. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. You can read more about Johnston’s work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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. Historical musicology tends to skew to the middle class, but male impersonation was entertainment for the working class. Through examining the content of these acts, as well as their reception, Rodger argues that during the second half of the nineteenth century, working class men began to guard their access to employment and the public sphere against competition from women, just as middle-class women began to break into the public sphere through work and political activity in support of women’s suffrage. The more realistic acts that lampooned middle-class masculinity that male impersonators once performed for an all-male working class audience became more focused on respectability and upholding conservative social values by the early twentieth century as audiences became mixed gender and more middle-class. Gillian M. Rodger is a professor of ethnomusicology and musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research centers on popular musical entertainment in the nineteenth century and American white working-class culture. In all her work, Rodger is interested in the dramatic function of songs in non-narrative entertainments and how those songs reflect contemporary ideas about gender, class, and sexuality. She has published articles in several journals including American Music and Musical Quarterly. Her first book, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth Century (2010), surveys the history of variety beginning in the 1840s. Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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 understanding of the histories and relationships between African Americans and Italian Americans. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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. Prior to joining the University of Illinois, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Latin American Studies as Wesleyan University, and then Assistant Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Brazilian Studies at Columbia University. Sitara Thobani is Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the performance arts in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and its diasporas, especially as these relate to formations of nation, gender, sexuality and religion. She received her DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology form Oxford University, and is the author of Indian Classical Dance and the Making of Postcolonial National Identities: Dancing on Empire’s Stage (Routledge 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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 literature collaborations. By emphasizing the significance of the musical structural component that informs a literary text, the book suggests a more profound dialogue between music and literature. The Musical Novel offers a detailed discussion of jazz elements that turn out to be effective for the organization of literary texts. Although this aspect has been previously discussed by scholars, Petermann focuses on the structural overlapping, drawing attention to improvisation elements. In this interview, Petermann specifies that despite the temptation to draw parallels between jazz and textual structuring, improvisation in literary texts, however, should be perceived as a metaphor. This comment invites the consideration of how musical and literary works affect both performance and reception. The Musical Novel contains a few chapters and subchapters that delve into a detailed analysis of Bach’s Goldberg Variations: Bach’s masterpiece appears rather productive for literary borrowings and variations at many levels, including structure and content. These chapters are particularly illuminating in terms of the dialogical opportunities that music and literature offer and welcome. Emily Petermann’s book offers an opportunity to explore new ways not only for reading and writing but also for teaching: one of the questions that this interview raises is how musical novel can be read and taught. The Musical Novel welcomes the expansion of the territory of interdisciplinary borrowings and collaborations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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 production, Francis reminds us that as long as musicologists insist on centering their scholarship on the lone composer/genius, someone who is almost always a man, we will miss how creative works are really a result of the complex interplay of networks of influence, and collaborators who participated in individual composers’ lives and music. She positions Boulanger as a participant in the cultural field of musical modernism, who used her position to influence Stravinsky’s compositions while also promoting and shaping his reputation as the premiere neo-classicist composer. At the center of Teaching Stravinsky is the long correspondence between Stravinsky, members of his family, and Boulanger which spans over forty years. In Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinkys, Francis edits and provides the English translation of most of the letters exchanged by the two friends providing readers not only the source material for her own work, but also an important resource for anyone interested in twentieth-century music. Both books have extensive companion websites. Perhaps most exciting in the Teaching Stravinsky website are the reproductions of pages from Stravinksy’s scores containing Boulanger’s comments with Francis’s explanations. The companion site for Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys holds all the letters in their original French. Kimberly A. Francis is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Guelph in Canada. Her work centers on twentieth and twenty-first century music and feminist musicology. She has published articles in many journals including The Musical Quarterly, Women and Music, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. Her work has been recognized many times with awards such as a Glen Haydon Award for her dissertation from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010, and the American Musicological Society’s Paul A. Pisk Prize and Teaching Fund Award. She was an International Fellow with the American Association of University Women. Her research has been supported by multiple grants including a General Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (20112013). She also serves as Editor-in Chief for the University of Guelph’s award-winning journal, Critical Voices: The University of Guelph Book Review Project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music