Songbooks

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Weisbard
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
American Music ◽  
Theodore Dreiser ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
Village Voice

In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna; the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan; or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre—cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning.

Are Popular Music Curricula Antiracist?: The CCNY Music Department as a Case Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-451
Author(s):  
Matthew K. Carter
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
American Music ◽  
Ear Training ◽  
Music Department ◽  
City College ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Music Theorist

In a recent virtual talk at the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music, music theorist Philip Ewell considered how music educators and researchers might begin to “undo the exclusionist framework of our contemporary music academy.” Ewell's enterprise resonated with me not only as one who teaches undergraduate courses in music theory, history, performance, and ear training, but also as an instructor in a recently adopted Popular Music Studies program at the City College of New York (CCNY). The CCNY music department's shift in focus from a mostly white, mostly male, classical-based curriculum towards a more diverse and polystylistic repertory of popular music chips away at the exclusionist framework to which Ewell refers.

Remembrance of Things Past: Marxism and the Study of Popular Music

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
SIMON FRITH
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Commercial Music ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Ideology ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThis article considers the role of Marxism in the history of popular music studies. Its approach combines the sociology of knowledge with a personal memoir and its argument is that in becoming a field of scholarly interest popular music studies drew from both Marxist theoretical arguments about cultural ideology in the 1950s and 1960s and from rock writers’ arguments about the role of music in shaping socialist bohemianism in the 1960s and 1970s. To take popular music seriously academically meant taking it seriously politically. Once established as an academic subject, however, popular music studies were absorbed into both established music departments and vocational, commercial music courses. Marxist ideas and ideologues were largely irrelevant to the subsequent development of popular music studies as a scholarly field.

Dylan Goes Electric

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-50
Author(s):  
Kathryn Lofton
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Electric Guitar ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Moment

Within the study of rock music, religion appears as a racial marker or a biographical attribute. The concept of religion, and its co-produced opposite, the secular, needs critical analysis in popular music studies. To inaugurate this work this article returns to the moment in singer-songwriter Bob Dylan’s career that is most unmarked by religion, namely his appearance with an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Dylan’s going electric became, through subsequent years of narrative attention, a secularizing event. “Secularizing event” is a phrase coined to capture how certain epochal moments become transforming symbols of divestment; here, a commitment writ into rock criticism as one in which rock emerged by giving up something that had been holding it back. Through a study of this 1965 moment, as well as the history of electrification that preceded it and its subsequent commentarial reception, the unreflective secular of rock criticism is exposed.

Introduction

Bossa Mundo ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
K. E. Goldschmitt
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mediation Processes ◽  
Brazilian Politics

This Introduction elaborates the theoretical frameworks that shape the book, with a focus on meeting points of mediation, attention, and branding. It features a critique of prevailing discourses of listener attention and distraction in popular music studies in favor of relational and trans-human conceptions of attention, which are more appropriate for a study that interrogates mediation processes. It points to the long history of US and British interference in Brazilian politics and situates the present study through a transnational framework. It outlines the historical connection between Brazil’s myth of racial democracy and the perpetuation of racial stereotypes in the country’s brand. The Introduction also outlines the chapters in the rest of the book.

Large Town Officeholding in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut: The Growth of Oligarchy

1975 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce C. Daniels
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local History ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Local Study ◽  
Town Meeting ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Large Town ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial New England

The Colonial New England town has always intrigued American historians but, paradoxically, few historians until recently have placed the colonial town under a microscope and studied it in detail. Most, instead, like George Bancroft and Herbert Baxter Adams, simply heaped accolades upon it. Even the Progressive historians, writing in an age of scientific history and seeking to debunk the myth of town meeting democracy, still did not apply a close scrutiny to the actual sources but instead also talked in generalities. The only real exceptions to this pattern and the only persons to delve deeply into local sources were Charles Andrews in his River Towns of Connecticut and G. E. Howard in his Introduction to the Local Constitutional History of the United States, both published in 1889. The next serious professional local study did not appear until 1961. In the intervening seventy-two years hundreds of local histories were written, but by antiquarians who frequently wrote with intelligence and felicity but seldom asked the significant questions that a professional historian would. Indeed, to be involved in local history implied, to people living in this time period, that a person was an antiquarian and not a true historian. However, since 1961 a number of historians have attempted to put the New England town under a microscope and ascertain some specifics to replace the generalities.

scholarly journals Latin Down Under: Latin American migrant musicians in Australia and New Zealand

Popular Music ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Bendrups
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American Music ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Latin American Music ◽  
American Popular Music

AbstractThe global significance of Latin American popular music is well documented in contemporary research. Less is known about Latin American music and musicians in Australia and New Zealand (collectively termed ‘Australasia’): nations that have historically hosted waves of migrants from the Americas, and which are also strongly influenced by globalised US popular music culture. This article presents an overview of Latin American music in Australasia, drawing on ethnographic research, with the aim of providing a historical framework for the understanding of this music in the Australasian context. It begins with an explanation of the early 20th-century conceptualisation of ‘Latin’ in Australasia, and an investigation into how this abstract cultural construction affected performance opportunities for Latino/a migrants who began to arrive en masse from the 1970s onwards. It then discusses the performance practices that were most successfully recreated by Latin American musicians in Australia and New Zealand, especially ‘Andean’ folkloric music, and ‘tropical’ dance music. With reference to prominent individuals and ensembles, this article demonstrates how Andean and tropical performance practices have developed over the course of the last 30 years, and articulates the enduring importance of Latin American music and musicians within Australasian popular music culture.

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