Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film—these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these devices were also the implements of a musical revolution. Instruments for New Music traces a diffuse network of cultural agents who shared the belief that a truly modern music …
In the 1990s, Los Angeles was home to numerous radical social and environmental eruptions. In the face of several major earthquakes and floods, riots and economic insecurity, police brutality and mass incarceration, some young black Angelenos turned to holy hip hop—a movement merging Christianity and hip hop culture—to “save” themselves and the city. Converting street corners to open-ai…
To produce the song sequences that are central to Indian popular cinema, singers' voices are first recorded in the studio and then played back on the set to be lip-synced and danced to by actors and actresses as the visuals are filmed. Since the 1950s, playback singers have become revered celebrities in their own right. Brought to Life by the Voice explores the distinctive aesthetics and affect…
Fugue for J. S. Bach was a natural language; he wrote fugues in organ toccatas and voluntaries, in masses and motets, in orchestral and chamber music, and even in his sonatas for violin solo. The more intimate fugues he wrote for keyboard are among the greatest, most infl uential, and best-loved works in all of Western music. They have long been the foundation of the keyboard repertory, played …
After the sound reproduction industry had claimed “perfect high fidelity” for sound recordings already at the beginning of the twentieth century, composers and sound artists challenged this perfection by tweaking microphones and loudspeakers to make them act as a musical instrument instead of a mere sound reproduction device. This book explores the instrumental use of microphones and loudsp…
Many critics have interpreted Bob Dylan’s lyrics, especially those composed during the middle to late 1960s, in the contexts of their relation to American folk, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll precedents; their discographical details and concert performances; their social, political and cultural relevance; and/or their status for discussion as “poems.” Dylan's Autobiography of a Vocation ins…
The digital turn has created new opportunities for scholars across disciplines to use sound in their scholarship. This volume's contributors provide a blueprint for making sound central to research, teaching, and dissemination. They show how digital sound studies has the potential to transform silent, text-centric cultures of communication in the humanities into rich, multisensory experiences t…
Borrowed Forms examines the use of music by contemporary novelists and critics from across the Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone worlds. Through readings of Nancy Huston, Maryse Condé, J. M. Coetzee, Assia Djebar, Julio Cortázar, and other late twentieth-century novelists, the book shows how writers deploy musical strategies to expand the possibilities of the novel in response to …
David A. McDonald rethinks the conventional history of the Palestinian crisis through an ethnographic analysis of music and musicians, protest songs, and popular culture. Charting a historical narrative that stretches from the late-Ottoman period through the end of the second Palestinian intifada, McDonald examines the shifting politics of music in its capacity to both reflect and shape fundame…
We Shall Not Be Moved: The Trail Blazed by a Song from the U.S. South to Spain and South America details the history of "We Shall Not Be Moved" from its birth as a slave spiritual in the U.S. South and its subsequent adoption as a standard hymn by the U.S. labor, civil rights, and farmworker movements, to its singing in the student movement opposing the Franco dictatorship in Spain in the 1960s…