Music & Performance

Hip-Hop Revolution explores the current cultural and political landscape of hip-hop by providing a broad based historical context for the art. Beginning with the emergence of popular culture in the...

My interests in cultural politics include a project I had started before the Bernstein project—a study of the joint work by the Soviet artists Vladimir Mayakovsky and El Lissitzky, their...

Primitive Selves offers a different take on the history of Japanese colonial rule in Korea. Whereas most studies focus on specific policies—such as economic exploitation, compulsory education, assimilation directives, military...

Songbooks is a book about books on American popular music. It’s a vast subject, and my book covers books from a 1770 collection of psalmody by a tanner in revolutionary...

One of the main ideas in this book is that music is connected to geography; it originates from a specific place. The social factors shaping that place...are reflected in the music...

The Singing Turk explores the huge cultural phenomenon of European operas about Turks, flourishing especially during the eighteenth century, in the European age of Enlightenment. Though most people interested in...

I try to understand how the different genres that emerged or entered maturity in the late 1960s – including rock music criticism, true crime, gonzo journalism, science fiction...

Just around Midnight is about the entanglements of popular music and racial thought during the 1960s, and particularly the question of how rock and roll music “became white.” By the...

The Cuban Hustle documents the myriad ways in which ordinary Cubans have sought to survive, hustle, and invent alternative cultures in the twenty-year period following the collapse of the Soviet...

The book is about the experience of the historical moment called “1989,” lasting somewhere between an instant and a few years. More specifically, it’s about a set of feelings, intuitions,...

A great deal of what I am saying depends on the claim that black musical genres and belief-systems are part of a single, unified complex in the Americas from Brazil...

Our authors might of course be fans of the subject, but they are also - with one or two exceptions - academics who are interested in broader social, historical or cultural trends. Another important aspect in this was the focus on creativity...

Music, Math, and Mind is written for musicians and music lovers, and will take them through a journey that uncovers the science of music and sound. Because artists and art...

Relationscapes attempts to develop a theory of the incipiency of movement. Initially, my main concern was to continue a line of questioning developed in my previous book, Politics of Touch,...

Castrati, I argue, assumed the function of a latency that haunted Moreschi and his predecessors, especially after about 1830. By then, they had departed from European opera stages and soon ended up exclusively in papal Rome. Since then, castrati have continued haunting our present..

In the 1990s, a middle-aged, stuttering jazz pianist unexpectedly became the best-selling male artist in Europe, outselling even Michael Jackson. His name was John Paul Larkin. But the world knew him as Scatman John. John was a lifelong stutterer...

They’re a band that never wanted fame, and I mean that quite literally. They were with independent labels, they’re publishing stuff on their own, and they’re refusing to rush...

Mura Dehn is this fascinating woman. When I first came in contact with her, nobody knew who she was. I did my dissertation on her, and in the 30 years since, she has become very famous in some circles. When Bloomsbury approached me I had just retired, and I had a list, as long as my leg, of things that I was gonna do...

For more than half a century, one folk singer's face has been quietly rewriting the movies it appears in — as actor, documentary subject, music-video fixture, and even unreleased director. This is an argument for taking that filmography seriously, and a corrective to the tidy myths a recent hit biopic spun around the night an icon “went electric.”

Many of Springsteen's songs are built around characters caught in situations where it's difficult to know what the right decision is. These aren't "big" heroic stories — they're stories about failure, exclusion, disappointment, and hope that often goes nowhere, all grounded in very concrete everyday situations. Just listen to any song on "Nebraska" or "The Ghost of Tom Joad", and you will immediately be drawn into these emotions.

This book is about a seemingly crazy idea that turned into one of the most remarkable publishing successes of the twentieth century. In 1967, Jann Wenner, a 20-year-old Berkeley dropout, and Ralph J. Gleason, a 50-year...

Through these various case studies, Public Acoustics offers a parallel history to traditional narratives of the emergence of the public sphere, emphasizing how writers understood the importance of public discourse in terms of its sensuous, affective, confusing, and mobile qualities over its capacity to produce clear articulations of public opinion.

Opera Wars is very much an examination of where the opera industry currently stands and all of the pressure points and conflicts that have emerged from having this four-century-old art form collide with contemporary society. I divide the book into eight key battlegrounds...

Good Vibrations builds on a scientific and cultural shift in how we understand music. For a long time, music was considered “just entertainment”: pleasant, but biologically unimportant. In the book,...

Unsilencing belongs to the global conversation about how societies remember—or refuse to remember—state violence. It speaks to the legacy of the gulag but also to the aftermath of authoritarianism everywhere,...

I came to this subject through an earlier project concerning business complicity under National Socialism.Companies such as Siemens (electronics), Krupp (steel), and the automotive firms BMW, Volkswagen, and Daimler Benz,...

What comes to mind when you think of opera? For most people, the word summons some variation on belting ladies, black tie, red velvet seats, opulent theatres, and diamond-encrusted snobbery...

Composing the Citizen explores how and why music is deeply valuable to society, how music helps people fulfill their human potential as individuals and members of communities.The Third Republic in...

Beautiful Monsters explores how “classical music,” and the idea of “the classic” itself, found a home in the American popular imagination. Concerns about the apparent cultural demise of classical music...

One Public explores the contemporary story of one of the most influential theatres in America. While the study covers the colorful history of The Public from its founding by Joseph Papp, the focus of the manuscript is the trajectory of a theatrical impulse, and how the Public nurtures plays from the workshop phase...

Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission is about the messy, uncertain process of transition from authoritarian to democratic rule, and the quasi-judicial ritual that South Africa used to help accomplish such...

The basic thesis of Hotter Than That is that the trumpet has been associated, rightly or wrongly, with masculinity. The men who have played it have jealously guarded their exclusive...

Hip-Hop Revolution explores the current cultural and political landscape of hip-hop by providing a broad based historical context for the art. Beginning with the emergence of popular culture in the...

My interests in cultural politics include a project I had started before the Bernstein project—a study of the joint work by the Soviet artists Vladimir Mayakovsky and El Lissitzky, their...

Primitive Selves offers a different take on the history of Japanese colonial rule in Korea. Whereas most studies focus on specific policies—such as economic exploitation, compulsory education, assimilation directives, military...

Songbooks is a book about books on American popular music. It’s a vast subject, and my book covers books from a 1770 collection of psalmody by a tanner in revolutionary...

One of the main ideas in this book is that music is connected to geography; it originates from a specific place. The social factors shaping that place...are reflected in the music...

The Singing Turk explores the huge cultural phenomenon of European operas about Turks, flourishing especially during the eighteenth century, in the European age of Enlightenment. Though most people interested in...

I try to understand how the different genres that emerged or entered maturity in the late 1960s – including rock music criticism, true crime, gonzo journalism, science fiction...

Just around Midnight is about the entanglements of popular music and racial thought during the 1960s, and particularly the question of how rock and roll music “became white.” By the...

The Cuban Hustle documents the myriad ways in which ordinary Cubans have sought to survive, hustle, and invent alternative cultures in the twenty-year period following the collapse of the Soviet...

The book is about the experience of the historical moment called “1989,” lasting somewhere between an instant and a few years. More specifically, it’s about a set of feelings, intuitions,...

A great deal of what I am saying depends on the claim that black musical genres and belief-systems are part of a single, unified complex in the Americas from Brazil...

Our authors might of course be fans of the subject, but they are also - with one or two exceptions - academics who are interested in broader social, historical or cultural trends. Another important aspect in this was the focus on creativity...

Music, Math, and Mind is written for musicians and music lovers, and will take them through a journey that uncovers the science of music and sound. Because artists and art...

Relationscapes attempts to develop a theory of the incipiency of movement. Initially, my main concern was to continue a line of questioning developed in my previous book, Politics of Touch,...

Castrati, I argue, assumed the function of a latency that haunted Moreschi and his predecessors, especially after about 1830. By then, they had departed from European opera stages and soon ended up exclusively in papal Rome. Since then, castrati have continued haunting our present..

In the 1990s, a middle-aged, stuttering jazz pianist unexpectedly became the best-selling male artist in Europe, outselling even Michael Jackson. His name was John Paul Larkin. But the world knew him as Scatman John. John was a lifelong stutterer...

They’re a band that never wanted fame, and I mean that quite literally. They were with independent labels, they’re publishing stuff on their own, and they’re refusing to rush...

Mura Dehn is this fascinating woman. When I first came in contact with her, nobody knew who she was. I did my dissertation on her, and in the 30 years since, she has become very famous in some circles. When Bloomsbury approached me I had just retired, and I had a list, as long as my leg, of things that I was gonna do...

For more than half a century, one folk singer's face has been quietly rewriting the movies it appears in — as actor, documentary subject, music-video fixture, and even unreleased director. This is an argument for taking that filmography seriously, and a corrective to the tidy myths a recent hit biopic spun around the night an icon “went electric.”

Many of Springsteen's songs are built around characters caught in situations where it's difficult to know what the right decision is. These aren't "big" heroic stories — they're stories about failure, exclusion, disappointment, and hope that often goes nowhere, all grounded in very concrete everyday situations. Just listen to any song on "Nebraska" or "The Ghost of Tom Joad", and you will immediately be drawn into these emotions.

This book is about a seemingly crazy idea that turned into one of the most remarkable publishing successes of the twentieth century. In 1967, Jann Wenner, a 20-year-old Berkeley dropout, and Ralph J. Gleason, a 50-year...

Through these various case studies, Public Acoustics offers a parallel history to traditional narratives of the emergence of the public sphere, emphasizing how writers understood the importance of public discourse in terms of its sensuous, affective, confusing, and mobile qualities over its capacity to produce clear articulations of public opinion.

Opera Wars is very much an examination of where the opera industry currently stands and all of the pressure points and conflicts that have emerged from having this four-century-old art form collide with contemporary society. I divide the book into eight key battlegrounds...

Good Vibrations builds on a scientific and cultural shift in how we understand music. For a long time, music was considered “just entertainment”: pleasant, but biologically unimportant. In the book,...

Unsilencing belongs to the global conversation about how societies remember—or refuse to remember—state violence. It speaks to the legacy of the gulag but also to the aftermath of authoritarianism everywhere,...

I came to this subject through an earlier project concerning business complicity under National Socialism.Companies such as Siemens (electronics), Krupp (steel), and the automotive firms BMW, Volkswagen, and Daimler Benz,...

What comes to mind when you think of opera? For most people, the word summons some variation on belting ladies, black tie, red velvet seats, opulent theatres, and diamond-encrusted snobbery...

Composing the Citizen explores how and why music is deeply valuable to society, how music helps people fulfill their human potential as individuals and members of communities.The Third Republic in...

Beautiful Monsters explores how “classical music,” and the idea of “the classic” itself, found a home in the American popular imagination. Concerns about the apparent cultural demise of classical music...

One Public explores the contemporary story of one of the most influential theatres in America. While the study covers the colorful history of The Public from its founding by Joseph Papp, the focus of the manuscript is the trajectory of a theatrical impulse, and how the Public nurtures plays from the workshop phase...

Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission is about the messy, uncertain process of transition from authoritarian to democratic rule, and the quasi-judicial ritual that South Africa used to help accomplish such...

The basic thesis of Hotter Than That is that the trumpet has been associated, rightly or wrongly, with masculinity. The men who have played it have jealously guarded their exclusive...