In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

One of the most neglected areas of musicological research is art music written by nineteenth-century American composers, thus Douglas Shadle‘s book Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a welcome, and much needed, addition to the field. It is the first comprehensive survey of American nineteenth-century orchestral music. Organized chronologically, each chapter also features a detailed critical analysis of a major work. Shadle unearths, analyzes, and advocates for a repertoire that has been erased almost completely from the historical and performance record. Along the way, Shadle debunks or nuances some of the most common narratives in musicological historiography on American music. Written in a lively, approachable style, he provides contemporary assessments of the music, while also contextualizing American symphonic works within the musical, cultural, and political history of the United States. Despite focusing on nineteenth-century music and composers, Shadle’s work resonates with and informs some of the controversies that dog classical music today, including the continued dominance of pieces by white male composers in the repertoire of the nations leading orchestras. He challenges the arguments that critics made then, and some continue to make today, that uphold the systemic exclusion of non-canonical music and works by composers from marginalized groups. Learn more about Orchestrating the Nation here. Douglas W. Shadle is an assistant professor of musicology at Vanderbilt University whose research centers primarily on American orchestral music and American musical culture in the nineteenth century. His work has appeared in many journals and collected editions including American Music, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and MLA Notes. His article How Santa Clause Became a Slave Driver: The Work of Print Culture in a Nineteenth-Century Controversy won the 2016 Society for American Music Irving Lowen’s Article Award and a 2015 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award. Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise has been well-reviewed not only by musicologists, but also in the popular press in venues such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. It was also honored with an ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award in 2017. Currently, Shadle is working on a short monograph for the Oxford Keynote Series on Antonin Dvořak’s New World Symphony. 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.

In the wake of Ken Burns’ most recent series, The Vietnam War, America’s fascination with the conflict shows no sign of abating. Fortunately the flood of popular retellings of old narratives is supplemented by a number of well-researched and reasoned efforts aimed at garnering a better sense of how our presumptions about the Vietnam War are in need of reinterpretation and revision. Returning to New Books in Military History is historian Gregory A. Daddis, author of two recent accounts of the war that together offer a sharp reassessment of the American effort. In Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing America’s Strategy in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2017) Daddis challenges many existing perceptions of the readiness and roles of MACV’s two most prominent commanders, Generals William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, as well as their struggles with the Washington defense establishment during the war. By centering his study on the strategic planning and its execution, Daddis not only acknowledges the centrality of Vietnamese agency in the outcome of the war, he also reveals how some historians have misjudged the war’s outcome to present flawed visions of possible victory.

It’s a sad story known well. In dead of winter at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, U.S. soldiers with the Seventh Cavalry Regiment gunned down over two hundred Lakota men, women, and children. Their crime? Taking part in the Ghost Dance ritual. What happened afterwards is a story told less often. David W. Grua, historian and editor with the Joseph Smith Papers project, tells about the competing memory and counter-memory of Wounded Knee as the U.S. Army first shaped the narrative, and later, Lakotas attempted to have their side of the story heard. In his Robert M. Utley Prize winning book, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (Oxford University Press, 2016), Grua argues that race, official memory, and public memorialization served the purposes of white supremacy on the northern Great Plains throughout much of the early twentieth century. Official army reports as well as physical memorialization at the massacre site spun a narrative of Indian savagery and white innocence that helped make the case for the twenty Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers who took part in the bloodshed. The truth was, of course, far more complicated, as Lakota activists like Joseph Horn Cloud would prove in an effort to gain restitution and justice from the American government. Surviving Wounded Knee is an important story about what happens to a massacre site once the smoke clears, and is a testament to the power of public history. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

It’s intuitive to think that statements of the form “lying is wrong” ascribe a property—that of wrongness—to acts of the type lying. In this way, one might think that statements of this kind are much like statements of the form “Bill is left-handed,” which also seems to attribute a property—left-handedness to Bill. But what about a statement like “Bill is a Wookie?” As there is no property of being a Wookie, the statement seems then to be false. What’s called the error theory is the view that statements that attribute moral properties are always false, because no such properties exist. In Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgments (Oxford University Press, 2017), Bart Streumer offers a fascinating kind of defense of the error theory as it applies to all normative judgments: Streumer argues that the error theory cannot be believed, and its unbelievability makes the error theory more likely to be true.  

In his work, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mark Sedgwick maps the ideational processes that have led to the development of contemporary western Sufism. Sedgwick showcases how Neoplatonism influenced Arab philosophy and subsequently Sufism. Pre-modern Sufism then appealed to Jewish and Christian mystics, who framed Sufism as a non-Islamic tradition, in effect emphasizing its universalism. With this historical mapping Sedgwick masterfully showcases how, even in its earliest period, Sufism was engaged with by Muslims and non-Muslims, and thus the fluidities noted in western Sufism in the contemporary context is by no means unique, but rather reflective of an age-old process of textual, philosophical and mystical transmissions. Moving between questions of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, universal and Islamic, this study naturally challenges how we think and frame Sufism. This book is a must read for anyone interested in Sufism, especially in modern western Sufism. M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Ithaca College. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism (Bloomsbury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018). More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at mxavier@ithaca.edu.

What if you suddenly discovered a cherished member of your family was a Nazi? How would you make sense of the code of silence that had kept an uncomfortable reality at bay? How would you resolve the wartime suffering of your family with their moral culpability for the Holocaust? Roger Frie explores the thorny issue of historical memory and intergenerational trauma in his new award winning book Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2017). In an intensely personal confrontation with the Nazi past in his own family, Roger searches for ways to navigate historical traumas and reconcile the memory of his grandfather with the knowledge of his deeds. Roger Frie is a registered psychologist and interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and history. He publishes and lectures widely on historical trauma, culture, memory, and human interaction. Roger has also edited a collection of essays bringing together historians and psychoanalysts to further examine the dynamics of intergenerational trauma entitled History Flows Through Us: Germany, the Holocaust, and the Importance of Empathy (Routledge, 2018). Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of modern Europe specializing in Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title Policing Hitler’s Critics. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at john.ryan.stackhouse@gmail.com or @Staxomatix

Kevin Bartig’s new book Sergei Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores multiple facets of one of the most famous film scores of the twentieth century, as well as the cantata Prokofiev adapted from the original music. Sergei Eisenstein’s classic film Alexander Nevsky, about a thirteenth-century Russian national hero who defeated the Teutonic Knights of the Holy Roman Empire, premiered in July 1938 in the Soviet Union amid rising tensions with Nazi Germany. While Eisenstein’s film was a propaganda piece designed to encourage Soviet patriotism at a time of growing fears about the Nazi regimes aggression, it is also one of the great motion pictures of the twentieth century because of its technical mastery and climactic half-hour Battle of the Ice scene. Using extensive archival sources, Bartig recounts the unusually close collaboration between Eisenstein and Prokofiev that produced the score, the investigates the music’s reception in Russia and abroad from its premiere until today, and explores questions raised by the connections between music and politics. Part of the Oxford University Press’s new Keynotes series, the relatively short book uses the close analysis of one work to examine Soviet cultural politics, the creation of film scores, the power of accessible music, and the afterlife of works of propaganda after their original contexts disappear. Kevin Bartig is an associate professor of musicology at Michigan State University and specializes in music and culture in Eastern Europe and the US. He has received multiple grants and fellowships including awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. He was also a Lilly Teaching Fellow during the 2011-12 academic year. His publications include Composing for the Red Screen: Sergey Prokofiev and Soviet Film (Oxford University Press, 2013), as well as articles, reviews, and essays in several collected editions. 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.

Music is frequently connected to leftist politics and seen as the soundtrack to social protest movements, most notably the civil rights movement. But the far right groups use music too. Benjamin Teitelbaum‘s Lions of the North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2017) explores how Swedish and Nordic far right parties deployed music in the 2000’s to expand the reach of their ideas. Consciously rejecting the sounds of White Power music and the image of skinheads in favor of pop music, hip-hop, and reggae, leaders of Sweden’s far right parties used the change in music to make in-roads into mainstream political discourse. In this podcast Teitelbaum discusses the shifting theoretical landscape that undergirds the radical nationalism and how this led to a variety of approaches toward music by far right parties. We explore how far right musicians and audiences came to use African-inspired musical forms in their effort to spread their ideas about Swedish nationalism. In addition to exploring questions of race, the conversation also examines the changing role of women in far right music and the vexed position of folk music. The podcast concludes with drawing some comparisons and contrasts between far right movements in the United States and Sweden. Benjamin R. Teitelbaum is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado. Teitelbaum’s commentary on music and politics has appeared in major European and American media outlets, in addition to scholarly venues. He has contributed as an expert for NPR, Swedish Radio, Norwegian Radio, the BBC, Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Helsinge Sanomat and Berlingske, and he has authored op-eds in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Dagbladet and the Wall Street Journal. Teitelbaum is also a musician who specializes in Swedish folk music and Sweden’s unofficial national instrument, the nyckelharpa. More information about him can be found on his website. The host for this episode is Richard Schur, Professor of English at Drury University. He is the author of Parodies of Ownership: Hip Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law and the co-editor of African American Culture and Legal Discourse.

In 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), David Stevenson examines a pivotal chapter of the First World War. Two and a half years of death and destruction had brought the belligerents to new nadirs of attrition and zeniths of strategic calculation. Deeply invested in the war, with unprecedented losses of blood and treasure, and no longer optimistic about their chances of victory, all sides were looking for a quick exit but had few prospects of finding one. In 1917, the Germans gambled in escalating their submarine warfare, which drew the hesitant Americans into the conflict, the French faced mutinies, and the Russians plunged the throes of Revolution. The war thus raged, spreading across two oceans to four continents, finally turning toward its conclusion. In this episode of the podcast, David Stevenson discusses the causes, course, and effects of these events with us, and shares his insights about judging historical forces and human agency, evaluating counterfactuals, and drawing comparisons between 1917 and subsequent events of the last 100 years, including the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and conflicts of the twenty-first century. Professor Stevenson is Stevenson Chair of International History at the London School of Economics, and has published several important works on the World War I including With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918, and 1914-1918: The History of the First World War. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College.  

Gregory Laski approaches the concept of democracy in his text, Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2018) from a variety of dimensions and perspectives, integrating the concept of temporality to considerations of liberty and justice within an analysis of American political thought and history, especially in the period following the Civil War. Laski’s complex and sophisticated text will have great appeal to political theorists and political philosophers as well as scholars of American political development and American letters and literature. Laski explores the idea of temporality in context of American democracy, and democracy generally, and the concept of progress as we often consider it in relation to post-slavery America. Untimely Democracy highlights an often-under-explored area of American politics, in the post-bellum writers and their discourse that examines a period of stasis as Reconstruction comes to an end and African-American liberty does not, in fact, expand. Laski approaches these theoretical considerations through post-Civil war writers like Stephen Crane, Pauline Hopkins, Callie House, W.E.B Dubois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass and others. The thrust of this exploration is to reposition, in a sense, the concept of racial progress and the quest for liberty—providing a counter-discourse to the expected linear arc generally associated with racial progress. Laski’s examination is multilayered and examines these written and rhetorical works, especially within an analysis that explores our understanding of time, memory, recollection, and progress as an only-forward moving trajectory. This book takes the reader on a journey through concepts of temporal distinctions or horizons within a democratic quest, examining what Laski titles “untimely democracy”—neither clear progress, nor a forgetting of the past, but a consideration of democracy and the concept of expanded liberty from within a context that is bracketed in time and that explores this tension within time.