New Books in Music

Though he never enjoyed the fame of his contemporaries Mozart and Haydn, Antonio Rosetti was a successful composer whose works received a wide audience. In his book, The Career of an Eighteenth-Century Kapellmeister: The Life and Music of Antonio Rosetti (University of Rochester Press, 2014), Sterling Murray provides readers with both an account of Rosetti’s career and a style study of his compositions. As a young man Rosetti found employment as a double bass player at the southern German court of Kraft Ernst, Prince of Oettingen-Wallerstein. There he began composing a wide range of instrumental music for the court, eventually rising to the position of kapellmeister for the courts Hofkapelle. A sojourn in Paris in 1781-82 enhanced Rosetti’s growing reputation by providing opportunities for publishing his music while exposing him to a wider range of styles, an experience which was soon reflected in his compositions. While financial concerns led to his relocation to the court of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in 1789, his death three years later cut short his career, leaving his achievements subject to the vicissitudes of taste and the changes in musical styles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: An Ecological Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2016), a multi-authored volume co-edited by Catherine Grant and Huib Schippers, examines a range of musical traditions from cultures around the world. The book deliberately places endangered musical practices alongside vibrant traditions like western opera and Hindustani music, each assessed along five domains: systems of learning music, musicians and communities, contexts and constructs, regulations and infrastructure, and media and the music industry. Doing so allows for both “vertical reading” (reading chapters in sequential order) and “horizontal reading” (in which one examines one or a handful of domains and focuses on these across different chapters). Beyond the book, information from the project is also available on the website soundfutures.org. Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and modernity in China’s Tibet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

In The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford University Press, 2016), Larry Wolff takes us into that distinctly European art form, the opera, to show us the reflection of European ideas of Ottoman Turkey in the modern period. Beginning in 1683 when Ottoman guns shook the walls of Vienna, through a long eighteenth century, and up to Napoleon’s military supremacy in the nineteenth, when Turkish conquest of Europe was “no longer really imaginable” (402), the singing Turk in one form or another, dazzled, terrified, and enchanted European audiences from Vienna, to Venice, to Paris. Professor Wolff’s discussion of the music—its creation, its reception, and its context—is richly entertaining and accessible to the layman. It also reveals important currents in political and cultural thought during the Enlightenment in a Europe with ever-broader horizons. Professor Wolff moves between decades and opera houses, to argue that, rather than being some simplistic oriental foil, the operatic Turk ultimately allows the European audience to see its own humanity in a trans-Mediterranean alter ego, and composers and librettists to resolve the two in harmony with plenty of drama and humor along the way. The reader of the Singing Turk is advised to listen along on YouTube to the operas, other compositions, and Turkish military orchestra that appear in The Singing Turk. Professor Wolff has also collected quite a few of these on a website, http://www.singingturk.com/. In our podcast, Professor Wolff also discusses twenty-first century implications of this long cultural, political, and diplomatic relationship. Furthermore, he explains one of the opera’s more peculiar romantic roles of (now mercifully defunct), that of the castrato (adult performer castrated in boyhood) and why such an actor never played the Turkish eunuch. Professor Wolff is Silver Professor, Professor of History, and Director of Mediterranean Studies at New York University. He specializes in the history of Eastern Europe, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Enlightenment, and the history of childhood, writing from an intellectual, cultural, literary—and now musical—perspective. His work considers East and West and the dialectic relationship between the two, as he did with his Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994). The Singing Turk is his seventh book. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

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

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

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

Gretchen Dykstra‘s career to date has been both impressive and wide-ranging. She was the founding President of the Times Square Alliance, the former Commissioner of the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs, and the founding President of the 9/11 Memorial Foundation. She is also a writer, and in this New Books in Folklore episode, she is interviewed about her biography of her grandfather, Franz Rickaby, which features in Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017) Franz Rickaby was a young folk music collector and fiddler and between 1919 and 1923, he travelled extensively around the Upper Midwest, seeking out the songs and stories of logging industry workers. Even as he embarked on his venture, the region’s lumber business was in stark decline. Most of the original pine forests that had covered the area had been clear cut by that time, but although the environment had been depleted, a rich cache of folkloric material remained. Rickaby set about preserving this material—songs, ballads, and stories—in manuscript form and then presented in his seminal work Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy. This tome provided, as folklorist James P. Leary writes in his introduction to Pinery Boys, “the foundation for our understanding of North Americas Anglophone lumberjack folksongs, song-makers, and singers” (3). Alas, Rickaby himself died aged 35 shortly before Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy appeared in print leaving the prominent Harvard-based folklorist George Kittredge to oversee its publication which took place in 1926. Rickaby’s wife Lillian, who had urged Kittredge to take up the task, wrote elsewhere that although she was sorry that her husband had not lived to see the finished product, “what are books to those who walk among the stars?” (70). Gretchen Dykstra’s biography of her grandfather forms a significant part of Pinery Boys and offers valuable insight into the life and motivations of a man about whom little was previously known. Pinery Boys also includes the republication of Rickaby’s Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy, along with other material he collected but which fell outside of the purview of his major work. In addition, and as mentioned earlier, the book’s introduction, which provides valuable context, is written by the University of Wisconsin’s James P. Leary. Leary, himself a distinguished scholar of the folk music of the Upper Midwest, also provides illuminating annotations to Rickaby’s work. Incidentally, during the course of her New Books in Folklore interview, Dykstra mentions a recent recording of songs collected by her grandfather as performed by Brian Miller. More information about this recording, which is entitled Minnesota Lumberjack Songs: Irish and Scottish Music from the North Woods, can be found here. Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

A city in its original state is arbitrary and has no meaning. The act of placemaking is a multifaceted process in the planning, designing, and management of public spaces. The social construction of meaning is a process that capitalizes on the assets, inspiration, and potential of a public space. This meaning is constructed from the social and emotional sentiments that people evoke from the city. The structural and physical aspects of the city are less important. Jonathan R. Wynn, the author of Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport (University of Chicago, 2015) and my guest for this episode, studied the process of placemaking through observing major music festivals for the cities of Austin, Texas; Nashville, Texas; and Newport, Rhode Island. In our interview, we discuss how this study was shaped from his past study on tour guides and how community members serve as major contributors to placemaking. Wynn also shares his thoughts on the current climate of music festivals in the United States compared to Canada. Jonathan R. Wynn, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Undergraduate Program Director at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Dr. Wynn is an urban sociologist who published The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York and regularly contributes to the Everyday Sociology blog. He is currently working on a project about hospitals as a central hub for urban communities. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled “Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars.” You can learn more about Dr. 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

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow‘s book, Personal Stereo (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) , which is part of the Object Lessons series, offers a compelling and expertly researched study of the Sony Walkman, taking into account the device’s controversial origin story, the seismic cultural impact on society in the 1980s, the worries of diminishing social interactions, and the philosophical implications of listening to music within one’s own private bubble. All this is channeled through a personal nostalgic affection for the device. Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow is a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine. Her writing has appeared in Slate, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Dissent, where she is a contributing editor. She was previously a contributing writer for the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, a columnist for the urban affairs website Next City, and a Journalism and Media Fellow at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer and author of several books on the subjects of film and popular culture. He lives in Ontario, Canada. Follow him on Twitter @riffsandmeaning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Studio 54 opened its doors 40 years ago and since that time it has held a place in American popular culture. Studio 54 was the place to go dancing to great music, mingle with celebrities and beautiful people, and do drugs night after night. In his historical and cultural memoir as the owner of Studio 54, Mark Fleischman takes readers behind the scenes and the into the basement rooms and dark corners of the night club. Inside Studio 54: The Real Story of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll from Former Studio 54 Owner (Rare Bird Books, 2017) introduces readers to the Studio 54 of the 1980s which Fleischman took control over after the original owners went to jail for tax evasion. Fleischman shares stories of celebrities, drugs, and day in and day out partying. He presents how he initiated theme nights and created ways to make the night club a destination for cultural icons of the decade. Through his journey of making Studio 54 the in club of the 1980s after disco was declared dead, Fleischman also shares his story of addiction and recovery, finding a new life through Rancho La Puerta and sobriety. Fleischman’s Inside Studio 54 is a no-nonsense view of a cultural landmark that gives readers interested in popular, music and celebrity culture insight behind the scenes of the most famous night club in the world. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in people’s 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