New Books in Music

Before the twentieth century, opera was a kind of cultural glue: it was both a medium of mass-communication, and a powerful shaper and reflector of the popular imagination in the way TV and film are today. In Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing 1770-1900 (Stanford University Press, 2012), Andrea S. Goldman explores the history, urban culture, and gender dynamics of opera in the Qing capital of Beijing (a locality with empire-wide influence) from about 1770 to 1900. Goldman’s book traces the ways that the state and different urban populations manipulated opera performances as a means to various ends, including pleasure, moral education, and political commentary. Along the way, Goldman offers sensitive close readings of some fascinating historical sources, including a form of hybridized connoisseurship-cum-city guidebooks (“flower registers,” or huapu) and playwrights’ desk copies of operas. In this extraordinarily rich and carefully-wrought story, we learn of the spaces and markets of operatic performance and the varied attempts (some successful, others not) at state regulation of late Qing opera. We learn of the intricate tracings of gender and class in the selective staging of scenes from literary operas on the commercial stage, as this selective performance could dramatically change the meanings that audiences gleaned form operatic performances. In this book full of brothers, adulterous women, boy actresses, and sugar daddies, Goldman has managed to make the social and cultural history of opera feel not just relevant, but deeply necessary for understanding the politics and society of the Qing. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Thomas Bey William Bailey is the author of Unofficial Release: Self-Released and Handmade Audio in Post-Industrial Society (Belsona Books, 2012). He is a psycho-acoustic sound artist and writer on saturation culture. Thomas traces the history of self-released audio from its origins in mail-art networks of the 1970s to the present day practice of using antiquated media – the humble cassette tape – for the dissemination of experimental sounds. Net-labels, mp3 blogs, tape traders, and their many casts of characters are examined along the way as changing technologies impact the strategies for resilience among self-releasing audio artists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

What is noise? In his new book Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Greg Hainge, Reader in French at University of Queensland, Australia, explores this question. The book is written within the tradition of critical theory and is at once playful and punning, as well as suffused with challenging and perceptive analysis. The core position of the book is that we need to move beyond the dichotomous understanding of noise that sees it as either something to be removed or rejected, an unnecessary distraction from a core signal, or something that should be celebrated, but in celebration co-opted into being something that isn’t noise. For Hainge we need a new understanding of noise, an understanding that seeks to celebrate noise through a range of engagements with cultural and theoretical phenomena. Noise is not just about sound, but figures in all forms of communication. The book takes on the accepted readings of work in music, such as John Cage’s 4’33”, literature, such as Sartre’s Nausea, as well as photography and film. These new approaches, mediated by the concern with noise, will be of interest to a range of readers from across the humanities, as well as for specialists in film and music theory and aesthetics. The project of founding on ontology of noise is also a contribution to the growing field of noise studies, which is the kind of interdisciplinary academic area that is emerging within the noisy world of the contemporary academy.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press, 2012) is a fascinating study of the MP3 as a historical, cultural, conceptual, and social phenomenon. In the course of an account of the MP3 that has surprising connections to telephony and the economics of perception, Jonathan Sterne usefully shifts our attention from media-in-general to a more specific focus on material formats, “the stuff beneath, beyond, and behind the boxes our media come in.” MP3 explores the process by which AT&T learned how to make money from the gaps in human hearing. By the 1980s, Sterne shows, engineers had developed methods for using what cannot be heard within the audible spectrum as the basis for a system of data compression for digital sound transmission. The same decade saw a subgroup of the International Organization for Standardization, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), devise a standard for digital video and audio with the help of a series of tests that gauged listeners’ levels of sonic annoyance. Sterne shows how the MP3 format emerged out of these overlapping material and social contexts of perception, technics, and experimentation. There are cat pianos and cat telephones (not what you think!) here, as well as accounts of cybernetics and information theory, histories of the domestication of noise, considerations of the challenge of archiving digital mashups, and vignettes about Suzanne Vega and Tom’s Diner. It’s a wonderful book about an important part of our daily media landscape, and it was great fun to talk about it! A review of MP3: The Meaning of Format can be found in Public Books here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

New Jersey. Home to Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Yo La Tango. . .and the Misfits, a hardcore metal horror rock band from Lodi. In This Music Leaves Stains: The Complete Story of the Misfits (Scarecrow Press, 2013), James Greene Jr. let’s us in on the career of the band and of the various people who have claimed membership within it. The focus, of course, is on the “classic” Walk Among Us version of the band consisting of Jerry Only (the member with the longest tenure in the band), his brother Doyle, Arthur Googy and, arguably the most famous member, Glenn Danzig. Greene’s story highlights the ongoing personal conflicts within the Misfits, conflicts that broke-up some versions of the band only to create new ones. Along the way, Danzig becomes a certified rock star with his eponymously-named band, Danzig, Jerry and Doyle continue on with the Misfits until a rift sends Doyle out of the band, with Jerry continuing on to this day with the Misfits band, music, and (significantly) iconography. James Greene Jr. is a freelance writer who has contribure to Crawdaddy!, Splitsider, and Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, among others. He is a graduate of the University of Central Florida. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Between 1969 and 1973, the Who hit their commercial and creative peak. The legendary English quartet produced three Billboard Top Ten albums, including two double LP “rock operas,” Tommy (1969) and Quadrophenia (1973). Sandwiched between them was the triumphant Who’s Next (1971),an album universally proclaimed as one of the greatest in pop music history. But as Richie Unterberger shows in his engrossing Won’t Get Fooled Again: The Who from Lifehouse to Quadrophenia(Jawbone, 2011), this period in the band’s history was equally rife with turmoil and conflict. Guitarist Pete Townsend confronted failure in the form of the band’s aborted multimedia rock opera Lifehouse, which collapsed in a very public fashion in 1971. Two years later, the band broke ties with its longtime creative partner, producer and former manager Kit Lambert over missing publishing royalties. Finally, shows on the Who’s 1973 Quadrophenia tour were rife with jarring technical difficulties as the band attempted to replicate the album’s dense soundscapes in a live setting. Thanks to his exhaustive research efforts and sparking prose, Unterberger gives the reader a first-hand look into the inner workings of this greatest of rock bands. This is the definitive book on the Who’s most important era and one of the best books ever written on these rock legends. I give it my highest recommendation. Richie Unterberger is an acclaimed author and music historian, renowned for his meticulous research. A regular contributor to the All Music website, Mojo, Record Collector and many other publications, he has also written dozens of liner notes for CD reissues of classic 60s and 70s albums. His previous books include Unknown Legends of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Eight Miles High and Turn! Turn! Turn! He can be contacted through his website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

After the huge success of Elvis Presley there was a moment when it looked as if rock ‘n’ roll might, indeed, be nothing more than a fad. Its successor in the world of popular music would be folk music, and its undisputed leader was the Kingston Trio. In Greenback Dollar: The Incredible Rise of the Kingston Trio (The Scarecrow Press, 2013) William J. Bush details the history of this landscape altering band. In it, Bush details the biographies of, first, the original three members of the band – Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane, and Dave Guard – and their meteoric rise to fame from 1958 through 1961. He then tells of the falling out and eventual replacement of Guard with John Stewart and the continued artistic and commercial success of the band through the sixties. Along the way, Bush (a friend of all the members of these two incarnations of the band) describes the important places and events that led to the massive popularity that followed the Trio. So rock music never did fade away, but the influence of folk, thanks in large part to the Kingston Trio, became an integral part of popular music for decades to come. William J. Bush is a music journalist whose articles have appeared in a number of music magazines including Acoustic Guitar, Frets, Pennsylvania Heritage, The Guitar Player Handbook, and Artists of American Folk Music. Additionally, he has written for EMI/Capital Records, Folk Era Records, Bear Family Records, and Shout! Factory. He also appears in the 2006 documentary “The Kington Trio: Wherever We May Go.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

“The public don’t understand jazz music as we musicians do. A diminished seventh don’t mean a thing to them, but they go for high notes. After all, the public is paying. If musicians depended on musicians at the box office they would starve to death.”–Louis Armstrong Brian Harker’s Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (Oxford University Press, 2011) is an artful jambalaya of rigorous musical analysis, thoughtful cultural contexts, and some provocative informed speculation as to how Armstrong absorbed, innovated, and consolidated the music we call jazz. Harker focuses his analysis and discussion on seven of Louis Armstrong’s “Hot Five” recordings, made during the period between 1925 and 1928. Harker’s recording-as-“snap-shot” approach illuminates how Armstrong used novelty, musical narrative, rhythmic variation, harmonic changes, “sweet” and “hot” elements,  and technical virtuosity in his vast recording repertoire. Harker also details how Armstrong relentlessly wedded his drive for self-improvement and creative expression to commercial realities, giving the reader fascinating anecdotes and back stories about this extraordinary African-American’s journey for personal and musical acceptance. Highlights of Harker’s song -by-song analysis include Armstrong’s “novelty” imitation of a clarinet’s cascading arpeggios in “Cornet Chop Suey,” his “telling a story” in “Big Butter and Egg Man,” his negotiation of harmonic changes in “Potato Head Blues,” his crowd-thrilling high note playing in “SOL Blues” and “Gully Low Blues,” his “sweet jazz” elements in “Savoy Blues” and his brilliant amalgam of all the afore-mentioned jazz elements in his masterpiece recording, “West End Blues.” Brian Harker, a Professor of Music at Brigham Young University and former professional trumpet player himself, has spent a good part of his life studying Louis Armstrong. And, he is quite interesting and provocative when he is a speculative detective. Some examples include how he shares the theory that some of Armstrong’s dynamic rhythmic experimentation was inspired by Armstrong’s association with the dance team of Brown and McGraw, or how Armstrong’s sustained high C virtuosity was influenced by his admiration for opera superstar Enrico Caruso as well as his competitive rivalry with trumpeter Reuben Reeves – or how Armstrong’s incorporating elements of “sweet music” (in Savoy Blues) may have been inspired by Armstrong’s own predilection for Guy Lombardo’s sweet jazz as a preferred musical background during his own romantic trysts.  This gives feel and flesh to the book and complements Harker’s studied analyses of Armstrong’s solo transcriptions. Louis Armstrong drew from everything and everyone around him. He constantly tried to improve himself musically and personally and yet, at the same time, resented the “putting on of airs,” all the while negotiating the politics of race and the brutal realities of the music and entertainment world. Harker’s thoughtful cultural introspections gives the reader a greater appreciation for what Armstrong himself had to endure and transcend during the Hot Five recording period of his career. According to Harker, Louis was most proud of his “color barrier” advances in radio and film and saw his Hot Five recordings as simply another pay... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Michael J. Kramer, author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), spoke with Ray Haberski about the way rock music became a venue, a medium, and a culture through which diverse groups of people–from the hippies in Berkeley, California... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

After spending millions to steal superstar Brooklyn-based rappers the Beastie Boys away from Def Jam Records in 1988, Capitol Records had high hopes for the act’s follow up effort. And why not? License to Ill (1986) had sold over five million copies while topping the Billboard charts. MTV had fallen in love with the trio and played their videos around the clock. By all accounts their next LP would be another MTV-ready commercial monster. But as Dan LeRoy recounts in his eminently entertaining and essential Paul’s Boutique(Continuum, 2009), the Beastie Boys had a different agenda. They took Capitol’s money and relocated to Los Angeles to party, write and record the new LP. Rather than spend their advance on expensive recording studios, they laid down most of the tracks in the living room of one of their collaborators. While at work, the Beasties — and their producers the Dust Brothers — drew on an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music as they selected the hundreds of samples of other artists’ recordings that they would use (in a legally dubious manner) on their new album. Released with much fanfare in the summer of 1989, Paul’s Boutique would kick off one of the more inexplicable album cycles in pop music history. LeRoy notes that the album lacked a true single and likewise, the Beasties chose not to tour behind it. The final result was an LP that went over the heads of most Beastie Boys fans and dropped from the charts within months of its release. As Le Roy demonstrates, however, Paul’s Boutique has come to be recognized as a revolutionary album that presaged the ways in which pop music is created and consumed today. Dan LeRoy is Director of Literary Arts at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School in Midland, PA. He has written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and many other publications. He is the co-author, with Michael Lipton, of Twenty Years of Mountain Stage, a history of the NPR musical variety show, and The Greatest Music Never Sold: Secrets of Legendary Live Albums David Bowie, Seal, Beastie Boys, Beck, Chicago, Mick Jagger & More! He lives near Pittsburgh with his wife and three children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music