Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: Music

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet about music

Posted on January 2, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on music A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Blacksound: making race and popular music in the United States
Morrison, Matthew D. California, 2024

In this original monograph, Morrison (NYU) argues that today’s popular music industry was built on the exploitation of slave song and blackface minstrelsy, resulting in an amalgamation of Black and other racialized (including white) musics that he theorizes as “Blacksound.” Over five chapters, Morrison uses Blacksound to analyze sonic identity, performance, and property within a cultural and legal system under white control. For example, William Henry Lane (”Master Juba”), a Black antebellum minstrel whose virtuosic dancing defied description, was an early Black performer robbed of his “intellectual performance property,” since incipient US copyright law protected only notated music (and later, recordings). Through blackface, whites typically denigrated and stereotyped Black performers by their (unwritten) movements and improvisations, only to embody those same performative acts for their own profit. Morrison also devotes chapters to Stephen Foster’s “Americana” and the under-studied publishing house M. Witmark & Sons (“the house that blackface built”). The final chapter, on the evolution of ragtime from a local Black music to the aesthetic basis of mainstream popular music, traces how Tin Pan Alley commodified Blacksound, allowing non-Black performers to profit without the burden of Black skin. View on Amazon

2. Voice machines: the castrato, the cat piano, and other strange sounds
Gordon, Bonnie. Chicago, 2023

Gordon (Univ. of Virginia) offers a unique perspective on castrati, the vocal acrobats who enhanced the sensory delight of baroque opera audiences. Following surgery and extensive vocal training, castrati retained the voice boxes of boys but that apparatus was supported by large chests, heads, and limbs. Particularly focusing on the relationship of music and technology, Gordon moves back and forth through history, beginning with Byzantine eunuchs and ending with a 2021 visit to the garden of author Vernon Lee, who wrote fictional stories about castrati. The modern separation between living creatures and mechanical creations did not exist for 17th-century scientists such as Galileo and Francis Bacon. Numerous pre-electric technologies are discussed, including those that, like the enhanced castrato voice, involve the manipulation of nature—the (imaginary) cat piano, hydraulic organs, the pig organ, and others. Readers encounter several famous Italian castrati (and their vocal magic), among them Pasqualini, Paoluccio, Senesino, Vittori, Ferri, and Alessandro Moreschi, the only castrato who was ever recorded. These were voices of great power, exceptional flexibility, and brilliant tone. View on Amazon

3. At the vanguard of vinyl: a cultural history of the long-playing record in jazz
Mueller, Darren. Duke, 2024

In 1948, the long-playing record (LP) was introduced commercially. It would soon supplant the 78rpm record, which had been the standard format for music recordings for decades. The 78rpm only had room for about three minutes of music per side, whereas the LP had room for much longer passages. This was significant for many genres of music. Mueller (Eastman School of Music, Univ. of Rochester) chronicles his exhaustive investigation of how the LP influenced the history of jazz and the nature of jazz records. A welcome by-product is his comprehensive discography of jazz LPs, particularly from the 1950s. A major change brought about by the LP was that recordings of lengthy jazz improvisations could be provided in entirety. Black men performers were working in the studio for white men record company executives, exposing various aspects of the racism that prevailed. Furthermore, women artists were mostly excluded. Mueller explores the role of particular record companies and artists, such as Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, in the LP revolution. The breadth and depth of his research is exemplary. View on Amazon

4. Bach’s architecture of gratitude: on the genius of the Mass in B Minor Crooks, James. McGill-Queen’s, 2024

J. S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor has long been considered a monument of European music, and its complicated creation and assembly have inspired a veritable library of scholarship. Within that library, the present volume seems unique. Crooks (Bishops Univ., Canada), surely not a philosopher only but a philosopher-musician, surveys the Mass through various lenses, colored mostly by aesthetic theories of significant philosophers. These views support the author’s thesis that the whole composition is a manifestation of gratitude in its myriad senses. To this end, the musical structure recapitulates the physical structure of a cathedral (to oversimplify). Crooks has set his narrative in the first person, and he does not shy from revealing his enormous regard for Bach’s work. That the book is so personal makes it approachable by musicians who might be daunted by any whiff of historical aesthetics; consult John Butt’s Bach: Mass in B Minor (1991) for a musicological overview. The book should be enlightening to anyone performing the Mass or any of Bach’s liturgical music, as well as to anyone seeking a different take on Bach. View on Amazon.

5. From perception to pleasure: the neuroscience of music and why we love it Zatorre, Robert J. Oxford, 2023

This volume may appear slim, but it embodies an extraordinary achievement. Zatorre (McGill Univ., Canada) is a neuroscientist who, for most of his career, has studied how the brain processes music and other auditory information. He has written scores of scientific articles on music and the brain and many chapters on how the brain processes music. His studies are deeply informative and often incredibly clever. He is a researcher with a capacious knowledge of literature and music. While remaining steadfastly true to the ideals of science, he writes with a poet’s gift for turning the results of complex empirical studies of the brain into graceful prose accessible to scientists and laypeople alike. The book is a brilliant and illuminating journey through the various layers of music processing in the brain from the first milliseconds of perception to the endless joys of musical pleasure. Moving effortlessly among the various levels of organization and analysis of the brain/mind, from description to mechanisms, Zatorre lays out the empirical evidence for particular aspects of how the brain processes music and uses that evidence to construct brilliant deductions and suggestions for future research. View on Amazon.

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