Music reviews and criticism Books

Book SynopsisPresents a new perspective on the aesthetic aspects of liberalism through examinations of music and ideas about music, including listening practices, performance contexts and modes of embodiment across elite and amateur spheres. This book will nuance current understanding, and will appeal to scholars of both Victorian literature and music.Trade Review'This book is a most welcome contribution to the renewed interest in liberalism and music culture. It reveals that Victorian liberal values were shaped by aesthetic debates in which the acts of performing and listening to music played an important role. The essays offer an absorbing illustration of the various tensions between music as recreation and music as a means of control, examining the role of human agency and the endeavour to experience life as an individual liberal subject.' Derek B. Scott, University of LeedsTable of Contents1. Aesthetic liberalism Sarah Collins; Part I. Cultivation and/as Control: 2. Musical discipline and Victorian liberal reform Erin Johnson-Williams; 3. 'Brightening the lives of the people on Sunday': the National Sunday League and liberal attitudes towards concert promotion in Victorian Britain Simon McVeigh; 4. Music and mass education: cultivation or control? Rosemary Golding; Part II. Dissent, Individualism and Agency: 5. A musical presence among liberal thinkers: Eliza Flower and her circle, 1832–1845 Kate Bowan; 6. 'That more liberal mode of life': Rosa Newmarch, aestheticism, and queer listening in Victorian and Edwardian Britain Phillip Ross Bullock; Part III. Character and Emotion: 7. Style, character and revelation in Parry's Fourth Symphony Matthew Riley; 8. The Parrys and Prometheus Unbound: actualizing liberalism Phyllis Weliver; 9. Liberalism and Victorian musical sympathy Bennett Zon; 10. Music and character in the Victorian reception of Wagner: conducting the Philharmonic ca. 1855 Katherine Fry; 11. Afterword: liberalism in the round Peter Mandler.

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Book SynopsisGoing beyond merely explaining how the artists in these genres achieved their peculiar effects, he presents challenging new analyses of telling craft details which help students and scholars come to know more fully this bold age of aesthetic extremism.Trade ReviewScholarly and impressive... Such a thorough consideration of the interconnectedness of modernism illuminates how truly revolutionary this artistic movement was. ChoiceTable of ContentsList of IllustrationsIntroduction. Modernist TransvaluationI. Two Originary Texts1. Baudelaire and Symbolism2. Nietzsche and the DionysiacII. Isms3. Impressionism4. Expressionism5. Futurism6. Cubism7. Abstractionism8. Primitivism9. Imagism10. Neoclassicism11. Dadaism12. Surrealism13. Aestheticism14. Corporealism15. Totalizing Art16. Communism, Fascism, and Later ModernismEpilogue. The End of Modernism?Notes

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Book SynopsisThe recording studio, she argues, is at the center of musical culture in the twentieth century.Trade Review[ Chasing Sound] does more than traverse the technology of sound recordings: it provides a history on the evolution of sound recording, quality, and even popular music movements, and is a 'must' for any music history or music technology library. Midwest Book Review Chasing Sound is a welcome addition to a growing literature illuminating the history of sound recording... What makes the book unique are the author's interviews with dozens of engineers and producers. The voices of those who worked in the studios day in and day out enliven the rest of the book's narrative with a perspective born of practical experience. Journal of American History This 292-page hardbound book goes back to Edison's invention, moves through the electrical recording era and brings us to the end of the analog recording studio. -- Steve Ramm Anything Phonographic Schmidt Horning's excellent dissertation... provides us with valuable and well-founded information of the recording music business from its early beginnings until the rock music era. This book can be recommended to all not only interested in the technological development of sound recording, but also in the sociological change of the recording profession from the 1890s to the late 1960s. -- Peter Tschmuck Music Business Research Chasing Sound represents an indispensable and critical approach for historians of sound, one that is unafraid of reconfiguring the central players in a narrative as big as the history of recorded music. -- Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo Sounding Out! Schmidt Horning provides an insightful look into the conception and maturation of the recording industry and ways the continuing quest for improved sonic fidelity impacts popular music and Western culture. Susan Schmidt Horning's recent book, however, is a compelling exploration of a world largely hidden from view that has been shaped by scientists and recording engineers whom she calls tinkerers. More importantly, Chasing Sound is a vital contribution to sound studies that traces the shift from the aesthetic of live performance to the recorded object that has dominated the popular imagination for nearly a century... Moreover, Schmidt Horning attends to intricate detail but includes so much archival research that recordists, scientists, musicians, and others are humanized players in an important tale of American culture. Schmidt Horning cleverly unfolds this unique history while underscoring the significant accomplishments that they wrought. -- Kathryn Metz ARSC Journal (Association for Recorded Sound Collections) An engaging and colorful narrative about the evolution of a profession. -- Andre Millard American Historical Review This book is rich in detail and analysis, resulting from years devoted to researching into archives and collecting interviews (as well as Schmidt Horning's knowledge of the trade as a musician herself). -- Simone Turchetti British Journal for the History of Science Meticulously researched... -- Steve Savage Journal on the Art of Record Production Chasing Sound is a masterful accomplishment. It offers a crucial addition to the burgeoning scholarship on sound and recording and holds significant value for students and scholars of labor, technology, and popular culture in the twentieth-century United States. With a sharp eye and keen ear, Susan Schmidt Horning gives us that rarest of treasures: a book that succeeds equally well as sophisticated analysis and engrossing narrative. It is highly recommended. -- Charles L. Hughes History: Reviews of New Books Schmidt Horning provides a diligent and thoughtful contribution to the history of the recording industry... A valuable addition to the body of scholarship on the recording industry... Marvel at the intricacy of the art, the miracle that we can preserve and retrieve sounds from decades ago, and appreciate the individuals who worked so thanklessly for the love of the music. The Journal of Popular Culture A well-written, fascinating account of the multiple shifts and changes in studio recording--from the art of capturing a live performance to the art of engineering an illusion and the concomitant reversal of the historical relationship between live and recorded music. Isis Recording technology is at the heart of Chasing Sound, Horning has made it user-friendly for those without extensive technical backgrounds, and she draws attention to matters easily overlooked by specialists... A welcoming introduction to the history of musical recording. Technology and Culture Schmidt has gone above and beyond the call of duty. By letting more than 80 deffent types of stinging incets jab him, he has developed a "pain index" for each sting... His descriptions of the pain are wry and eloquent. ScienceTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Capturing Sound in the Acoustic Era2. The Studio Electrifies3. A Passion for Sound4. When High Fidelity Was New5. Control Men in Technological Transition6. The Search for the Sound7. Channeling SoundConclusionNotesEssay on SourcesIndex

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Trade ReviewSpecialists in English, media, film and television have also been invited to take part in this conversation, which feels authentic to the spirit of Eno ... The book mulls over those necessary questions that anyone thinking about Eno must eventually face. * The Wire *Contributions include meticulous descriptions of compositions; a chapter about Eno’s ambient oeuvre (which quirkily compares him to Tolkien at great length) ... Albiez contributes to the best piece on precursors to Eno’s use of the studio to create new sounds. ... Intellectually stimulating. * Record Collector *The collection’s standouts are Martin James’ pithy, pacy account of Eno’s years in New York (1978-84) … and Hillegonda Rietveld’s coolly attentive reading of the soundtrack to the film The Lovely Bones, in which his “oblique music seems like a ghostly call from the ‘in-between’”. * Times Higher Education *For quite some time, Brian Eno has been jokingly referred to as the ‘professor of pop’. It’s about time, then, that real academics caught up with a body of work that is as perplexing as it is complex. ... Essential reading for all academic listeners. * Times Higher Education ('What are you reading?') *This much needed book explores the many trajectories of Eno’s varied career, and it will engage and excite any music lover, regardless of your opinion of Eno’s work. It’s a richly rewarding collection that deftly explores and unpacks the work of one of popular music’s pioneering figures. ... Oblique Music does an outstanding job of critically capturing both the well-known and less familiar elements of Eno’s work ... [It] provides some thought-provoking material on broader issues such as collaboration, composition, creativity, experimentation, musicianship, technology and more, and as such will stimulate the interest of anyone engaged in music creation and production. This is a book that you will return to time and again — like Eno’s best work, its rewards make themselves most evident after repeated visits. * Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture *Meticulously written, rich in detail and factually argued ... Anyone who wants to know Eno from the beginning, to understand his experimental strategies in the studio or to study his eternal movement between pop music and free sound, will not be disappointed. * Groove (Bloomsbury translation) *[T]he essays or chapters in this anthology are thoughtful, thought-provoking, informed and interesting ... [and] they come at their subject from an appropriately wide-ranging and inter-disciplinary number of fields ... It’s a lively and varied collection, that leaves room for even more consideration of the elusive, enigmatic and influential Eno. * International Times *[A] series of essays by academics each focussing on an aspect of Eno's work and ideas. ... There's even a chapter about Devo. A fascinating [read]. * Electronic Sound *As producer, musician, theorist, facilitator and more, Brian Eno has left significant traces across popular culture since the 1970s and this wide-ranging volume skillfully brings to light both well-known and more obscure aspects of his work and legacy. * Alexei Monroe, Cultural theorist and author of Interrogation Machine: Laibach & NSK *Few figures in the history of modern music stand up to the kind of wide-ranging, detailed and careful treatment meted out in this brilliant collection. Eno’s expansive repertoire – from glam rock icon to avant-garde composer - constitutes the fertile grounds for what is a learned and lively intervention. Deigned to be a benchmark collection for anyone interested in process-oriented creativity and experimental musicianship, the collection shines a light on Eno’s dynamic craftsmanship. It fills a crucial gap in the field, bestowing on the reader a unique insight into Eno the polymath, singer, collaborator, composer, avant-gardiste, intellectual and self-defined “non-musician”. A richly-informed, lucidly written and rigorously compiled collection that provides new insights with every turn of the page. * Nick Prior, Senior Lecturer and Head of Sociology, University of Edinburgh, Scotland *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Brian Eno: A problem of organization - David Pattie and Sean Albiez PART ONE - Eno: Composer, musician and theorist 1 The Bogus Men: Eno, Ferry and Roxy Music - David Pattie 2 Brian Eno, non- musicianship and the experimental tradition - Cecilia Sun 3 Taking the studio by strategy- David Pattie 4 Between the avant- garde and the popular: The discursive economy of Brian Eno’s musical practices - Chris Atton 5 Yes, but is it music? Brian Eno and the definition of ambient music - Mark Edward Achtermann 6 The Lovely Bones: Music from beyond - Hillegonda C. Rietveld 7 The voice and/of Brian Eno - Sean Albiez PART TWO - The University of Eno: Production and collaborations 8 Before and after Eno: Situating ‘The Recording Studio as Compositional Tool’ - Sean Albiez and Ruth Dockwray 9 Control and surrender: Eno remixed – collaboration and Oblique Strategies - Kingsley Marshall and Rupert Loydell 10 Avant-gardism, ‘Africa’ and appropriation in My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - Elizabeth Ann Lindau 11 Eno and Devo - Jonathan Stewart 12 Another Green World? Eno, Ireland and U2 - Noel McLaughlin 13 Documenting no wave: Brian Eno as urban ethnographer - Martin James Select Discography

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Book SynopsisSelling Folk Music: An Illustrated History highlights commercial sources that reveal how folk music has been packaged and sold to a broad, shifting audience in the United States. Folk music has a varied and complex scope and lineage, including the blues, minstrel tunes, Victorian parlor songs, spirituals and gospel tunes, country and western songs, sea shanties, labor and political songs, calypsos, pop folk, folk-rock, ethnic, bluegrass, and more. The genre is of major importance in the broader spectrum of American music, and it is easy to understand why folk music has been marketed as America''s music. Selling Folk Music presents the public face of folk music in the United States via its commercial promotion and presentation throughout the twentieth century. Included are concert flyers; sheet music; book, songbook, magazine, and album covers; concert posters and flyers; and movie lobby cards and posters, all in their original colors. The 1964 hootenanny craze, for eTrade ReviewThe work will underline the importance of such sources and perhaps encourage their preservation.

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Book SynopsisFocuses on the white, female artists of the 1950s, a time that predated the chart-topping girl groups of the early 1960s. These popular performers, many of whom graduated out of the big bands of the 1940s, impacted popular music in a huge way.Trade ReviewAuthors have long neglected the fabulous females of the fifties, but Steve Bergsman makes up for that neglect with this fascinating, fact-filled book. All I Want Is Loving You fills a major gap in pop music history and Bergsman is the author who should fill it." - Peter Benjaminson, author of The Story of Motown, Mary Wells: The Tumultuous Life of Motown's First Superstar

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Book SynopsisHighlights the Black female artists of the 1950s, a time that predated the chart-topping girl groups of the early 1960s. Many of the singers of this era became wildly famous and respected, and even made it into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame. However, there were many others, who made one or two great records and then disappeared from the scene.Trade ReviewA singular look and fully researched account of the women singers who were trailblazers in the early 1950s as R&B evolved into rock ’n’ roll." - Aaron Cohen, author of Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power and Aretha Franklin's 'Amazing Grace'"An encyclopedic history that conveys important contributions of individual artists as well as the collective body of women singers." - Frank Matheis, contributing writer for Living Blues, publisher of thecountryblues.com, and coauthor of Sweet Bitter Blues: Washington, DC's Homemade Blues

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