Author: John Howland
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520300114
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
"Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has long thrived in American popular music. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses of media, orchestration, and arranging. He travels from symphonic jazz to the Great American Songbook; teenage symphonies of the Motown label and 1960s girl groups to the emerging "countrypolitan" sound of Nashville; the sunshine pop and baroque pop of the Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco; the hip-hop-with-orchestra events of Jay-Z and Kanye West to indie rock bands with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. The luxe aesthetic merges popular-music idioms with lush string orchestrations, big-band instrumentation, and symphonic instruments. This book attunes readers to hearing the discourses that gathered around the music and its associated images, and in turn examines pop's relations to aspirational consumer culture, spectacle, theatricality, glamour, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and "classy" lifestyles"--
Hearing Luxe Pop
Author: John Howland
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520300114
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
"Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has long thrived in American popular music. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses of media, orchestration, and arranging. He travels from symphonic jazz to the Great American Songbook; teenage symphonies of the Motown label and 1960s girl groups to the emerging "countrypolitan" sound of Nashville; the sunshine pop and baroque pop of the Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco; the hip-hop-with-orchestra events of Jay-Z and Kanye West to indie rock bands with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. The luxe aesthetic merges popular-music idioms with lush string orchestrations, big-band instrumentation, and symphonic instruments. This book attunes readers to hearing the discourses that gathered around the music and its associated images, and in turn examines pop's relations to aspirational consumer culture, spectacle, theatricality, glamour, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and "classy" lifestyles"--
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520300114
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
"Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has long thrived in American popular music. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses of media, orchestration, and arranging. He travels from symphonic jazz to the Great American Songbook; teenage symphonies of the Motown label and 1960s girl groups to the emerging "countrypolitan" sound of Nashville; the sunshine pop and baroque pop of the Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco; the hip-hop-with-orchestra events of Jay-Z and Kanye West to indie rock bands with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. The luxe aesthetic merges popular-music idioms with lush string orchestrations, big-band instrumentation, and symphonic instruments. This book attunes readers to hearing the discourses that gathered around the music and its associated images, and in turn examines pop's relations to aspirational consumer culture, spectacle, theatricality, glamour, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and "classy" lifestyles"--
Hearing Luxe Pop
Author: John Howland
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520300106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
"Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has long thrived in American popular music. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses of media, orchestration, and arranging. He travels from symphonic jazz to the Great American Songbook; teenage symphonies of the Motown label and 1960s girl groups to the emerging "countrypolitan" sound of Nashville; the sunshine pop and baroque pop of the Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco; the hip-hop-with-orchestra events of Jay-Z and Kanye West to indie rock bands with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. The luxe aesthetic merges popular-music idioms with lush string orchestrations, big-band instrumentation, and symphonic instruments. This book attunes readers to hearing the discourses that gathered around the music and its associated images, and in turn examines pop's relations to aspirational consumer culture, spectacle, theatricality, glamour, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and "classy" lifestyles"--
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520300106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
"Hearing Luxe Pop explores a deluxe-production aesthetic that has long thrived in American popular music. John Howland presents an alternative music history that centers on shifts in timbre and sound through innovative uses of media, orchestration, and arranging. He travels from symphonic jazz to the Great American Songbook; teenage symphonies of the Motown label and 1960s girl groups to the emerging "countrypolitan" sound of Nashville; the sunshine pop and baroque pop of the Beach Boys to the blending of soul and funk into 1970s disco; the hip-hop-with-orchestra events of Jay-Z and Kanye West to indie rock bands with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. The luxe aesthetic merges popular-music idioms with lush string orchestrations, big-band instrumentation, and symphonic instruments. This book attunes readers to hearing the discourses that gathered around the music and its associated images, and in turn examines pop's relations to aspirational consumer culture, spectacle, theatricality, glamour, sophistication, cosmopolitanism, and "classy" lifestyles"--
The Relentless Pursuit of Tone
Author: Robert Fink
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199985251
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 409
Book Description
The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music assembles a broad spectrum of contemporary perspectives on how "sound" functions in an equally wide array of popular music. Ranging from the twang of country banjoes and the sheen of hip-hop strings to the crunch of amplified guitars and the thump of subwoofers on the dance floor, this volume bridges the gap between timbre, our name for the purely acoustic characteristics of sound waves, and tone, an emergent musical construct that straddles the borderline between the perceptual and the political. Essays engage with the entire history of popular music as recorded sound, from the 1930s to the present day, under four large categories. "Genre" asks how sonic signatures define musical identities and publics; "Voice" considers the most naturalized musical instrument, the human voice, as racial and gendered signifier, as property or likeness, and as raw material for algorithmic perfection through software; "Instrument" tells stories of the way some iconic pop music machines-guitars, strings, synthesizers-got (or lost) their distinctive sounds; "Production" then puts it all together, asking structural questions about what happens in a recording studio, what is produced (sonic cartoons? rockist authenticity? empty space?) and what it all might mean.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199985251
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 409
Book Description
The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music assembles a broad spectrum of contemporary perspectives on how "sound" functions in an equally wide array of popular music. Ranging from the twang of country banjoes and the sheen of hip-hop strings to the crunch of amplified guitars and the thump of subwoofers on the dance floor, this volume bridges the gap between timbre, our name for the purely acoustic characteristics of sound waves, and tone, an emergent musical construct that straddles the borderline between the perceptual and the political. Essays engage with the entire history of popular music as recorded sound, from the 1930s to the present day, under four large categories. "Genre" asks how sonic signatures define musical identities and publics; "Voice" considers the most naturalized musical instrument, the human voice, as racial and gendered signifier, as property or likeness, and as raw material for algorithmic perfection through software; "Instrument" tells stories of the way some iconic pop music machines-guitars, strings, synthesizers-got (or lost) their distinctive sounds; "Production" then puts it all together, asking structural questions about what happens in a recording studio, what is produced (sonic cartoons? rockist authenticity? empty space?) and what it all might mean.
Analyzing Recorded Music
Author: William Moylan
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000819663
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 491
Book Description
Analyzing Recorded Music: Collected Perspectives on Popular Music Tracks is a collection of essays dedicated to the study of recorded popular music, with the aim of exploring "how the record shapes the song" (Moylan, Recording Analysis, 2020) from a variety of perspectives. Introduced with a Foreword by Paul Théberge, the distinguished editorial team has brought together a group of reputable international contributors to write about a rich collection of recordings. Examining a diverse set of songs from a range of genres and points in history (spanning the years 1936–2020), the authors herein illuminate unique attributes of the selected tracks and reveal how the recording develops the expressive content of song performance. Analyzing Recorded Music will interest all those who study popular music, cultural studies, and the musicology of record production, as well as popular music listeners.
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000819663
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 491
Book Description
Analyzing Recorded Music: Collected Perspectives on Popular Music Tracks is a collection of essays dedicated to the study of recorded popular music, with the aim of exploring "how the record shapes the song" (Moylan, Recording Analysis, 2020) from a variety of perspectives. Introduced with a Foreword by Paul Théberge, the distinguished editorial team has brought together a group of reputable international contributors to write about a rich collection of recordings. Examining a diverse set of songs from a range of genres and points in history (spanning the years 1936–2020), the authors herein illuminate unique attributes of the selected tracks and reveal how the recording develops the expressive content of song performance. Analyzing Recorded Music will interest all those who study popular music, cultural studies, and the musicology of record production, as well as popular music listeners.
Beyond the Bandstand
Author: W. Anthony Sheppard
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025204732X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
The most successful bandleader of the 1920s, Paul Whiteman was an entertainment icon who played a major role in the mainstreaming of jazz. Whiteman and his band premiered Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Duke Ellington acknowledged his achievements. His astonishing ear for talent vaulted a who’s who of artists toward prominence. But Whiteman’s oversized presence eclipsed Black jazz musicians while his middlebrow music prompted later generations to jettison him from jazz history. W. Anthony Sheppard’s collection of essays confronts the racial implications of Whiteman’s career. The contributors explore Whiteman’s broad impact on popular culture, tracking his work and influence in American marketing, animated films, the Black press, Hollywood, and the music publication industry, and following him behind the scenes with arrangers, into grand concert halls, across the Atlantic, into the courtroom, and on television. Multifaceted and cutting-edge, Beyond the Bandstand explores the racial politics and artistic questions surrounding a controversial figure in popular music. Contributors: Ryan Raul Bañagale, Stephanie Doktor, John Howland, Katherine M. Leo, Sarah Caissie Provost, W. Anthony Sheppard, Catherine Tackley, Elijah Wald, and Christi Jay Wells
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025204732X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
The most successful bandleader of the 1920s, Paul Whiteman was an entertainment icon who played a major role in the mainstreaming of jazz. Whiteman and his band premiered Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Duke Ellington acknowledged his achievements. His astonishing ear for talent vaulted a who’s who of artists toward prominence. But Whiteman’s oversized presence eclipsed Black jazz musicians while his middlebrow music prompted later generations to jettison him from jazz history. W. Anthony Sheppard’s collection of essays confronts the racial implications of Whiteman’s career. The contributors explore Whiteman’s broad impact on popular culture, tracking his work and influence in American marketing, animated films, the Black press, Hollywood, and the music publication industry, and following him behind the scenes with arrangers, into grand concert halls, across the Atlantic, into the courtroom, and on television. Multifaceted and cutting-edge, Beyond the Bandstand explores the racial politics and artistic questions surrounding a controversial figure in popular music. Contributors: Ryan Raul Bañagale, Stephanie Doktor, John Howland, Katherine M. Leo, Sarah Caissie Provost, W. Anthony Sheppard, Catherine Tackley, Elijah Wald, and Christi Jay Wells
The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow
Author: Kate Guthrie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197523935
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 633
Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow takes a fresh look at the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Offering an alternative to the traditional focus on either highbrow modernism on the one hand or lowbrow popular music on the other, its novel view centers on the wealth of previously overlooked products and practices that bridged the space between these cultural extremes. While seminal attempts to recover middlebrow culture came from literary critics and historians, middlebrow studies is now a burgeoning field within musicology. As the first essay collection on this topic, this handbook has two aims: first, it seeks to explore the middlebrow as a historical phenomenon, excavating the kinds of critical writings, marketing practices, and compositional styles with which it was associated. By reanimating a range of musical practices and products--from symphonic concerts to Broadway musicals, opera criticism to rock journalism, and modern jazz to pop-rock--the contributors investigate how artists, critics, and audiences breached the divide from both above and below. In the process, the handbook chapters push the boundaries of middlebrow studies and demonstrate the category's relevance outside of the mid-twentieth-century Anglophone world by delving into the nineteenth century, interrogating the present day, and looking to Germany, Russia, and beyond. The handbook's second aim is to complicate the disciplinary divisions that have flowed from the entrenched oppositions between high and low genres. Breaking new ground by bringing together scholars of classical and popular music, these chapters trace common middlebrow themes across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Across this broad vista, contributors account for the kinds of syntheses, overlaps, and juxtapositions that made the cultural middle such a richly textured and endlessly contested terrain.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197523935
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 633
Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow takes a fresh look at the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Offering an alternative to the traditional focus on either highbrow modernism on the one hand or lowbrow popular music on the other, its novel view centers on the wealth of previously overlooked products and practices that bridged the space between these cultural extremes. While seminal attempts to recover middlebrow culture came from literary critics and historians, middlebrow studies is now a burgeoning field within musicology. As the first essay collection on this topic, this handbook has two aims: first, it seeks to explore the middlebrow as a historical phenomenon, excavating the kinds of critical writings, marketing practices, and compositional styles with which it was associated. By reanimating a range of musical practices and products--from symphonic concerts to Broadway musicals, opera criticism to rock journalism, and modern jazz to pop-rock--the contributors investigate how artists, critics, and audiences breached the divide from both above and below. In the process, the handbook chapters push the boundaries of middlebrow studies and demonstrate the category's relevance outside of the mid-twentieth-century Anglophone world by delving into the nineteenth century, interrogating the present day, and looking to Germany, Russia, and beyond. The handbook's second aim is to complicate the disciplinary divisions that have flowed from the entrenched oppositions between high and low genres. Breaking new ground by bringing together scholars of classical and popular music, these chapters trace common middlebrow themes across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Across this broad vista, contributors account for the kinds of syntheses, overlaps, and juxtapositions that made the cultural middle such a richly textured and endlessly contested terrain.
Global Popular Music
Author: Clarence Bernard Henry
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040151922
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 985
Book Description
Global Popular Music: A Research and Information Guide offers an essential annotated bibliography of scholarship on popular music around the world in a two-volume set. Featuring a broad range of subjects, people, cultures, and geographic areas, and spanning musical genres such as traditional, folk, jazz, rock, reggae, samba, rai, punk, hip-hop, and many more, this guide highlights different approaches and discussions within global popular music research. This research guide is comprehensive in scope, providing a vital resource for scholars and students approaching the vast amount of publications on popular music studies and popular music traditions around the world. Thorough cross-referencing and robust indexes of genres, places, names, and subjects make the guide easy to use. Volume 2, Transnational Discourses of Global Popular Music Studies, covers the geographical areas of North America: United States and Canada; Central America, Caribbean, and South America/Latin America; Europe; Africa and Middle East; Asia; and areas of Oceania: Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and Pacific Islands. It provides over twenty-four hundred annotated bibliographic entries covering discourses of extensive research that extend beyond the borders of the United States and includes annotated entries to books, book series, book chapters, edited volumes, special documentaries and programming, scholarly journal essays, and other resources that focus on the creative and artistic flows of global popular music.
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040151922
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 985
Book Description
Global Popular Music: A Research and Information Guide offers an essential annotated bibliography of scholarship on popular music around the world in a two-volume set. Featuring a broad range of subjects, people, cultures, and geographic areas, and spanning musical genres such as traditional, folk, jazz, rock, reggae, samba, rai, punk, hip-hop, and many more, this guide highlights different approaches and discussions within global popular music research. This research guide is comprehensive in scope, providing a vital resource for scholars and students approaching the vast amount of publications on popular music studies and popular music traditions around the world. Thorough cross-referencing and robust indexes of genres, places, names, and subjects make the guide easy to use. Volume 2, Transnational Discourses of Global Popular Music Studies, covers the geographical areas of North America: United States and Canada; Central America, Caribbean, and South America/Latin America; Europe; Africa and Middle East; Asia; and areas of Oceania: Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and Pacific Islands. It provides over twenty-four hundred annotated bibliographic entries covering discourses of extensive research that extend beyond the borders of the United States and includes annotated entries to books, book series, book chapters, edited volumes, special documentaries and programming, scholarly journal essays, and other resources that focus on the creative and artistic flows of global popular music.
Duke Ellington Studies
Author: John Howland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521764041
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 333
Book Description
This book surveys the breadth, richness, and meaning of Duke Ellington's celebrated career, examining his impact on jazz music and its surrounding culture.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521764041
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 333
Book Description
This book surveys the breadth, richness, and meaning of Duke Ellington's celebrated career, examining his impact on jazz music and its surrounding culture.
Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The Jazz Singer Who Transformed American Song
Author: Judith Tick
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393242021
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 439
Book Description
An NPR 2023 "Books We Love" Pick • A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 A landmark biography that reclaims Ella Fitzgerald as a major American artist and modernist innovator. Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996) possessed one of the twentieth century’s most astonishing voices. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald’s death, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer’s difficult childhood in Yonkers, New York, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls’ reformatory school—where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer. Rarely seen profiles from the Black press offer precious glimpses of Fitzgerald’s tense experiences of racial discrimination and her struggles with constricting models of Black and white femininity at midcentury. Tick’s compelling narrative depicts Fitzgerald’s complicated career in fresh and original detail, upending the traditional view that segregates vocal jazz from the genre’s mainstream. As she navigated the shifting tides between jazz and pop, she used her originality to pioneer modernist vocal jazz. Interpreting long-lost setlists, reviews from both white and Black newspapers, and newly released footage and recordings, the book explores how Ella’s transcendence as an improvisor produced onstage performances every bit as significant as her historic recorded oeuvre. From the singer’s first performance at the Apollo Theatre’s famous “Amateur Night” to the Savoy Ballroom, where Fitzgerald broke through with Chick Webb’s big band in the 1930s, Tick evokes the jazz world in riveting detail. She describes how Ella helped shape the bebop movement in the 1940s, as she joined Dizzy Gillespie and her then-husband, Ray Brown, in the world-touring Jazz at the Philharmonic, one of the first moments of high-culture acceptance for the disreputable art form. Breaking ground as a female bandleader, Fitzgerald refuted expectations of musical Blackness, deftly balancing artistic ambition and market expectations. Her legendary exploration of the Great American Songbook in the 1950s fused a Black vocal aesthetic and jazz improvisation to revolutionize the popular repertoire. This hybridity often confounded critics, yet throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ella reached audiences around the world, electrifying concert halls, and sold millions of records. A masterful biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald describes a powerful woman who set a standard for American excellence nearly unmatched in the twentieth century.
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393242021
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 439
Book Description
An NPR 2023 "Books We Love" Pick • A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2023 A landmark biography that reclaims Ella Fitzgerald as a major American artist and modernist innovator. Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996) possessed one of the twentieth century’s most astonishing voices. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald’s death, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist. Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer’s difficult childhood in Yonkers, New York, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls’ reformatory school—where she sang in its renowned choir and dreamed of being a dancer. Rarely seen profiles from the Black press offer precious glimpses of Fitzgerald’s tense experiences of racial discrimination and her struggles with constricting models of Black and white femininity at midcentury. Tick’s compelling narrative depicts Fitzgerald’s complicated career in fresh and original detail, upending the traditional view that segregates vocal jazz from the genre’s mainstream. As she navigated the shifting tides between jazz and pop, she used her originality to pioneer modernist vocal jazz. Interpreting long-lost setlists, reviews from both white and Black newspapers, and newly released footage and recordings, the book explores how Ella’s transcendence as an improvisor produced onstage performances every bit as significant as her historic recorded oeuvre. From the singer’s first performance at the Apollo Theatre’s famous “Amateur Night” to the Savoy Ballroom, where Fitzgerald broke through with Chick Webb’s big band in the 1930s, Tick evokes the jazz world in riveting detail. She describes how Ella helped shape the bebop movement in the 1940s, as she joined Dizzy Gillespie and her then-husband, Ray Brown, in the world-touring Jazz at the Philharmonic, one of the first moments of high-culture acceptance for the disreputable art form. Breaking ground as a female bandleader, Fitzgerald refuted expectations of musical Blackness, deftly balancing artistic ambition and market expectations. Her legendary exploration of the Great American Songbook in the 1950s fused a Black vocal aesthetic and jazz improvisation to revolutionize the popular repertoire. This hybridity often confounded critics, yet throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Ella reached audiences around the world, electrifying concert halls, and sold millions of records. A masterful biography, Becoming Ella Fitzgerald describes a powerful woman who set a standard for American excellence nearly unmatched in the twentieth century.
Queer Arrangements
Author: Lisa Barg
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819500658
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
The legacy of Black queer composer, arranger, and pianist Billy Strayhorn (1915–1967) hovers at the edge of canonical jazz narratives. Queer Arrangements explores the ways in which Strayhorn's identity as an openly gay Black jazz musician shaped his career, including the creative roles he could assume and the dynamics between himself and his collaborators, most famously Duke Ellington, but also iconic singers such as Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald. This new portrait of Strayhorn combines critical, historically-situated close readings of selected recordings, scores, and performances with biography and cultural theory to pursue alternative interpretive jazz possibilities, Black queer historical routes, and sounds. By looking at jazz history through the instrument(s) of Strayhorn's queer arrangements, this book sheds new light on his music and on jazz collaboration at midcentury.
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819500658
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
The legacy of Black queer composer, arranger, and pianist Billy Strayhorn (1915–1967) hovers at the edge of canonical jazz narratives. Queer Arrangements explores the ways in which Strayhorn's identity as an openly gay Black jazz musician shaped his career, including the creative roles he could assume and the dynamics between himself and his collaborators, most famously Duke Ellington, but also iconic singers such as Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald. This new portrait of Strayhorn combines critical, historically-situated close readings of selected recordings, scores, and performances with biography and cultural theory to pursue alternative interpretive jazz possibilities, Black queer historical routes, and sounds. By looking at jazz history through the instrument(s) of Strayhorn's queer arrangements, this book sheds new light on his music and on jazz collaboration at midcentury.