Anne Bogart's The Art of Resonance (Methuen Drama, 2021) locates the essence of theatre in the experience of resonant vibration among performers and between performers and audience members. The point of art, Bogart argues, is not to express oneself, but rather to create the conditions for "re-sounding," a process that requires both fully engaged performers and a fully engaged audience. Bogart draws on examples from music to physics to neuroscience in a book of essays that is animated by the same...
Oct 06, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 82
Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora (University of Michigan Press, 2021) explores the legacy of the Great Catastrophe—the death and expulsion from Turkey of 1.5 million Greek Christians following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922—through the music and dance practices of Greek refugees and their descendants over the last one hundred years. The book draws extensively on original ethnographic research conducted in Greece (on the island of Lesvos in particul...
Oct 04, 2021•58 min•Ep. 127
Washington, DC is known as the birthplace of hardcore punk. The raw, innovative, new sound coming out of the nation’s capital in the late 1970s is examined in Shayna Maskell’s Politics as Sound: The Washington, DC, Hardcore Scene, 1978-1983 (U Illinois Press, 2021). Maskell examines the DC hardcore scene between 1978 and 1983, focusing on the bands Bad Brains, Minor Threat, State of Alert (S.OA.), Government Issue (G.I.), and Faith. She explores the culturally, historical, and political impact o...
Sep 28, 2021•55 min•Ep. 99
Hamilton: An American Musical made its record-breaking Broadway debut in 2015—but the musical has reached far beyond typical Broadway audiences to pave a path into political discourse, pop culture, classroom curriculums, and the broader conversation about contemporary American politics. What led to this chain reaction of popularity, and how does it continue to influence these cultural and political dynamics? Jeffery and Sara Mehltretter Drury work to answer these questions using the tools of rhe...
Sep 16, 2021•47 min•Ep. 544
Franz Nicolay's Someone Should Pay for Your Pain (Gibson House Press, 2021) is a moving, funny, and sometimes brutal novel about the life of a touring musician. Rudy Pauver is a punk-turned-singer-songwriter now roughly ten years past his peak. He draws a small but steady crowd in bars and venues far from the beaten track, all while enduring the thundering success of his one-time protege Ryan Orland. Nicolay brings his decades of experience as a musician to this novel, which teems with perfect t...
Sep 15, 2021•53 min•Ep. 81
Mary Gauthier was twelve years old when she was given her Aunt Jenny’s old guitar and taught herself to play with a Mel Bay basic guitar workbook. Music offered her a window to a world where others felt the way she did. Songs became lifelines to her, and she longed to write her own, one day. Then, for a decade, while struggling with addiction, Gauthier put her dream away and her call to songwriting faded. It wasn’t until she got sober and went to an open mic with a friend did she realize that sh...
Sep 10, 2021•48 min•Ep. 23
Baylor University musicologist and the author of Hearing Beethoven Robin Wallace chats with Howard about the magic of Beethoven, weaving personal sentiments with professional insights to explore his unparalleled musical legacy. Howard Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow , Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast . He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://ne...
Sep 01, 2021•1 hr 52 min•Ep. 103
Caseen Gaines' Footnotes: The Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way (Sourcebooks, 2021) is a rollicking, entertaining, and fascinating cultural history of the 1921 Broadway musical Shuffle Along . Created by Black writers and composers and performed by an all-Black cast, Shuffle Along was one of the early cultural milestones of the Harlem Renaissance, not least because it launched the career of Josephine Baker. While it was beloved in its time, the humor of Shuffle Along cam...
Aug 31, 2021•47 min•Ep. 79
Janaki Bakhle's book Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Oxford UP, 2005) is a provocative account of the development of modern national culture in India using classical music as a case study. The author demonstrates how the emergence of an “Indian” cultural tradition reflected colonial and exclusionary practices, particularly the exclusion of Muslims by the Brahmanic elite, which occurred despite the fact that Muslims were the major practitioners of th...
Aug 25, 2021•49 min•Ep. 127
Crisis? What Crisis? At a time where there are repeated claims of the impending demise of art criticism, The Ends of Art Criticism (Lund Humphries Publishers, 2021) dispel these myths by arguing that the lack of a single dominant voice in criticism is not, as some believe, a weakness, but a strength, allowing previously marginalised voices and new global and political perspectives to come to the fore. Patricia Bickers speaks with Pierre d’Alancaisez about her time as the editor of Art Monthly , ...
Aug 06, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 70
Although hip hop culture has widely been acknowledged as a global phenomenon that has spread far beyond its roots in American African-Caribbean-Latinx cultures, there are few studies that have examined the participation of women in global hip hop, and even fewer that examine the reception of female artists by other women. Angela Williams's book Hip Hop Harem: Women, Rap and Representation in the Middle East (Peter Lang, 2020) explores the social reception of seven prominent female rappers from t...
Aug 06, 2021•51 min•Ep. 144
During the nadir of race relations in the United States South from 1877 to 1932, African Americans faced segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching. Among many forms of resistance, African Americans used their musical and theatrical talents to challenge white supremacy, attain economic opportunity, and transcend segregation. In Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877-1932 (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Dr. Mark A. Johnson argues that African Americans, especiall...
Aug 05, 2021•58 min•Ep. 126
How can music change the world? In Sonic Intimacy: Reggae Sound Systems, Jungle Pirate Radio and Grime YouTube Music Videos (Bloomsbury, 2020), Malcolm James , Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex , introduces the concept of sonic intimacy to think through the social, cultural, and political importance of three key moments in the history of British music. The book blends the history of music, society, and technology to show the moments of community and resist...
Aug 04, 2021•33 min•Ep. 240
Believing Your Ears: Examining Auditory Illusions is based on an extensive filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Diana Deutsch, Professor of Psychology at UC San Diego and one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of music. This conversation provides behind the scenes insights into her discovery of a large number of auditory illusions, including the so-called Octave Illusion, which concretely illustrate how what we think we’re hearing is often quite different from the actual s...
Aug 02, 2021•2 hr 31 min•Ep. 16
The Science of Siren Songs: Stradivari Unveiled is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and master violinmaker and acoustician Joseph Curtin, recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. This in-depth conversation explores Curtin’s long quest to characterize the sound of a Stradivari violin and the rigorous series of double-blind tests he and his colleagues developed to probe whether or not professional musicians can really tell the difference between a Stradivari a...
Jul 30, 2021•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 15
Throughout her career, spanning more than two decades, Jessica Hopper, a revered and pioneering music critic, has examined women recording and producing music, in all genres, through an intersectional feminist lens. The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic (MCD x Fsg Originals, 2021) features oral histories of bands like Hole and Sleater Kinney, interviews with the women editors of 1970s-era Rolling Stone, and intimate conversations with iconic musicians such as Björk, Ro...
Jul 30, 2021•56 min•Ep. 76
Pablo Palomino's The Invention of Latin American Music (Oxford UP, 2020) reconstructs the transnational history of the category of Latin American music during the first half of the twentieth century, from a longer perspective that begins in the nineteenth century and extends the narrative until the present. It analyzes intellectual, commercial, state, musicological, and diplomatic actors that created and elaborated this category. It shows music as a key field for the dissemination of a cultural ...
Jul 20, 2021•49 min•Ep. 123
For more than thirteen centuries, caravans transported millions of enslaved people from Africa south of the Sahara into what is now the Kingdom of Morocco. Today there are no museums, plaques, or monuments that recognize this history of enslavement, but enslaved people and their descendants created the Gnawa identity that preserves this largely suppressed heritage. This pioneering book describes how Gnawa emerged as a practice associated with Blackness and enslavement by reviewing visual represe...
Jul 16, 2021•49 min•Ep. 112
Music from East Asia has recently been making its way round the world on waves created and mediated by new technologies and global interconnections. This may seem like something very novel, but as Andrew Jones shows in Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s (U Minnesota Press, 2020), popular music from this region – and here specifically varieties of Chinese music – has been riding revolutionary technological and socioeconomic currents for a long time. Events during the 196...
Jul 16, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 407
The First World War poet and composer Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) spent the last fifteen years of his life confined in a Kent mental hospital before dying prematurely of tuberculosis. How good was Gurney's war poetry, and has his music stood the test of time? Why did try to re-write Shakespeare's plays? How far do recently uncovered archives transform our understandings both of Ivor Gurney's troubled life and his remarkable work? Kate Kennedy of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing discusses her groun...
Jul 15, 2021•44 min•Ep. 124
Brooke McCorkle Okazaki’s Shonen Knife’s Happy Hour , part of the 33 1/3 music history and culture series, is a joyful romp through the career of the internationally successful Japanese trio, Shonen Knife. The book focuses on the intersection of food, gender, and music for these pioneers of what Okazaki calls “ josei rock,” in other words, music by women in the Japanese scene that does not fit into heavily produced and marketed categories such as “girls bands” and “idols.” The book combines hist...
Jul 15, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 33
We live in a networked world. Online social networking platforms and the World Wide Web have changed how society thinks about connectivity. Because of the technological nature of such networks, their study has predominantly taken place within the domains of computer science and related scientific fields. But arts and humanities scholars are increasingly using the same kinds of visual and quantitative analysis to shed light on aspects of culture and society hitherto concealed. Written by Ruth Ahn...
Jul 14, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 7
Southern women of all classes, races, and walks of life practiced music during and after the Civil War. Dr. Candace Bailey examines the history of southern women through the lens of these musical pursuits, uncovering the ways that music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory help us understand its meaning in the women's culture of the time. Bailey pays particular attention to the space between music as an ideal accomplishment—part of how people expected women to perform gentility—...
Jul 13, 2021•59 min•Ep. 125
In Punks in Peoria: Making a Scene in the American Heartland (University of Illinois, 2021) Jonathan Wright and Dawson Barret explore do-it-yourself scene built by Peoria punks, performers, and scenesters in the 1980s and 1990s. Peoria, Illinois the quintessential Midwest town, where "if it could play in Peoria, it could play anywhere," was fertile ground for the boredom- and anger-fueled fury of punk rock. From fanzines to indie record shops to renting the VFW hall for an all-ages show, Peoria'...
Jul 12, 2021•59 min•Ep. 97
“What are we thinking about when we think about music in non-naturalistic terms?” asks Benjamin Steege —Associate Professor of Music Theory, Columbia University—in his new book An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought (University of Chicago Press, 2021). This deceptively subtle question exercised the minds of some of Europe's most delicate musical thinkers at a time of great social and political upheaval, and continues to be of interest to musicologists today. Putting a lit...
Jul 07, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 124
Children’s folklore is simultaneously a conservator of tradition and a site for creativity and innovation. For over five decades, Dr. Jeanne Pitre Soileau documented and collected the jokes, chants, rhymes, and games that that she observed on school playgrounds throughout her career as a public school teacher in southern Louisiana. From the early days of integration to the first decade of the 21st century, Dr. Soileau has taken note of the evolving forms in which children’s play take and its ref...
Jul 06, 2021•50 min•Ep. 36
Theological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project (Oxford UP, 2020) offers the first in-depth study of the development of art music in Israel from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In a bold and deeply researched account, author Assaf Shelleg explores the theological grammar of Zionism and its impact on the art music written by emigrant and native composers. He argues that Israeli art music, caught in the tension between a bibliocentric territorial nationalism on the...
Jul 02, 2021•54 min•Ep. 53
It is now just over a decade since protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square started Egypt's chapter in the events of the Arab Spring. Much has been made in western criticism of art and culture's role in the revolution, but the everyday cultural production of studio artists, graffiti artists, musicians, and writers since has attracted less attention. How have artists responded personally and artistically to the political transformation ? What has social role of art been in these periods of transition an...
Jun 30, 2021•59 min•Ep. 67
George Frederick Bristow, born in 1825, was a significant musical figure in the United States from the 1850s until his death in 1898. Now, almost one hundred years after his birth, Katherine Preston has just written his first biography-- George Frederick Bristow (University of Illinois Press, 2020)-- as part of the American Composers Series. Bristow led a professional life that today’s classical musicians would surely recognize. He patched together a living from performing, composing, conducting...
Jun 24, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 123
Richard Thompson's Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice 1967-1975 (Algonquin Books, 2021) gives fans of his music a tale as rollicking and entertaining as the reels and ballads he recorded with the band Fairport Convention. Fairport Convention was one of the central bands in the British Folk Rock scene, blending traditional English songs and melodies with the energy and irreverence of rock and roll. Thompson's memoir of his time with the band discusses the process of recording their clas...
Jun 21, 2021•47 min•Ep. 74
