Over sixty years after its opening night, West Side Story is perhaps the most famous and beloved of twentieth-century musicals and stands as a colossus of musical and dramatic achievement. It not only helped define a generation of musical theatre lovers but is among the handful of shows that have contributed to our understanding of American musical identity at mid-century. Bringing together contemporary scholars in music, theatre, dance, literature, and performance, The Cambridge Companion to We...
Mar 25, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 140
Tchaikovsky is famous for all the wrong reasons. Portrayed as a hopeless romantic, a suffering melancholic, or a morbid obsessive, the Tchaikovsky we think we know is a shadow of the fascinating reality. It is all too easy to forget that he composed an empire's worth of music, and navigated the imperial Russian court to great advantage. In this iconoclastic biography, celebrated author Simon Morrison re-creates Tchaikovsky's complex world. His life and art were framed by Russian national ambitio...
Mar 25, 2025•36 min•Ep. 274
Punjab Sounds (Routledge, 2024) nuances our understanding of the region's imbrications with sound. It argues that rather than being territorially bounded, the region only emerges in 'regioning', i.e., in words, gestures, objects, and techniques that do the region. Regioning sound reveals the relationship between sound and the region in three interlinked ways: in doing , knowing, and feeling the region through sound. The volume covers several musical genres of the Punjab region, including within ...
Mar 19, 2025•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 13
In Hearing Islam: The Sounds of a Global Religious Tradition , Lauren Osborne delves into the sonic dimensions of Islam, exploring how the tradition’s rich soundscape offers deep insights into culture, identity, and spirituality. In this innovative work, Osborne shifts the focus from the written word to the auditory, asking, "What can we learn about Islam when we enter through its sounds, instead of books?" This approach provides a unique lens through which to study the intersections of modernit...
Mar 15, 2025•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 352
Today we explore the mythology around John Cage’s visit to the anechoic chamber. The chamber was designed to completely eliminate echoes. Ironically, the tale of Cage’s experience in that space has echoed through history, affecting our understanding of silence, sound, and the self. But what do we really know about what happened there? And what could we ever know about such an event? In this audio essay, based on a piece that first appeared in the Australian Humanities Review , Mack Hagood explor...
Mar 10, 2025•29 min•Ep. 49
Sinéad O'Connor, renowned for her angelic voice and activism, overcame a tumultuous upbringing to become a global protest singer and advocate for social justice. O'Connor achieved worldwide success as an angel-voiced, shaven-headed Irish singer of heartfelt songs, but she was far more than just a pop star - she was also an activist and a survivor. Reeling from a troubled childhood at the hands of her violent mother, she spent 18 months living in a former Magdalene Laundry due to her truancy and ...
Mar 08, 2025•49 min•Ep. 273
Few towns in America are as famous as Woodstock, New York—although Woodstock may be most famous for an event that happened many miles away! Long before the 1969 Woodstock festival put the town on the map, it had been a center for artists and free thinkers who found refuge in its rural setting. Longtime citizens were often shocked by the arrival of these newcomers who brought new values and attitudes to their once-isolated village. From the transformative arrival of artists in the early twentieth...
Mar 07, 2025•26 min•Ep. 288
George M. Cohan was one of those rare Broadway figures who was a composer, lyricist, playwright, performer, director, theater owner, and star actor. He could, quite literally, do it all. In his day, he was famous as the "Yankee Doodle Boy" from his hit song and as the "Man Who Owned Broadway" from his musical of the same name. Cohan's songs and shows captured the spirit of an era when staggering social change gave new urgency to efforts to define Americanism. Elizabeth Craft’s Yankee Doodle Dand...
Mar 05, 2025•48 min•Ep. 272
The Royal Albert Hall: Building the Arts and Sciences (Brepols, 2024) by Dr. Simona Valeriani takes one of London’s most iconic buildings and deconstructs it to offer new insights into the society that produced it. As part of the new cultural quarter built in South Kensington on the proceeds from The Great Exhibition of 1851, the Royal Albert Hall was originally intended to be a ‘Central Hall of Arts and Sciences’. Prince Albert’s overarching vision was to promote technological and industrial pr...
Mar 05, 2025•58 min•Ep. 159
Paul Lisicky remembers when he first heard Joni Mitchell on the radio, and when he found one of her records in a bin at Korvettes. He was inspired by her musicality, her poetry, and her willingness to defy musical conventions. Nearly every one of her songs spoke to him in some way. As a budding songwriter whose music was widely performed in churches around the country, he was motivated by her superb tunings, phrasing, and melodies. Later, he focused more on lyrics and prose, hers and his own, ev...
Mar 04, 2025•22 min•Ep. 271
Today we hear two scholars reading their recent work on artificial intelligence. Steph Ceraso studies the technology of “voice donation,” which provides AI-created custom voices for people with vocal disabilities. Hussein Boon contemplates the future of AI in music via some very short and thought-provoking fiction tales. And we start off the show with Mack reflecting on how hard the post-shutdown adjustment has been for many of us and how that might be feeding into the current AI hype. For our P...
Mar 03, 2025•38 min•Ep. 48
In Before Sound: Re-Composing Material, Time, and Bodies in Music (Transcript Verlag, 2023), composer Tiziano Manca investigates the premises for and consequences of a major change in his compositional practice: this change emphasizes the temporality of sound and, more recently, the relationship between sounding body and musician. It calls into question the traditional conception of composition and its relation to sound material. Accordingly, Manca examines the theoretical and aesthetic reasons ...
Feb 28, 2025•22 min•Ep. 269
Just in time for Black History Month, we share an episode we’ve been excitedly working on for a number of months now. Ethnomusicologist Maya Cunningham brings us “The Sound World of Harriet Tubman.” Maya Cunningham is an activist and jazz singer currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in Afro-American studies with a concentration in ethnomusicology. We first came across Maya’s work last year as part of The Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project , an online initiati...
Feb 17, 2025•45 min•Ep. 46
Cultural Narratives of Old Age in the Lives, Work, and Reception of Old Musicians (Routledge, 2024) discusses the creative work of old musicians—composers, performers, listeners, and scholars—and how those forms of music- making are received and understood. Joseph Straus argues that composing oldly, performing oldly, and listening oldly are distinctive and valuable ways of making music—a difference, not a deficit; to be celebrated, not ignored or condemned. This book follows Age Studies in seein...
Feb 15, 2025•42 min•Ep. 269
Today we speak to Hildegard Westerkamp , the pioneering composer, radio artist and sound ecologist. The centerpiece of all of her work is a close attention to the sonic environment and its relation to culture. We will listen to excerpts of six soundscape compositions made between 1975 and 2005, all of which reward the close listener–conceptually and aesthetically–with a deeper relationship to the sonic environment. Mack Hagood interviewed Westerkamp shortly after the death of R. Murray Schafer i...
Feb 10, 2025•44 min•Ep. 45
The Business of Bobbysoxers: Cultural Production in 1940s Frank Sinatra Fandom (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Katie Beisel Hollenbach reconsiders the story of American popular music, celebrity following, and fan behavior during World War II through close examination of “bobbysoxers.” Preserved in popular memory as primarily white, hysterical, teen girl devotees of Frank Sinatra clad in bobby socks and saddle shoes, these girls were accused of displaying inappropriate behavior and priorit...
Feb 09, 2025•47 min•Ep. 268
Grunge. Flannel. Generation X. In 1993, Seattle was the capital of the world, Nirvana was king, and slackers were everywhere. When the Red Hot organization, a group of activists dedicated to raising money and awareness of AIDS, released their third compilation CD featuring the biggest bands of the era--Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys, The Breeders, Nirvana and more it quickly became the touchstone of a generation. Rolling Stone called No Alternative a "jaw-dropping compilation of mu...
Feb 08, 2025•53 min•Ep. 267
South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene by Samantha Ege (University of Illinois Press, 2014) is a collective biography of a group of Black women living in Chicago who were at the center of the support, promotion, and circulation of classical music by Black composers—often specifically Black women composers—in the years between the World Wars. Women like Nora Holt, Maud Roberts George, Estella Conway Bonds, and her daughter Margaret Bonds founded and led...
Feb 07, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 266
Our book is: Thanks to Life: A Biography of Violeta Parra (UNC Press, 2025), by Ericka Verba, which explores the life of Chilean musician and artist Violeta Parra (1917–1967). Parra is an inspiration to generations of artists and activists across the globe. Her music is synonymous with resistance, and it animated both the Chilean folk revival and the protest music movement Nueva Canción (New Song). Her renowned song "Gracias a la vida" has been covered countless times, including by Joan Baez, Me...
Feb 06, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 252
In Music Films: Documentaries, Concert Films and Other Cinematic Representations of Popular Musi c (Bloomsbury, 2024), Dr. Neil Fox considers a broad range of music documentaries, delving into their cinematic style, political undertones, racial dynamics, and gender representations, in order to assess their role in the cultivation of myth. Combining historical and critical analyses, and drawing on film and music criticism, Fox examines renowned music films such as A Hard Day's Night (1964), Dig! ...
Feb 05, 2025•58 min•Ep. 33
Cold Glitter: The Untold Story of Canadian Glam (Feral House, 2025) uncovers a forgotten yet fascinating chapter on glam rock music and culture...from Canada. Los Angeles-based multi-disciplinary artist Robert Dayton taps his Canadian roots to reveal mind-blowing stories of musicians fighting to be heard. It's a universal story of determined creators striving to make their voices heard. Dayton has spent years researching and interviewing these ground-breaking musicians trapped by geography, colo...
Feb 03, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 206
The 1950s looks placid from the outside, but underneath that calm post-war exterior roiled the intellectual and activist beginnings of the political movements that tore through the 1960s and 1970s. In Women in American Operas of the 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes (University of Rochester Press, 2023), Monica A. Hershberger considers the main female characters in four operas written in the 1950s: The Ballad of Baby Doe, Lizzie Borden, The Tender Land, and Susannah . For each work, Hershberger...
Jan 20, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 265
Take funny music seriously! Though often dismissed as silly or derivative, funny music, Lily E. Hirsch argues, is incredibly creative and dynamic, serving multiple aims from the celebratory to the rebellious, the entertaining to the mentally uplifting. Music can be a rich site for humor, with so many opportunities that are ripe for a comedic left turn. Taking Funny Music Seriously (Indiana UP, 2024) includes original interviews with some of the best musical humorists, such as Tom Lehrer, "the J....
Jan 17, 2025•58 min•Ep. 264
On today’s show, we address a performer’s nightmare—the nightmare of not being able to hear yourself onstage. My guest is ethnomusicologist Jacob Danson Faraday, who takes us behind the scenes of the famed Cirque du Soleil to learn how even Cirque’s world-class musicians struggle with technology when they want to hear themselves. Building on his international career as a touring sound technician, ethnomusicologist Jacob Danson Faraday researches the working communities and hidden labor of live s...
Jan 06, 2025•47 min•Ep. 39
In Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Duke UP, 2023), I. Augustus Durham examines melancholy and genius in black culture, letters, and media from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment. Drawing on psychoanalysis, affect theory, and black studies, Durham explores the black mother as both a lost object and a found subject often obscured when constituting a cultural legacy of genius across history. He analyzes the works of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Marvin Gaye, Octavi...
Jan 02, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 488
This summer, sound artist and “guerrilla academic” Ben Coleman got in touch to say how much he enjoys Phantom Power. He also suggested we check out another podcast he’s into called Love is the Message. We’re glad we did! Love is the Message: Music, Dance & Counterculture is a fantastic show from Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert , both of them authors, academics, DJs and audiophile dance party organisers. I recognized Tim Lawrence’s name from his great book on Arthur Russell . Jeremy Gilbert i...
Dec 30, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 38
Andrew Field, in his new book Rocking China (Earnshaw Books, 2023), documents one of the most exciting moments in the history of Chinese indie music. Through interviews with key players in these scenes over a period of two decades, Field explores the meanings of rock music in Chinese society as well as the many challenges and obstacles to the development of indie rock scenes in China. Highlights include a journey by rail into the heartlands of China with the hardcore rock band SUBS and legendary...
Dec 27, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 263
From the frontman of Band of Holy Joy, Johny Brown, Corpse Flower (Skill, 2024), is a long-form prose poem that shares Brown's journey through one of the most challenging times in his life. Released as a multimedia project, Corpse Flower includes not only Brown's book but the music and reading that goes along with it. Moving from dark to light and ending in hope and joy, Brown's work shares with readers his world in lyrical verse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Su...
Dec 25, 2024•39 min•Ep. 204
It’s summer and we are busy working on episodes for our fourth season. We’ve also rebuilt our website–check out the the fabulous new phantompod.org. There’s other great stuff in store for the podcast, so stay tuned! But today, I want to share one of my favorite podcasts with you: Will Robin’s Sound Expertise . For those of you into musicology or popular music studies, there’s a great chance you’re already a subscribe. That’s because Will’s show is fantastic and I personally know many music schol...
Dec 23, 2024•55 min•Ep. 37
From rock & roll to contemporary pop, Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music (Repeater, 2024) is a timely and original exploration of popular music’s role in shaping our society. Told through a Marxist lens, Toby Manning traces the last seventy years of political and social upheavals through its most iconic US and UK-based music. Mixing Pop and Politics examines the connections between popular music and political ideology and explores themes like the liberation of rock ’...
Dec 13, 2024•21 min•Ep. 262
