Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

In this concise history Philip (formerly, Open Univ., UK) covers thousands of years of musical activity across cultures and continents. Philip begins with the earliest known musical instruments, flutes made from mammoth tusks some 40,000 years ago, and concludes with contemporary composers and performers such as John Adams, Beyonce, and Rihanna, along the way looking at the various roles of music in society. Important themes emerge across chapters, for example the oral transmission of music through the centuries; origins and developments in musical notation; and the role of technology in support of advances in music, including music printing beginning around 1500 and adding valves to trumpets around 1850. The author's connections between earlier and later developments and across musical styles are skillful. The gamelan orchestra of Indonesia, for example, is first discussed in its original setting more than a thousand years ago, but later in connection with its influence on Impressionist Claude Debussy beginning around 1890 and on minimalist Steve Reich around 1970. Important topics are addressed, among them slavery, racism, and obstacles women composers and performers faced. This accessible, enjoyable volume balances traditional classical music topics with sections devoted to folk and popular musics in all their various forms.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Kaufman (Univ. of Central Lancashire, UK) explores songs of protest in the US across four and a half centuries, beginning with Columbus's 1492 voyage to what became the Americas. Long before the songs of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, Indigenous Americans sang about their lives and struggles. Invading Europeans brought their Christian music with the hope of saving souls while also claiming Native lands and eradicating/enslaving the Indigenous inhabitants. People brought from Africa aboard slave ships sang lamentations that later evolved into spirituals and the blues. Along the way, readers will encounter other Americans--colonists under British oppression, labor activists, abolitionists, woman suffragists, and immigrants from Ireland, China, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and Japan. National disasters--the Great Depression, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s--weighed particularly on the most vulnerable and also contributed to the song literature. The thread running throughout is protest songs from Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, and native inhabitants of Hawai'i and Alaska. This thread loops back once again in the conclusion with this question: "Whose America is it anyway?"Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

Rathey (Yale) has published extensively on the music of J. S. Bach. The title of the present volume is more than a pun: it directs the reader to the true point of this work, which is a study of public musical performance in the civil life of cities such as Leipzig in the 18th century. Rathey considers musical works, e.g., Bach's secular cantatas, as an integral part of civic functions, such as city council installations. The musical examples the author includes point out the compositional ideas that Bach used to fulfill these public assignments. The 17-page bibliography directs one to additional research. In focusing on Bach, Rathey's volume enlarges on Tanya Kevorkian's Music and Urban Life (CH, Sep'23, 61-0060), a historical study of civic performance. Rathey's works include Bach's Major Vocal Works: Music, Drama, Liturgy (CH, Sep'16, 54-0137) and Johann Sebastian Bach's Christmas Oratorio: Music, Theology, Culture (CH, Apr'17, 54-3662).Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This is a timely book, given the problems and financial losses in the live music industry related to the COVID pandemic and the monopoly ticketing policies of Ticketmaster. The story of live performance in the US is compelling, and Waksman (Smith College) tells it well. The reader will learn how things have changed in live performance since 1850, when European singing sensation Jenny Lind was promoted and marketed in the US by famous showman P. T. Barnum. The author does an outstanding job of analyzing the change from the the minstrel shows of the 19th century, vaudeville in the early-20th century, and the rise of jazz and rock 'n' roll to the current prominence of the hip-hop genre. He also covers the development of venues from the mid-19th century through the arena performances prevalent today. One learns that music in the US has been a product of the interaction of American capitalism and American cultures, especially the African American culture. Extensively documented, this is a definitive resource on the evolution of live music in the US.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

This book describes centuries-long efforts to communicate musical tempo (communicate is Moskovitz's word, and it is the best word). Iterative natural phenomena, e.g., the human heartbeat, are too irregular to set and keep musical time; normal clocks and pendulums have all manner of problems and limitations. In the early 19th century Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel seemed to have answered the call by creating a mechanical metronome. Alas, Winkel did not protect his intellectual property, and Johann Nepomuk Maelzel appropriated it and then manufactured the devices that became essential to the practice of music in Europe. Moskovitz discusses efforts as early as the 1400s to construct something like a metronome; in essence the book is a history of a specific technology serving an artistic purpose. Mozkovitz's narrative is compelling enough that musical readers may have to think more deeply about musical time. The essays in The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music, ed. by Mark Doffman, Emily Payne, and Toby Young (2022), include some references to metronome history, but that book has quite different goals and is not directly competitive. The current volume fills an obvious gap in understanding and is a welcome addition to the literature.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

In this book Ewell (Hunter College, CUNY) examines racism in American music theory, not merely in employment but also in the structural, scholarly underpinnings of the discipline. Of course Austrian music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) receives much attention here, since his work continues to be venerated despite his profoundly racist and nationalist views--views long ignored or suppressed in the world of theory. In 2019 Ewell delivered a talk titled "Music Theory and the White Racial Frame" at the Society for Music Theory's annual meeting, and he published a corresponding paper, by the same title, in Music Theory Online (June 2020). This proved disruptive, and Ewell describes some of the (surprising, disheartening) consequences in detail. The final section provides a positive prescription for music theory and classical music generally to broaden the outlook, consider the many preconceptions, and do better. This book may represent the cusp of a racial reckoning for music theory in the US. Ewell does not eschew technical matters, so the book may be a bit out of reach for nonmusicians. However, everyone--students and faculty--involved in music theory should read it.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

This book is a joy to read. A renowned scholar, Karpf is widely published and has taught music at many levels--from K-12 to respected colleges and universities. She brings a keen expertise to this critical inquiry into E. Azalia Hackley (1867-1922) and her remarkable life. An accomplished musician, educator, and activist, Hackley harnessed the energy of the postbellum, pre-Harlem years. The focus on racial equity generated a powerful initiative she called "musical social uplift." Karpf addresses distinctive aspects of Hackley's work to reveal the remarkably innovative perspectives informing her contributions. Although her early career as a classical soprano soloist followed established precedents, nothing comparable existed for music educators and certainly not for teaching Black students. The pedagogy Hackley assembled supported self-esteem and race pride, teaching music skills as a valuable community endeavor. Especially progressive was her incorporation of theological tenets of New Thought ideology. In the book' s seven chapters, Karpf illuminates the remarkable innovation, creativity, perseverance, and relevance of Hackley's work, which can no longer be overlooked in historical narratives of music in the US. An exemplary model of research methods, this richly engaging book will appeal to and encourage readers across disciplines. Karpf argues for using Hackley's contributions as viable strategies to implement in contemporary society.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) is one of Britain's best-known, most-honored composers, and this book covers the composer's long life and many works. The 18 chapters are organized chronologically, an arrangement that brings into play a wealth of information concerning the development of musical life in England from the end of the 19th century to slightly beyond the mid-20th century. Saylor (music history, Drake Univ.) provides useful, interesting details about the composer's personality and his many friends and family members. Vaughan Williams could be very temperamental in dealing with the performance of his own work; on the other hand, he could be unusually generous and considerate with regard to students, friends, and associates. He was a prolific composer but still left time for conducting, editing, teaching, collecting folk music (about which he was passionate in his early years), and dealing with administrative matters. About a third of the book is devoted to scholarly apparatus--including four appendixes ("Calendar," "List of Works," "Personalia," and "Select Bibliography"), 30 pages of notes, and indexes. A must resource for scholarship on Vaughan Williams.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

This is an outstanding book on the development, aesthetics, and historical context of medieval musical notation. Zazulia (Univ. of California, Berkeley) goes far beyond the idea of notation as a musical aide-memoire and convincingly demonstrates the ways in which medieval notation actually assisted in and was in many ways an active agent in the creation of new music. The author emphasizes, among other things, the notion of affordances--namely, the things made possible through the use of a new technology--and this concept may be very useful in musicological studies beyond the medieval era. As Zazulia demonstrates, the complexity of mensuration canons and the ease with which rhythmic transformations such as diminution and augmentation were accomplished in the late Middle Ages are almost unthinkable without the previous development of notation. Attention is also given to the ways in which musical notation, largely organized by proportional relationships, served metaphorically as an analogue to the visual arts and architecture. The book includes numerous musical examples, black-and-white and color plates of original manuscripts, and detailed notes and a bibliography.Summing Up: Essential.. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Few music books can be considered revelatory, but Cypess's volume earns that accolade because it exposes vital activity in 18th-century Europe (and America) that has been all but ignored by most musicians. This was the world of the musical salon, known vaguely only in later versions as havens for Chopin and others. A striking feature of musical salons was their level of influence in myriad facets of contemporary culture: all manner of engagement with the Enlightenment was happening right outside. Salons were liminal spaces, existing between domestic life and public life, and the centrality of women to the endeavor was unquestioned. A salon may have been the only place outside the home where a female artist could engage in music. The book is rife with score samples--audio excerpts are available on a website--supporting the notion that salons were teeming with musical life, but Cypess (Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers) has applied a genuinely transdisciplinary lens to this hidden world. Although the book classes as music, it will be perfectly accessible to readers beyond the music discipline. Fascinating and compelling.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.