By Táhirih Motazedian, author of Key Constellations: Interpreting Tonality in Film
My path to music theory and film music was a circuitous one: in college I originally started out as a music performance major, then (due to a hand injury) I entered the world of planetary science, and af...
By Amy Coddington, author of How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race
As hip hop turns 50, many mainstream outlets have highlighted how it has utterly transformed U.S. popular culture. And they’re right: look around, and it’s hard to see or hear something that hasn’t been influ...
Fanfare for a City: Music and the Urban Imagination in Haussmann’s Paris invites us to listen to the sounds of Paris during the Second Empire (1852–1870), a regime that oversaw dramatic social change in the French capital. By exploring the sonic worlds of exhibitions, cafés, streets, a...
By Kerry O’Brien and William Robin, co-authors of On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement
“Thursday evening was a major moment for musical Minimalism,” the New York Times declared last month. The Chicago Symphony had played a new Philip Glass work at Carnegie Hall while, nine blo...
By Guthrie Ramsey, author of Who Hears Here? On Black Music Pasts and Present
Who Hears Here? is part of the UC Press Phono: Black Music and the Global Imagination series
I wrote the essays in my new book Who Hears Here? On Black Music Pasts and Present over twenty-five years. These...
A stunning musical biography of Stevie Nicks that paints a portrait of an artist, not a caricature of a superstar.Reflective and expansive, Mirror in the Sky situates Stevie Nicks as one of the finest songwriters of the twentieth century.This biography from distinguished music historia...
By Mark Levine, author of We’ll Play Till We Die and Heavy Metal Islam
The video, posted anonymously on Facebook, had only 300 views when I first saw it. The singer wasn’t named, and in fact wasn’t even in the video — the camera stayed steady on the crowd. The words supplied their own ...