By Lawrence Kramer, author of Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of BeingOn the two-hundredth anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which premiered on May 7th, 1824, The New York Times ran an opinion piece on the work by the distinguished pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. The next day Beet...
Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy (the first original form of American popular music) and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops...
A conversation with Morgan Bimm, Kate Galloway, and Amy Skjerseth, Guest Editors of the Journal of Popular Music Studies Special Issue “Recast, Podcast, Broadcast: Podcasting Popular Music”
Morgan Bimm
Kate Galloway
Amy Skjerseth
JPMS‘s current issue is devoted to a discuss...
By James Walvin, author of Amazing Grace: A Cultural History of the Beloved Hymn
It may seem odd for a historian of slavery to write a history of a popular hymn. In fact, the link between “Amazing Grace” and slavery is clear and fairly obvious: the author of “Amazing Grace,” John Newto...
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...
The 17th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC) is being held this week from August 24-28, 2023, at Nihon University in Tokyo, Japan. In honor of the 2023 conference, we have removed the paywall from select issues of Music Perception. Click on the covers below ...
The current issue of the Journal of Musicology hosts a forum on “Centering Discomfort in Global Music History.” We asked contributors Daniel Castro Pantoja and Olivia Bloechl to talk a little more about the forum’s genesis and the questions it asks.
Daniel Castro Pantoja
Olivia...