New Books in Music

By: Marshall Poe
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  • Summary

  • Interviews with Scholars of Music about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
    New Books Network
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Music
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Episodes
  • Monica A. Hershberger, "Women in American Operas of The 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes" (U Rochester Press, 2023)

    Monica A. Hershberger, "Women in American Operas of The 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes" (U Rochester Press, 2023)
    Jan 20 2025
    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 analyzes the historical context and musical treatment of these four characters, who are all stereotyped as the virgin or the whore, or sometimes even both. In an unusual and productive analytical choice, Hershberger also includes the interpretive decisions and perspectives of the sopranos who originated or popularized these four roles, rather than focusing exclusively on the scores and the views of the male creative teams that wrote the works. Several of the operas include instances of emotional abuse as well as gendered and sexual violence that have long been ignored or downplayed by opera scholars, but Hershberger does not shy away from these disturbing subjects in the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Lily E. Hirsch, "Taking Funny Music Seriously" (Indiana UP, 2024)

    Lily E. Hirsch, "Taking Funny Music Seriously" (Indiana UP, 2024)
    Jan 17 2025
    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. D. Salinger of musical satire"; Peter Schickele, who performed as the invented composer P. D. Q. Bach, the supposed lost son of the great J. S. Bach; Kate Micucci and Riki Lindhome of the funny music duo Garfunkel and Oates; comedic film composer Theodore Shapiro; Too Slim of the country group Riders in the Sky; and musical comedian Jessica McKenna, from the podcast Off Book, part of a long line of "funny girls." With their help, Taking Funny Music Seriously examines comedy from a variety of genres and musical contexts--from bad singing to rap, classical music to country, Broadway music to film music, and even love songs and songs about death. In its coverage of comedic musical media, Taking Funny Music Seriously is an accessible and lively look at funny music. It offers us a chance to appreciate more fully the joke in music and the benefits of getting that joke--especially in times of crisis--including comfort, catharsis, and connection. Lily E. Hirsch is a musicologist and author most recently of Can't Stop the Grrrls: Confronting Sexist Labels in Music from Ariana Grande to Yoko Ono; Weird Al: Seriously; and Insulting Music: A Lexicon of Insult in Music. Lily on Twitter and Bluesky. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Palazzo Editions, Fall 2025). Bradley on Twitter and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • In One Ear, Out The Other

    In One Ear, Out The Other
    Jan 6 2025
    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 sound technicians on large-scale touring productions. He is a recent graduate of the PhD program in ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Today Jake takes us behind the scenes of Cirque du Soleil, sharing his dissertation research on how sound engineers and musicians negotiate the power to hear oneself. Stage monitoring, the technology that allows musicians to hear the performance as they play, is a topic we rarely hear about, but it’s absolutely essential to performers. Faraday suggests that, while new in-ear monitors are marketed as a godsend for performers, they are more of a mixed blessing, “homogenizing listening” and creating new kinds of issues and anxieties for musicians. Today’s show was edited and mixed by Jacob Danson Faraday, with additional editing by Mack Hagood. The song “Sail Away” by Colton Benjamin (2017) was obtained from the Free Multitrack Download Library on the Cambridge Music Technology website by Mike Senior, author of the excellent book Mixing Secrets For The Small Studio. Read the dissertation: Buried in the mix: touring sound technicians, sonic control, and emotional labour on Cirque du Soleil’s Corteo by Jacob Danson Faraday (2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
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    47 mins

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