Recommended New and Recent Books on Music
Print
James Fairclough and Harry Farnham The Mozart ProjectPipedreams Media, 2014
An utterly spectacular production that realizes the promise of multimedia, this interactive book combines learned and richly presented critical, biographical, and historical writing on Mozart with audio and video: interviews, panel discussions, three hours of music, 25 filmed performances, and a performance of Alexander Pushkin’s drama Mozart and Salieri (available through iBooks for iPad and Mac OS X only).
Robert GordonRespect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul ExplosionBloomsbury USA, 2013
Now in paperback, Gordon’s 2013 account of the rise and fall of Stax Records doubles as a cultural history of the South in the 1960s.
Tristan Perich1-Bit SymphonyPhysical Editions, 2014
Not a reissue but a republication: Perich’s breakthrough 1-Bit Symphony is now available with a bound copy of the score—to be exact, the first 1/100th of a second of the score, which amounts to almost 700 pages of hypnotic code, the first in a series on Physical Editions that packages recordings of Perich’s new compositions with a poster print of the score (Parallels is new and currently available).
Joshua HarmonThe Annotated Mixtape Dzanc Books, 2014
Harmon, a poet and fiction writer, views US history and his own life through the lens of his own record collection, a seemingly self-indulgent premise that nevertheless yields compelling results.
John SzwedBillie Holiday, The Musician and the MythViking, March 2015
2015 is Lady Day’s centennial year, and the great biographer of Miles Davis and Sun Ra explores her life and music without the romantic clichés that cloud her reputation and achievement.
Jon FineYour Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution* (But Can No Longer Hear)Viking Adult, 2015
A truly terrible title, but Jon Fine’s in-the-trenches account of his time in bands like Bitch Magnet and Don Caballero is a grounded antidote to the inevitable myth-making of books like Our Band Can Be Your Life (2001). It’s also, surprisingly, a frank examination of the nature of male friendship.
David GrubbsRecords Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound RecordingDuke University Press, 2014
A fascinating exploration of an enduring paradox at the core of avant-garde music: the sub rosa conflict between a listener’s path to knowledge—via records—and how those who made that music, particularly John Cage, thought that records were the antithesis of their art and values.
David StubbsFuture Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern GermanyMelville House, 2015
Published last year in the UK but due stateside in July, Stubbs’s survey of the fertile postwar ground that sprouted bands like Can and Kraftwerk promises to shed light on Krautrock and Germany in a way similar to that in which Rob Young’s Electric Eden (2010) examined folk music in the British Isles.
Will Holder and Alex WatermanYes, But is it Edible?New Documents, 2014
Something like the Old and New Testament of Robert Ashley, this large-scale book collects essays by Ashley and important early and late scores—including ...in memoriam Kit Carson (1963) and the entirety of Dust (1998) and Celestial Excursions (2003)—and with it, ambitious readers can literally make their own performances of his works, in the deepest, fundamental tradition of classical music.
Robert ChristgauGoing into the City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man Dey Street Books, 2015
Christgau’s excoriating brevity in his long-running Consumer Guide frustrates me as much as Greil Marcus’s bloated mythologizing, but there’s no denying the man’s stature as one of rock’s foremost critics. Who are we to begrudge him a memoir?
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Playlist for Prefab Houses: YouTube and the Revitalization of Japanese Ambient Music
by Sadie Rebecca StarnesMAR 2018 | Music
Liz Pelly’s recent article for The Baffler, “The Problem with Muzak,” bemoans music journalism’s embrace of Spotify. Algorithmically fueled, mood-based playlists such as “Ambient Chill,” she argues, are nothing more than “emotional wallpaper” for the distracted, disengaged masses.
Brooklyn Rail Highly Selective Music Listings
By The EditorsJUL-AUG 2017 | Music
Listings chosen by the Editors of the Music Section
A Talk about Music: Joey Agresta's Let's Not Talk About Music & Viewfound's Memorate
by Daniel WilsonSEPT 2017 | Music
Music’s capacity to elicit echoes of personal memory in listeners has received attention from writers in recent years. Unless one has personally experienced a “Proustian moment” in sound, a cynical reader might dismiss such writings as woolly meanderings. The phenomenon is, of course, real, but finding concrete, universally acceptable examples is problematic because the subjective effect varies from person-to-person.
Relexifying the Canon of Black Music
Nicholas Payton with Vilde Aaslid
JUNE 2017 | Music
Nicholas Payton’s once-fiery blog has been quiet lately. After his provocative 2011 rejection of the word “jazz” in favor of Black American Music, Payton has mostly retreated from the volatile jazz internet.
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