New Books in Music

New Books in Music

Interviews with Scholars of Music about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

Episodes

Christopher M. Reali, "Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals" (U Illinois Press, 2022)

August 17, 2025 • 39 mins
The forceful music that rolled out of Muscle Shoals in the 1960s and 1970s shaped hits by everyone from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones and Paul Simon. Christopher M. Reali's in-depth look at the fabled musical hotbed examines the events and factors that gave the Muscle Shoals sound such a potent cultural power. Many artists trekked to FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound in search of the sound of authentic...
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Inna Faliks, "Weight in the Fingertips: A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage" (Backbeat Books, 2023)

August 15, 2025 • 45 mins
Adventurous and passionate” (The New Yorker) Ukrainian-born pianist Inna Faliks has established herself as one of the most communicative, and poetic artists of her generation. She has made a name for herself through commanding performances of standard piano repertoire, as well genre-bending, interdisciplinary projects, and inquisitive work with contemporary composers. This season, she gave the world premiere of Clarice Assad’s “Li...
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Richard Mainwaring, "What the Ear Hears (And Doesn't): Inside the Extraordinary Everyday World of Frequency" (Sourcebooks, 2022)

August 13, 2025 • 70 mins
What do the world's loneliest whale, a black hole, and twenty-three people doing Tae Bo all have in common? In 2011, a skyscraper in South Korea began to shake uncontrollably without warning and was immediately evacuated. Was it an earthquake? An attack? No one seemed quite sure. The actual cause emerged later and is utterly fascinating: Twenty-three middle-aged folks were having a Tae Bo fitness class in the office gym on the twe...
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"Swiz" (Akashic Books, 2025)

August 11, 2025 • 71 mins
Swiz (Akashic Books, 2025). Swiz was a Washington DC hardcore punk band that existed from April of 1987 through August of 1990, cutting their teeth and carving their place in the scene that birthed trailblazers and contemporaries like Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Dag Nasty, Fugazi, Ian MacKaye, Dave Grohl, and Henry Rollins. Featuring original Dag Nasty singer Shawn Brown, Swiz’s faster, darker, and more aggressive take on the D.C. so...
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Robert Fitzgerald, "Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan: The Lyrical Lashing of an American Presidency" (UNC Press, 2025)

August 6, 2025 • 65 mins
Few politicians produced the musical reaction that Ronald Reagan did. His California-branded conservatism inspired countless young people to pick up guitars and thrash out their political angst. Punk bands across the United States took aim at the man, his presidency, and the idea of America he was selling to voters nationwide. Small yet vibrant scenes across the country emerged to challenge the communal norms and social values proj...
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A Spatial History of Disco

August 5, 2025 • 74 mins
In the third episode of Season Two of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares take you on an immersive journey through the hot nights and wild streets of Lower Manhattan during the Seventies. For this episode, Jesse Rifkin, a New York-based music historian and the owner and sole operator of Walk on the Wild Side Tours NYC, designed a specialized tour for Soundscapes NYC that explores key venues in the history of disc...
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Julia Sneeringer, "A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to The Beatles, 1956-69" (Bloomsbury, 2018)

August 3, 2025 • 72 mins
The Beatles’ sojourn in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg during the early 1960s is part of music legend. As Julia Sneeringer reveals in A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to The Beatles, 1956-69 (Bloomsbury, 2018), though, this was just the most famous episode in the neighborhood’s momentous engagement with rock ‘n’ roll during that period, one of importance not just to music history but to ...
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Bradley Morgan, "Frank Zappa's America" (LSU Press, 2025)

August 2, 2025 • 48 mins
From his early albums with the Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa established a reputation as a musical genius who pushed the limits of culture throughout the 1960s and 1970s, experimenting with a blend of genres in innovative and unheard-of ways. Not only did his exploratory styles challenge the expectations of what popular music could sound like, but his prolific creative endeavors also shaped how audiences thought about the freed...
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Gavin Williams, "Format Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

August 1, 2025 • 67 mins
With the rise of the gramophone around 1900, the shellac disc traveled the world and eventually became the dominant sound format in the first half of the twentieth century. Format Friction brings together a set of local encounters with the shellac disc, beginning with its preconditions in South Asian knowledge and labor, to offer a global portrait of this format.Spun at seventy-eight revolutions per minute, the shellac disc rapidly...
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Jess Reia, "Urban Music Governance: What Busking Can Teach Us about Data, Policy and Our Cities" (Intellect, 2025)

July 29, 2025 • 34 mins
What happens when precarious urban cultural laborers take data collection, laws, and policymaking into their own hands? Buskers have been part of our cities for hundreds of years, but they remain invisible to governments and in datasets. From nuisance to public art, this cultural practice can help us understand the politics of data collection, archives, regulatory frameworks, and urban planning. Busking also responds to underlying ...
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Charlotte Bentley, "New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859" (U of Chicago Press, 2022)

July 25, 2025 • 47 mins
Jazz is the music that many people associate with New Orleans. But before there was jazz in New Orleans there was opera. It was the only city in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century with a resident opera company that produced the latest European works. In New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Charlotte Bentley considers the thriving operatic ...
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Ford to City: Drop Dead

July 24, 2025 • 57 mins
On October 30, 1975, the New York Daily News printed the most famous headline in its history: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The previous day, President Gerald Ford had delivered a speech at the National Press Club in Washington on the looming bankruptcy of New York City. In the speech, Ford publicly denied the near-bankrupt New York City a federal bailout. The next morning, the streets of Manhattan were littered with the incendiary he...
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Brian Fauteux, "Music in Orbit: Satellite Radio in the Streaming Space Age" (Univ of California Press, 2025)

July 23, 2025 • 74 mins
Years before the advent of music streaming, Sirius and XM established satellite radio services that attracted paying subscribers through their ever-expanding lineup of niche music channels and exclusive celebrity-hosted programming. Brian Fauteux's Music in Orbit: Satellite Radio in the Streaming Space Age (University of California Press, 2025) is the first book to explore how satellite radio bridges legacy broadcast music radio an...
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Turning the Page, Tuning the Dial

July 23, 2025 • 48 mins
In the tenth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell expands upon previous episodes to consider the various musical styles that emerged in New York City during the Seventies alongside punk rock. In dialogue with music critic Will Hermes, author of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), and Lou Reed: King of New York (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 202...
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Lost Women of Disco

July 22, 2025 • 49 mins
Women have been central to the evolution of dance music culture since its earliest days, yet their contributions have often been overlooked. From Régine Zylberberg's pioneering work in creating the modern discotheque in 1950s Paris to Sharon White's trailblazing presence at New York's legendary venues in the 1970s, female DJs have shaped dance floors worldwide. Sharon White broke barriers as a Black queer radio DJ, finding her way ...
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Kelefa Sanneh, "Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres" (Penguin, 2021)

July 20, 2025 • 61 mins
Kelefa Sanneh was born in England, and lived in Ghana and Scotland before moving with his parents to the United States in the early 1980s. He was a pop music critic at the New York Times from 2000-2008, and has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since then. His first book, just released on Penguin, is called Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. The book refracts the entire history of popular music over the p...
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Jubilee (1978)

July 19, 2025 • 49 mins
In the ninth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell traces the trans-Atlantic movement of artists associated with punk culture in New York and London. In conversation with British cultural historian Matt Worley, we follow New York-based artists like Jayne (née Wayne) County, Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, and others to the U.K. where they embedded themselves in a growing music-based subculture. As the punk aesthetic expanded ...
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Megan Volpert, "Why Alanis Morissette Matters" (University of Texas Press, 2025)

July 18, 2025 • 52 mins
The first critical biography of iconic musician Alanis Morissette, creator of Jagged Little Pill. The 1990s hardly saw a bigger hit than Jagged Little Pill. Alanis Morissette's defining album won Grammys, dominated the Billboard charts, and sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. It left a deep mark on the psyches of countless listeners. Three decades later, Megan Volpert checks in with Morissette, probing her rich and varied ...
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Triauna Carey, "The Revolution Will Be Spotified: Music As a Rhetorical Mode of Resistance" (Lexington Books, 2024)

July 18, 2025 • 49 mins
The Revolution Will Be Spotified: Music As a Rhetorical Mode of Resistance (Lexington Books, 2024) investigates the rhetorical strategies present in mainstream popular music and how those strategies are implemented to empower resistance. Case studies across the genres of popular music in the West are surveyed throughout the book to consider the power of music as a rhetorical tool during cultural flashpoints and times of crisis. Car...
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Rock 'N' Roll Resurrection

July 12, 2025 • 55 mins
In the eighth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell talks with music history professor Steve Waksman about the social and stylistic transformation of the New York rock scene during the mid-1970s. The introduction of new bands clashed with the old guard, culminating with a violent altercation between artists in CBGB in March 1976.  In 2024, Waksman accepted the Leverhulme International Professorship in Music in the Departmen...
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