Music

American Stravinsky by Gayle Murchison

I Don't Sound Like Nobody by Albin Zak

I Hear a Symphony by Andrew Flory

So Busy Being Free by Daniel Sonenberg

American Stravinsky

Gayle Murchison

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

One of his country's most enduringly successful composers, Aaron Copland created a distinctively American style and aesthetic in works for a diversity of genres and mediums, including ballet, opera and film. Also active as a critic, mentor, advocate and concert organizer, he played a decisive role in the growth of serious music in the Americas in the 20th century.

Copland has been the subject of a number of book length works, but Gayle Murchison's study is the first to show Copland's style development from his early works through the transition period and into his first widely accessible ballet. Whereas most of the earlier works on Copland have detailed his life, Murchison's study is about his music, going beyond description to provide real analysis.

Gayle Murchison is Assistant Professor of Music and Black Studies at the College of William and Mary, and author of numerous articles on Aaron Copland, Mary Lou Williams, and William Grant Still, one of which won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.

September 2009
416 Pages

I Don't Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950's America

Albin Zak

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

In comparison to the 1960s and 70s, decades that saw almost unparalleled social and cultural change in the United States, the 1950s is often considered in the popular imagination to have been the last bastion of stability and traditional values. But in the world of popular music, the 1950s were years of great transformation, generating the sounds that would define generations to follow.

By now we know the stories of Elvis and Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry; their legends have been revisited time and again on the page and on the big screen. Thus, Albin Zak’s I Don't Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America, will not be another entry into the works on the "great men" of music history, nor will it be another simple re-treading of how rock music changed the world. Zak's is to be landmark study of the sounds, the landscape—in the music world and the country at large—and the figures—both behind the microphone, in the control booth, and at the turntable—that created the music that would become rock and roll.

Albin Zak is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Music at SUNY Albany, and is one of the most respected and most accomplished young scholars in the growing field of popular music studies. He is the author of Velvet Underground Companion (Schirmer Books 1997) and Cutting Tracks, Making Records: The Poetics of Rock (University of California Press 2001), a groundbreaking study of rock music production. Zak is also a recording engineer, record producer, songwriter, singer, and guitarist, and co-editor of our book series, Tracking Pop.

Spring 2010
320 pages

I Hear a Symphony: Listening to the Music of Motown

Andy Flory

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Without question, few parts of contemporary popular music history have received more attention than Motown. Yet the scholars, journalists, historians, and cultural critics who have retold the story of Berry Gordy and Co. time and again have almost entirely avoided discussion of the most important element of the company's history: its music.

In I Hear a Symphony, Andy Flory will use the music of Motown Records to tell the history of this important and influential record company. With a mixture of contextual history and in-depth case studies, Flory will chronicle the rise of Motown from Detroit in the 1950s through the company's success in the 1960s, its move to Los Angeles in the 1970s and, finally, its evolving reception in the popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s. Along the way, he will explore the extent to which the new sounds emanating from Detroit during the 1960s accompanied the political and social changes forged by Motown artists. He will also closely examine the place of the music in the historical development of R&B, and the larger framework that we have long used to discuss the changing face of race in American popular music during the period following the Second World War. Flory's unique approach will allow him to argue that the music of Motown was indelibly shaped by the ideals of Detroit's post-war black middle class; that Motown's creative personnel participated in an African-American tradition of dialogism in rhythm and blues while developing the famous "Motown Sound"; that although historians often view Motown and its Memphis-based rival Stax as diametrically opposed, it is difficult to neatly fit the music of these companies into this type of idealized binary; that a conflict within Motown's music from the late 1960s reflects the widening political and social stratification of this period; and that the reception of Motown's music in Britain reveals fascinating elements of international class valuation and cultural appropriation.

Andy Flory received his Ph.D. in Musicology from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 2002, where he is currently a lecturer. An earlier version of this project, completed under the direction of John Covach, won the Glen Haydon Dissertation Award.

Fall 2010
320 pages

So Busy Being Free: Joni Mitchell in Context

Daniel Sonenberg

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

In the summer of 1968, Joni Mitchell released her debut album, Song to a Seagull, a quiet but momentous gesture in the history of post-war popular music.

Accompanying her acrobatic soprano voice with only a steel-string guitar, and singing of her migration from the city to the sea, Mitchell hearkened back to the popular folk revival that had bloomed a decade earlier and waned in the early 1960s. Yet far from a throwback, Mitchell was the harbinger of a vibrant movement that would fully blossom only at the turn of a new decade: the solo singer-songwriter. Inspired by the poetic sensibility of Bob Dylan and rock music’s defiant ideology of individualism, Mitchell employed her seemingly boundless talent to engage her world in a deeply personal manner, developing not only a style, but also a genre.

This book is an examination of the dramatic first eleven-year arc in Joni Mitchell's recording career, the period during which Mitchell attained fame, achieved her greatest commercial and critical success, and created the music with which she is still most closely associated today. The book focuses on close readings of five songs, considered in their myriad historical, biographical and musical/stylistic contexts: "I Had a King" (1968); "The Last Time I Saw Richard" (1971); "Court and Spark" (1974); "Shadows and Light" (1975); and "Goodbye Porkpie Hat" (1979). These five songs, in their richness of musical and lyrical sophistication, innovation, and timeliness, provide a significant window through which to view Mitchell at the peak of her creative powers.

The book aims to reveal the depth of Mitchell's artistry, and to expose as a central component of that depth the rich interplay between her work and the turbulent transformation of America's social, political, and music-industrial landscapes in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Daniel Sonenberg is currently Assistant Professor and Resident Composer at the University of Southern Maine and received his D.M.A. in Music Composition from CUNY in 2003. In addition to his scholarly work, which he has presented at numerous conferences, Sonenberg is active as a composer, having been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony.

Spring 2010