front cover of Race, Rock, and Elvis
Race, Rock, and Elvis
Michael T. Bertrand
University of Illinois Press, 2000

Did Elvis Presley's brand of rock 'n' roll help revise racial attitudes in postwar America? Michael T. Bertrand delves into this question and many others to investigate popular music's revolutionary influence on black-white relations in the South. 

Youthful fans of rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, and other black-inspired music often broke from their segregationist elders and ignored the color line. Not coincidentally, these same young white people--the southern branch of a national and commercialized youth culture--led a general relaxation of racist attitudes. Bertrand argues that African American music facilitated a new recognition of black people as fellow human beings. African American audiences welcomed Elvis with enthusiasm while racially mixed audiences flocked to music venues at a time when adults expected separate performances for black and white audiences. Bertrand also describes the critical role of radio and recordings in making African American culture available to white fans on an unprecedented scale. Over time, southern working-class youth used the new music to define and express new values and build their own identities.

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Rockin' in the Ivory Tower
Rock Music on Campus in the Sixties
James M. Carter
Rutgers University Press, 2023

Histories of American rock music and the 1960s counterculture typically focus on the same few places: Woodstock, Monterey, Altamont. Yet there was also a very active college circuit that brought edgy acts like the Jefferson Airplane and the Velvet Underground to different metropolitan regions and smaller towns all over the country. These campus concerts were often programmed, promoted, and reviewed by students themselves, and their diverse tastes challenged narrow definitions of rock music.  

Rockin’ in the Ivory Tower takes a close look at two smaller universities, Drew in New Jersey and Stony Brook on Long Island, to see how the culture of rock music played an integral role in student life in the late 1960s. Analyzing campus archives and college newspapers, historian James Carter traces connections between rock fandom and the civil rights protests, free speech activism, radical ideas, lifestyle transformations, and anti-war movements that revolutionized universities in the 1960s. Furthermore, he finds that these progressive students refused to segregate genres like folk, R&B, hard rock, and pop. Rockin’ in the Ivory Tower gives readers a front-row seat to a dynamic time for the music industry, countercultural politics, and youth culture.

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Reichsrock
The International Web of White-Power and Neo-Nazi Hate Music
Dyck, Kirsten
Rutgers University Press, 2016
From rap to folk to punk, music has often sought to shape its listeners’ political views, uniting them as a global community and inspiring them to take action. Yet the rallying potential of music can also be harnessed for sinister ends. As this groundbreaking new book reveals, white-power music has served as a key recruiting tool for neo-Nazi and racist hate groups worldwide. 
 
Reichsrock shines a light on the international white-power music industry, the fandoms it has spawned, and the virulently racist beliefs it perpetuates. Kirsten Dyck not only investigates how white-power bands and their fans have used the internet to spread their message globally, but also considers how distinctly local white-power scenes have emerged in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the United States, and many other sites. While exploring how white-power bands draw from a common well of nationalist, racist, and neo-Nazi ideologies, the book thus also illuminates how white-power musicians adapt their music to different locations, many of which have their own terms for defining whiteness and racial otherness. 
 
Closely tracking the online presence of white-power musicians and their fans, Dyck analyzes the virtual forums and media they use to articulate their hateful rhetoric. This book also demonstrates how this fandom has sparked spectacular violence in the real world, from bombings to mass shootings. Reichsrock thus sounds an urgent message about a global menace. 
 
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Everyone Loves Live Music
A Theory of Performance Institutions
Fabian Holt
University of Chicago Press, 2020

For decades, millions of music fans have gathered every summer in parks and fields to hear their favorite bands at festivals such as Lollapalooza, Coachella, and Glastonbury. How did these and countless other festivals across the globe evolve into glamorous pop culture events, and how are they changing our relationship to music, leisure, and public culture? In Everyone Loves Live Music, Fabian Holt looks beyond the marketing hype to show how festivals and other institutions of musical performance have evolved in recent decades, as sites that were once meaningful sources of community and culture are increasingly subsumed by corporate giants.
 
Examining a diverse range of cases across Europe and the United States, Holt upends commonly-held ideas of live music and introduces a pioneering theory of performance institutions. He explores the fascinating history of the club and the festival in San Francisco and New York, as well as a number of European cities. This book also explores the social forces shaping live music as small, independent venues become corporatized and as festivals transform to promote mainstream Anglophone culture and its consumerist trappings. The book further provides insight into the broader relationship between culture and community in the twenty-first century. An engaging read for fans, industry professionals, and scholars alike, Everyone Loves Live Music reveals how our contemporary enthusiasm for live music is more fraught than we would like to think.

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Destined for Greatness
Passions, Dreams, and Aspirations in a College Music Town
Ramirez, Michael
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Pursuing the dream of a musical vocation—particularly in rock music—is typically regarded as an adolescent pipedream. Music is marked as an appropriate leisure activity, but one that should be discarded upon entering adulthood. How then do many men and women aspire to forge careers in music upon entering adulthood? 

In Destined for Greatness, sociologist Michael Ramirez examines the lives of forty-eight independent rock musicians who seek out such non-normative choices in a college town renowned for its music scene. He explores the rich life course trajectories of women and men to explore the extent to which pathways are structured to allow some, but not all, individuals to fashion careers in music worlds. Ramirez suggests a more nuanced understanding of factors that enable the pursuit of musical livelihoods well into adulthood.  
 
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Rockin' Out Of The Box
Gender Maneuvering in Alternative Hard Rock
Schippers, Mimi
Rutgers University Press, 2002

Given the long history of feminism and its contested place in popular culture, important, practical questions arise: What effect, if any, have feminist ideas and practices had on the lives of young men and women who grew up with them? How do these individuals negotiate the realities of gender in their daily lives?

In Rockin’ Out of the Box, Mimi Schippers, employing the crucial feminist insight that gender is a constantly shifting performance and not an essential quality related to sex, explores the gender roles, assumptions, and transgressions of the men and women involved in the alternative hard rock scene. The author focuses on this sizable section of rock music both because it is widely inclusive of men and women and because it explicitly adopted feminism as its point of departure from mainstream music. Schippers uses the innovative term gender maneuvering to explain her observations that gender and sexuality are negotiated and always changing features of social relations. This process, she demonstrates, operates as a cultural practice and as an individual strategy of resistance to socially prescribed gender roles.

Schippers, who spent more than two years frequenting alternative hard rock clubs and concerts in Chicago, conducted extensive interviews with fans as well as musicians, including Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Kim Thayil of Soundgarden, Donita Sparks and Jennifer Finch of L7, Kat Bjelland and Lori Barbero of Babes in Toyland, Rose of Poster Children, Louise Post and Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt, and Liz Davis and Valerie Agnew of 7 Year Bitch. As it documents the development of a rock music genre that has so far received little academic attention, this book  also demonstrates how this musical culture contributes to our understanding of the daily practices of gender relations among young people.

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Together, Somehow
Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor
Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta
Duke University Press, 2023
In Together, Somehow, Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta examines how people find ways to get along and share a dancefloor, a vibe, and a sound. Drawing on time spent in the minimal techno and house music subscenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin as the first decade of the new millennium came to a close, Garcia-Mispireta explains this bonding in terms of what he calls stranger-intimacy: the kind of warmth, sharing, and vulnerability between people that happens surprisingly often at popular electronic dance music parties. He shows how affect lubricates the connections between music and the dancers. Intense shared senses of sound and touch help support a feeling of belonging to a larger social world. However, as Garcia-Mispireta points out, this sense of belonging can be vague, fluid, and may hide exclusions and injustices. By showing how sharing a dancefloor involves feeling, touch, sound, sexuality, and subculture, Garcia-Mispireta rethinks intimacy and belonging through dancing crowds and the utopian vision of throbbing dancefloors.
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Healing Songs
Ted Gioia
Duke University Press, 2006
While the first healers were musicians who relied on rhythm and song to help cure the sick, over time Western thinkers and doctors lost touch with these traditions. In the West, for almost two millennia, the roles of the healer and the musician have been strictly separated.

Until recently, that is. Over the past few decades there has been a resurgence of interest in healing music. In the midst of this nascent revival, Ted Gioia, a musician, composer, and widely praised author, offers the first detailed exploration of the uses of music for curative purposes from ancient times to the present. Gioia’s inquiry into the restorative powers of sound moves effortlessly from the history of shamanism to the role of Orpheus as a mythical figure linking Eastern and Western ideas about therapeutic music, and from Native American healing ceremonies to what clinical studies can reveal about the efficacy of contemporary methods of sonic healing.

Gioia considers a broad range of therapies, providing a thoughtful, impartial guide to their histories and claims, their successes and failures. He examines a host of New Age practices, including toning, Cymatics, drumming circles, and the Tomatis method. And he explores how the medical establishment has begun to recognize and incorporate the therapeutic power of song. Acknowledging that the drumming circle will not—and should not—replace the emergency room, nor the shaman the cardiologist, Gioia suggests that the most promising path is one in which both the latest medical science and music—with its capacity to transform attitudes and bring people together—are brought to bear on the multifaceted healing process.

In Healing Songs, as in its companion volume Work Songs, Gioia moves beyond studies of music centered on specific performers, time periods, or genres to illuminate how music enters into and transforms the experiences of everyday life.

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Elevator Music
A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong; Revised and Expanded Edition
Joseph Lanza
University of Michigan Press, 2004
It's campy, it's cool, empty, intrusive, trite, and treacly. It's Big Brother singing. Call it what you will -- elevator music, Moodsong ® easy listening, or Muzak ®. For a musical genre that was supposed to offend no one, it has a lot of enemies.
Musical cognoscenti decry its insipid content; regular folk -- if they notice -- bemoan its pervasiveness; while hipsters and campsters celebrate its retro chic. Mindful of the many voices, Joseph Lanza's Elevator Music sings seriously, with tongue in cheek, the praises of this venerable American institution.
Lanza addresses the criticisms of elites who say that Muzak and its ilk are dehumanized, vapid, or cheesy. These reactions, he argues, are based more on cultural prejudices than honest musical appraisal.
Says Lanza, today's so-called mood music is the inheritor of a long tradition of mood-altering music stretching back to the ancients; Nero's fiddle and the sirens of Odysseus being two famous examples. Contemporary atmospheric music, Lanza argues, not only serves the same purpose, it is also the inevitable background for our media-dominated age.
One of Lanza's premises, to quote Mark Twain, is that this music is "better than it sounds." "This book will have succeeded in its purpose," he writes, "if I can help efface...the distinction between one person's elevator music and another's prized recording."
Joseph Lanza is an author, producer, and music historian. His most recent book is Russ Columbo and the Crooner Mystique.
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Music and Trance
A Theory of the Relations Between Music and Possession
Gilbert Rouget
University of Chicago Press, 1985
Ritual trance has always been closely associated with music—but why, and how? Gilbert Rouget offers and extended analysis of music and trance, concluding that no universal law can explain the relations between music and trance; they vary greatly and depend on the system of meaning of their cultural context.

Rouget rigorously examines a worldwide corpus of data from ethnographic literature, but he also draws on the Bible, his own fieldwork in West Africa, and the writings of Plato, Ghazzali, and Rousseau. To organize this immense store of information, he develops a typology of trance based on symbolism and external manifestations. He outlines the fundamental distinctions between trance and ecstasy, shamanism and spirit possession, and communal and emotional trance. Music is analyzed in terms of performers, practices, instruments, and associations with dance. Each kind of trance draws strength from music in different ways at different points in a ritual, Rouget concludes. In possession trance, music induces the adept to identify himself with his deity and allows him to express this identification through dance.

Forcefully rejecting pseudo-science and reductionism, Rouget demystifies the so-called theory of the neurophysiological effects of drumming on trance. He concludes that music's physiological and emotional effects are inseparable from patterns of collective representations and behavior, and that music and trance are linked in as many ways as there are cultural structures.
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Triple Entendre
Furniture Music, Muzak, Muzak-Plus
Herve Vanel
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Triple Entendre discusses the rise and spread of background music in contexts as diverse as office workplaces, shopping malls, and musical performance. Hervé Vanel examines background music in several guises, beginning with Erik Satie's "Furniture Music" of the late 1910s and early 1920s, which first demonstrated the idea of a music not meant to be listened to and was later considered a precedent to modern, functional background music. Vanel argues that when the Muzak Corporation's commercialized ambient music became a predominant feature of modern life in the 1940s--both as a brand and a genre of background music--it also became a powerful instrument of social engineering in an advanced capitalist society. Different kinds of music were developed to encourage or incite greater productivity in the workplace, more energetic shopping, or more animated socializing.

Vanel's discussion culminates in the creative response of the composer John Cage to the pervasiveness and power of background music in contemporary society. Cage neither opposed nor rejected Muzak, but literally answered its challenge by formulating a parallel concept that he called "Muzak-Plus." Forty years after Satie presented his work to general critical puzzlement, Cage saw how background music could be combined with mid-century technology and theories of art and performance to create a participatory soundscape on a scale that Satie could not have envisioned, again reconfiguring the listener's stance to music. By examining the subterranean connections existing between these three formulations of a singular idea, Triple Entendre analyzes and challenges the crucial boundary that separates an artistic concept from its actual implementation in life.

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The Spirit of This Place
How Music Illuminates the Human Spirit
Patrick Summers
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Artists today are at a crossroads. With funding for the arts and humanities endowments perpetually under attack, and school districts all over the United States scrapping their art curricula altogether, the place of the arts in our civic future is uncertain to say the least. At the same time, faced with the problems of the modern world—from water shortages and grave health concerns to global climate change and the now constant threat of terrorism—one might question the urgency of this waning support for the arts. In the politically fraught world we live in, is the “felt” experience even something worth fighting for?

In this soul-searching collection of vignettes, Patrick Summers gives us an adamant, impassioned affirmative. Art, he argues, nurtures freedom of thought, and is more necessary now than ever before.

As artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera, Summers is well positioned to take stock of the limitations of the professional arts world—a world where the conversation revolves almost entirely around financial questions and whose reputation tends toward elitism—and to remind us of art’s fundamental relationship to joy and meaning. Offering a vehement defense of long-form arts in a world with a short attention span, Summers argues that art is spiritual, and that music in particular has the ability to ask spiritual questions, to inspire cathartic pathos, and to express spiritual truths. Summers guides us through his personal encounters with art and music in disparate places, from Houston’s Rothko Chapel to a music classroom in rural China, and reflects on musical works he has conducted all over the world. Assessing the growing canon of new operas performed in American opera houses today, he calls for musical artists to be innovative and brave as opera continues to reinvent itself.

This book is a moving credo elucidating Summers’s belief that the arts, especially music, help us to understand our own humanity as intellectual, aesthetic, and ultimately spiritual.
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Efficacy of Sound
Power, Potency, and Promise in the Translocal Ritual Music of Cuban Ifá-Òrìsà
Ruthie Meadows
University of Chicago Press, 2023
The first book-length ethnographic study on music and Ifá divination in Cuba and Nigeria.

Hailing from Cuba, Nigeria, and various sites across Latin America and the Caribbean, Ifá missionary-practitioners are transforming the landscape of Ifá divination and deity (òrìṣà/oricha) worship through transatlantic travel and reconnection. In Cuba, where Ifá and Santería emerged as an interrelated, Yorùbá-inspired ritual complex, worshippers are driven to “African traditionalism” by its promise of efficacy: they find Yorùbá approaches more powerful, potent, and efficacious.
 
In the first book-length study on music and Ifá, Ruthie Meadows draws on extensive, multisited fieldwork in Cuba and Yorùbáland, Nigeria, to examine the controversial “Nigerian-style” ritual movement in Cuban Ifá divination. Meadows uses feminist and queer of color theory along with critical studies of Africanity to excavate the relation between utility and affect within translocal ritual music circulations. Meadows traces how translocal Ifá priestesses (ìyánífá), female batá drummers (bataleras), and priests (babaláwo) harness Yorùbá-centric approaches to ritual music and sound to heighten efficacy, achieve desired ritual outcomes, and reshape the conditions of their lives. Within a contentious religious landscape marked by the idiosyncrasies of revolutionary state policy, Nigerian-style Ifá-Òrìṣà is leveraged to transform femininity and masculinity, state religious policy, and transatlantic ritual authority on the island.
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Musical Ethics and Islam
The Art of Playing the Ney
Banu Senay
University of Illinois Press, 2020
After the establishment of the Turkish Republic, Turkey's secularized society disdained the ney, the Sufi reed flute long associated with Islam. The instrument's remarkable revival in today's cities has inspired the creation of teaching and learning sites that range from private ney studios to cultural and religious associations and from university clubs to mosque organizations.

Banu Şenay documents the years-long training required to become a neyzen—a player of the ney. The process holds a transformative power that invites students to create a new way of living that involves alternative relationships with the self and others, changing perceptions of the city, and a dedication to craftsmanship. Şenay visits reed harvesters and travels from studios to workshops to explore the practical processes of teaching and learning. She also becomes an apprentice ney-player herself, exploring the desire for spirituality that encourages apprentices and masters alike to pursue ney music and its scaffolding of Islamic ethics and belief.

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Songs for the Spirits
Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam
Barley Norton
University of Illinois Press, 2008

Songs for the Spirits examines the Vietnamese practice of communing with spirits through music and performance. During rituals dedicated to a pantheon of indigenous spirits, musicians perform an elaborate sequence of songs--a "songscape"--for possessed mediums who carry out ritual actions, distribute blessed gifts to disciples, and dance to the music's infectious rhythms. Condemned by French authorities in the colonial period and prohibited by the Vietnamese Communist Party in the late 1950s, mediumship practices have undergone a strong resurgence since the early 1990s, and they are now being drawn upon to promote national identity and cultural heritage through folklorized performances of rituals on the national and international stage.

By tracing the historical trajectory of traditional music and religion since the early twentieth century, this groundbreaking study offers an intriguing account of the political transformation and modernization of cultural practices over a period of dramatic and often turbulent transition. An accompanying DVD contains numerous video and music extracts that illustrate the fascinating ways in which music evokes the embodied presence of spirits and their gender and ethnic identities.

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Street Scriptures
Between God and Hip-Hop
Alejandro Nava
University of Chicago Press, 2022
This book explores an important aspect of hip-hop that is rarely considered: its deep entanglement with spiritual life.
 
The world of hip-hop is saturated with religion, but rarely is that element given serious consideration. In Street Scriptures, Alejandro Nava focuses our attention on this aspect of the music and culture in a fresh way, combining his profound love of hip-hop, his passion for racial and social justice, and his deep theological knowledge. Street Scriptures offers a refreshingly earnest and beautifully written journey through hip-hop’s deep entanglement with the sacred.
 
Nava reveals a largely unheard religious heartbeat in hip-hop, exploring crosscurrents of the sacred and profane in rap, reggaeton, and Latinx hip-hop today. Ranging from Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, Lauryn Hill, Cardi B, and Bad Bunny to St. Augustine and William James, Nava examines the ethical-political, mystical-prophetic, and theological qualities in hip-hop, probing the pure sonic and aesthetic signatures of music, while also diving deep into the voices that invoke the spirit of protest. The result is nothing short of a new liberation theology for our time, what Nava calls a “street theology.”
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The Street Is My Pulpit
Hip Hop and Christianity in Kenya
Mwenda Ntarangwi
University of Illinois Press, 2016
To some, Christianity and hip hop seem antithetical. Not so in Kenya. There, the music of Julius Owino, aka Juliani, blends faith and beats into a potent hip hop gospel aimed at a youth culture hungry for answers spiritual, material, and otherwise.

Mwenda Ntarangwi explores the Kenyan hip hop scene through the lens of Juliani's life and career. A born-again Christian, Juliani produces work highlighting the tensions between hip hop's forceful self-expression and a pious approach to public life, even while contesting the basic presumptions of both. In The Street Is My Pulpit, Ntarangwi forges an uncommon collaboration with his subject that offers insights into Juliani's art and goals even as Ntarangwi explores his own religious experience and subjective identity as an ethnographer. What emerges is an original contribution to the scholarship on hip hop's global impact and a passionate study of the music's role in shaping new ways of being Christian in Africa.

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Deathlife
Hip Hop and Thanatological Narrations of Blackness
Anthony B. Pinn
Duke University Press, 2024
In Deathlife, Anthony B. Pinn analyzes hip hop to explore how Blackness serves as a framework for defining and guiding the relationship between life and death in the United States. Pinn argues that white supremacy and white privilege operate based on the right to distinguish death from life. This distinction is produced and maintained through the construction of Blackness as deathlife. Drawing on Afropessimism and Black moralism, Pinn theorizes deathlife as a technology of whiteness that projects whites’ anxieties about the end of their lives onto the Black other. Examining the music of Jay-Z; Kendrick Lamar; Tyler, the Creator; and others, Pinn shows how hip hop configures the interconnection and dependence between death and life in such a way that death and life become indistinguishable. In so doing, Pinn demonstrates that hip hop presents an alternative to deathlife that challenges the white supremacist definitions of Blackness and anti-Blackness more generally.
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The Devil’s Music
How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll
Randall J. Stephens
Harvard University Press, 2018

When rock ’n’ roll emerged in the 1950s, ministers denounced it from their pulpits and Sunday school teachers warned of the music’s demonic origins. The big beat, said Billy Graham, was “ever working in the world for evil.” Yet by the early 2000s Christian rock had become a billion-dollar industry. The Devil’s Music tells the story of this transformation.

Rock’s origins lie in part with the energetic Southern Pentecostal churches where Elvis, Little Richard, James Brown, and other pioneers of the genre worshipped as children. Randall J. Stephens shows that the music, styles, and ideas of tongue-speaking churches powerfully influenced these early performers. As rock ’n’ roll’s popularity grew, white preachers tried to distance their flock from this “blasphemous jungle music,” with little success. By the 1960s, Christian leaders feared the Beatles really were more popular than Jesus, as John Lennon claimed.

Stephens argues that in the early days of rock ’n’ roll, faith served as a vehicle for whites’ racial fears. A decade later, evangelical Christians were at odds with the counterculture and the antiwar movement. By associating the music of blacks and hippies with godlessness, believers used their faith to justify racism and conservative politics. But in a reversal of strategy in the early 1970s, the same evangelicals embraced Christian rock as a way to express Jesus’s message within their own religious community and project it into a secular world. In Stephens’s compelling narrative, the result was a powerful fusion of conservatism and popular culture whose effects are still felt today.

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Les Paul
Guitar Wizard
Bob Jacobson
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2012

This addition to the Badger Biographies series for young readers tells the story of Les Paul, the legendary “Wizard of Waukesha,” who pioneered the solid body electric guitar, multi-track recording, and many other musical inventions. Fascinated since boyhood with musical technology, the young Les moved from experimenting with his mother’s player piano and phonograph to developing his own amplifier and tinkering with crystal radios.

After leaving his hometown of Waukesha at age 17 to pursue a musical career—a decision his mother supported—the budding jazz guitarist lived in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, in each city finding a new audience and new musical partnerships. A regular on the radio, Les became a fixture in early television, appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, and later, a show of his own with partner Mary Ford. Along the way, he overcame numerous physical challenges, including recovery from electric shock and rehabilitation after a horrific car accident—both of which threatened his musical career. And yet, Les Paul pushed musical technology forward more than any other musician of the twentieth century. This Grammy Hall of Fame inductee died in 2009, making Les Paul: Guitar Wizard a timely addition to the series. This lively story is rounded out with sidebars on radio call letters and how an electric guitar works, a full discography, and over 60 historic photographs.

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Basic Concepts in Music Education, II
Richard J. Cowell
University Press of Colorado, 1991
First published in 1958, Basic Concepts in Music Education served as the standard text for a generation of music educators. Providing the basics on aesthetic philosophy, of education, and of music education, this popular volume remained in print for twenty-five years.

A continuation on the first edition, Basic Concepts in Music Education, II features revisions and updates by the living authors as well as contributions by new authors who delineate concepts of music education that are particularly important to the nineties and beyond. These topics include growth processes, learning theory, functional music, messages for teachers, the range of musical experience, technology, and evaluation.

Chapters from the most noted authorities in music education promise to provide definitive guidance in Basic Concepts, II that Basic Concepts, I has provided for the past quarter century. Among the contributors are Charles Fowler, Harry S. Broudy, Foster McMury, Wayne Bowman, Marilyn Zimmerman, Bennett Reimer, Clifton Burmeister, Richard Colwell, Robert Ehle, and Allen P. Britton. Like its predecessor, Basic Concepts, II offers rich and stimulating discussions on the most pertinent issues facing music education today - discussions that are vital to professionals and enlightening to the general reader.

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In Search of Music Education
Estelle R. Jorgensen
University of Illinois Press, 1997
        What is music education, and what ought it to be? By challenging narrow
        and inadequate conceptions of the field, Estelle Jorgensen raises the
        possibility of alternative views that can dignify the teacher's task,
        enrich and enliven the profession, and validate an exciting range of additional
        ways in which music education can be undertaken in the contemporary world.
      One of the most respected leaders in music education, Jorgensen emphasizes
        world music and ethnomusicology as equal partners alongside the more conventional
        sounds and styles that have dominated the classroom. Exemplifying sound
        scholarship, thorough research, and compelling argument, In Search
        of Music Education will be especially welcome wherever teachers strive
        to deal with requirements for responsible music education.
 
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Music Education in the United States
Contemporary Issues
J. Terry Gates
University of Alabama Press, 1988
Reflects the current issues in music education and the ongoing attempt to overcome obstacles to excellence in teaching music
 
This solid collection of essays, written by outstanding American music educators, reflects the current issues in music education and the ongoing attempt to overcome obstacles to excellence in teaching music. It stands as the most important and far-ranging professional overview of the discipline since the publication of the landmark Basic Concepts in Music Education in 1958, and early reviews indicate that it will generate both critical discussion and acclaim.
 
Several themes recur:(1) that music and, therefore, music education exist in a variety of social and cultural contexts, even when examined in controlled situations; (2) that music teaching has not yet freed itself from its traditional over-reliance on technical training, in spite of attention to aesthetic education; and (3) that there is a remarkable undercurrent of agreement among this diverse group of authors concerning the profession’s basic obligation to expand and refine the musical sensitivity of all age group of Americans. This book reflects some advanced thinking about these themes, which establishes new foundations for next generation theorizing and research.
 
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John Dygon's Proportiones practicabiles secundum Gaffurium
New Critical Text, Translation, Annotations, and Indices by Theodor Dumitrescu
University of Illinois Press, 2006

A rare example of musical scholarship from the Tudor period, in translation and fully annotated

John Dygon was the prior of St. Augustine’s monastery in Canterbury when Henry VIII boldly dissolved the English Catholic Church during the 1530s and reorganized it under royal control. Only a single copy of Dygon’s manuscript on music theory has survived, held by Trinity College, Cambridge.  This volume will be the first publication of these two treatises, providing both a scholarly transcription and English translation.

Dygon’s treatise provides a rare and important example of musical scholarship from the early Tudor period, demonstrating the status of music education at the time, the affiliations of English scholarship with music study in Europe, and the music that was actually performed in England. The treatises address questions of musical notation, especially regarding rhythmic proportions, as well as practical issues about performance. Theodor Dumitrescu’s introduction situates Dygon’s treatises within the larger history of European music, paying close attention to its borrowings from and adaptations of prior treatises. 

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Book on Music
Florentius de Faxolis
Harvard University Press, 2010
Between 1485 and 1492 Cardinal Ascanio Sforza was the recipient of a music treatise composed for him by “Florentius Musicus” (Florentius de Faxolis), who had served him in Naples and Rome. Now in Milan, the richly illuminated small parchment codex bears witness to the musical interests of the cardinal, himself an avid singer taught by Duke Ercole d’Este. Florentius, whose treatise, found in no other source, is edited here for the first time, evidently took the cardinal’s predilections into account, for the Book on Music is unusual for its emphasis on “the praises, power, utility, necessity, and effect of music”: he devotes far more space to citations from classical and medieval authors than is the norm, and his elevated style shows that he aspires to appear as a humanist and not merely a technician. Likewise, the production quality of the manuscript indicates the acceptance of music’s place within the high culture of the Quattrocento. The author’s unusual insights into the musical thinking of his day are discussed in the ample commentary. The editors, a Renaissance musicologist (Bonnie Blackburn) and a classical scholar (Leofranc Holford-Strevens), have combined their disciplines to pay close attention both to Florentius’ text and to his teachings.
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The Lucidarium of Marchetto of Padua
A Critical Edition, Translation, and Commentary
Edited by Jan W. Herlinger
University of Chicago Press, 1985
"Herlinger deserves the thanks of the scholarly community for having prepared both edition and translation with the most meticulous of critical methods and the greatest of care."—Leeman L. Perkins, Renaissance Quarterly

"An almost archetypal example of unpretentious and honest scholarship."—Alejandro Enrique Planchart, Journal of the American Musicological Society
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Prosdocimo de' Beldomandi's Musica Plana and Musica Speculativa
Prosdocimo de Beldomandi. Translated by Jan Herlinger.
University of Illinois Press, 2007

Available in English for the first time, Prosdocimo's Tractatus plane musice (1412) and Tractatus musice speculative (1425) are exemplary texts for understanding the high sophistication of music theory in the early fifteenth century. Known for considering music as a science based on demonstrable mathematical principles, Prosdocimo praises Marchetto for his theory of plainchant but criticizes his influential Lucidarium for its heterodox mathematics. In dismissing Marchetto as a “mere performer,” Prosdocimo takes up matters as broad as the nature and definition of music and as precise as counterpoint, tuning, and ecclesiastical modes. The treatises also reveal much about Prosdocimo’s understanding of plainchant; his work with Euclid's Elementa; and his familiarity with the music theory of Boethius, Macrobius, and Johannes de Muris. A foremost authority on Italian music theory of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, Jan Herlinger consults manuscripts from Bologna, Cremona, and Lucca in preparing these valuable first critical editions.

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The Unanswered Question
Six Talks at Harvard
Leonard Bernstein
Harvard University Press, 1976

“A summation of his beliefs about music as he looked into the final quarter of the 20th century…Bernstein’s talks still seem surprisingly fresh. But words were nearly as much Bernstein’s métier as music.” —New York Times

The varied forms of Leonard Bernstein’s musical creativity have been recognized and enjoyed by millions. These lectures, Mr. Bernstein’s most recent venture in musical explication, will make fascinating reading as well. Virgil Thomson says of the lectures: “Nobody anywhere presents this material so warmly, so sincerely, so skillfully. As musical mind-openers they are first class; as pedagogy they are matchless.”

Mr. Bernstein considers music ranging from Hindu ragas through Mozart and Ravel, to Copland, suggesting a worldwide, innate musical grammar. Folk music, pop songs, symphonies, modal, tonal, atonal, well-tempered and ill-tempered works all find a place in these discussions. Each, Mr. Bernstein suggests, has roots in a universal language central to all artistic creation. Using certain linguistic analogies, he explores the ways in which this language developed and can be understood as an aesthetic surface. Drawing on his insights as a master composer and conductor, Mr. Bernstein also explores what music means below the surface: the symbols and metaphors which exist in every musical piece, of whatever sort. And, finally, Mr. Bernstein analyzes twentieth century crises in the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, finding even here a transformation of all that has gone before, as part of the poetry of expression, through its roots in the earth of human experience.

These talks, written and delivered when Leonard Bernstein was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, are the newest of the author’s literary achievements. In addition to a distinguished career as conductor, pianist, and composer, Mr. Bernstein is the recipient of many television Emmys for the scripts of his Young People’s Concerts, Omnibus programs, and others, and is the author of The Infinite Variety of Music and The Joy of Music, for which he received the Christopher Award.

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New Images of Musical Sound
Robert Cogan
Harvard University Press, 1984

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On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone
Philip Ewell
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Since its inception in the mid-twentieth century, American music theory has been framed and taught almost exclusively by white men. As a result, whiteness and maleness are woven into the fabric of the field, and BIPOC music theorists face enormous hurdles due to their racial identities. In On Music Theory, Philip Ewell brings together autobiography, music theory and history, and theory and history of race in the United States to offer a black perspective on the state of music theory and to confront the field’s white supremacist roots. Over the course of the book, Ewell undertakes a textbook analysis to unpack the mythologies of whiteness and western-ness with respect to music theory, and gives, for the first time, his perspective on the controversy surrounding the publication of volume 12 of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. He speaks directly about the antiblackness of music theory and the antisemitism of classical music writ large and concludes by offering suggestions about how we move forward. Taking an explicitly antiracist approach to music theory, with this book Ewell begins to create a space in which those who have been marginalized in music theory can thrive.
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The The Theoretical-Practical Elements of Music, Parts III and IV
Francesco Galeazzi Translated with an Introductin and Commentary by Deborah Burton and Gregory W. Harwood
University of Illinois Press, 2012
A virtuoso violinist, conductor, composer, and a professor of mathematics and botany, Francesco Galeazzi (1758–1819) firmly believed that musical education should be clear, demonstrable, and practical. In 1791 and 1796, he published the two volumes of his Elementi teorico-practici di musica, a treatise that demonstrated both his thorough grounding in the work of earlier theorists and his own approach to musical study. The first volume gave precise instructions on the violin and how to play it; the second demonstrated his command of other instruments and genres and provided comprehensive introductions to music theory, music history, and music aesthetics. The treatise also addresses the nature of compositional process and eighteenth-century concerns about natural and acquired talent and creativity.
 
This volume offers an unprecedented English translation of the second volume of Elementi teorico-practici di musica, with annotations and commentary. The translation is introduced with a study of Galeazzi's life and milieu, the genesis and sources for the Elementi, and its reception through the present day.
 
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Solfege, Ear Training, Rhythm, Dictation, and Music Theory
A Comprehensive Course
Marta Arkossy Ghezzo
University of Alabama Press, 1993

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Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past
Edited by Christopher Hatch and David W. Bernstein
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In recent decades, increased specialization has sharply separated music theory from historical musicology. Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past brings together a group of essays—written by theorists and musicologists—that seek to bridge this gap. This collection shows that music theory can join forces with historical musicology to produce a more humanistic form of musical scholarship.

In nineteen essays dealing with musical theories from the twelfth to the twentieth century, two recurring themes emerge. One is the need to understand the historical circumstances of the writing and reception of theory, a humanistic approach that gives theory a place within social and intellectual history. The other is the advantages of applying contemporaneous theory to the music of a given period, thus linking theory to the history of musical styles and structures. The periods given principal attention in these essays are the Renaissance, the years around 1800, and the twentieth century.

Abundantly illustrated with musical examples, Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past offers models of new practical applications of theory to the analysis of music. At the same time, it raises the broader question of how historical knowledge can deepen the understanding of an art and of systematic writings about that art.
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Teaching Approaches in Music Theory, Second Edition
An Overview of Pedagogical Philosophies
Michael R. Rogers
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

Drawing on decades of teaching experience and the collective wisdom of dozens of the most creative theorists in the country, Michael R. Rogers’s diverse survey of music theory—one of the first to comprehensively survey and evaluate the teaching styles, techniques, and materials used in theory courses—is a unique reference and research tool for teachers, theorists, secondary and postsecondary students, and for private study. This revised edition of Teaching Approaches in Music Theory: An Overview of Pedagogical Philosophies features an extensive updated bibliography encompassing the years since the volume was first published in 1984.

In a new preface to this edition, Rogers references advancements in the field over the past two decades, from the appearance of the first scholarly journal devoted entirely to aspects of music theory education to the emergence of electronic advances and devices that will provide a supporting, if not central, role in the teaching of music theory in the foreseeable future. With the updated information, the text continues to provide an excellent starting point for the study of music theory pedagogy.

Rogers has organized the book very much like a sonata. Part one, “Background,” delineates principal ideas and themes, acquaints readers with the author’s views of contemporary musical theory, and includes an orientation to an eclectic range of philosophical thinking on the subject; part two, “Thinking and Listening,” develops these ideas in the specific areas of mindtraining and analysis, including a chapter on ear training; and part three, “Achieving Teaching Success,” recapitulates main points in alternate contexts and surroundings and discusses how they can be applied to teaching and the evaluation of design and curriculum.

Teaching Approaches in Music Theory emphasizes thoughtful examination and critique of the underlying and often tacit assumptions behind textbooks, materials, and technologies. Consistently combining general methods with specific examples and both philosophical and practical reasoning, Rogers compares and contrasts pairs of concepts and teaching approaches, some mutually exclusive and some overlapping. The volume is enhanced by extensive suggested reading lists for each chapter.

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Music and Musical Thought in Early India
Lewis Rowell
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Offering a broad perspective of the philosophy, theory, and aesthetics of early Indian music and musical ideology, this study makes a unique contribution to our knowledge of the ancient foundations of India's musical culture. Lewis Rowell reconstructs the tunings, scales, modes, rhythms, gestures, formal patterns, and genres of Indian music from Vedic times to the thirteenth century, presenting not so much a history as a thematic analysis and interpretation of India's magnificent musical heritage.

In Indian culture, music forms an integral part of a broad framework of ideas that includes philosophy, cosmology, religion, literature, and science. Rowell works with the known theoretical treatises and the oral tradition in an effort to place the technical details of musical practice in their full cultural context. Many quotations from the original Sanskrit appear here in English translation for the first time, and the necessary technical information is presented in terms accessible to the nonspecialist. These features, combined with Rowell's glossary of Sanskrit terms and extensive bibliography, make Music and Musical Thought in Early India an excellent introduction for the general reader and an indispensable reference for ethnomusicologists, historical musicologists, music theorists, and Indologists.
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From Scratch
Writings in Music Theory
James TenneyEdited by Larry Polansky, Lauren Pratt, Robert Wannamaker, and Michael Winter
University of Illinois Press, 2019
One of the twentieth century's most important musical thinkers, James Tenney did pioneering work in multiple fields, including computer music, tuning theory, and algorithmic and computer-assisted composition. From Scratch arranges, edits, and revises Tenney's hard-to-find writings into one indispensable collection. Selections focus on his fundamental concerns—"what the ear hears"—and include thoughts and ideas on perception and form, tuning systems and especially just intonation, information theory, theories of harmonic space, and stochastic (chance) procedures of composition.
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Heartland Excursions
Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music
Bruno Nettl
University of Illinois Press, 1995

In Heartland Excursions, a legendary ethnomusicologist takes the reader along for a delightful, wide-ranging tour of his workplace. Bruno Nettl provides an insightful, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, always pithy ethnography of midwestern university schools of music from a different perspective in each of four chapters, alternating among three distinct voices: the longtime professor, the "native informant," and the outside observer, an "ethnomusicologist from Mars." 

If you've ever been to a concert or been connected to a university with a school of music, you ll discover yourself--or someone you know--in these pages. 

"In the music building you can't tell the quick from the dead without a program."--Chapter 1, "In the Service of the Masters" 

"The great ability of a violin student whom I observed was established when his dean was persuaded to accompany him."--Chapter 2, "Society of Musicians" 

"Some teachers of music history would accuse students who listen to Elvis Presley not only of taking time away from hearing Brahms, but also of polluting themselves."--Chapter 3, "A Place for All Musics?" 

At commencement, the graduates "were perhaps not aware that they had just participated in an event in which the principal values of the Western musical world . . . had been taken out of storage bins for annual exercise."--Chapter 4, "Forays into the Repertory"

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Gallus Dressler's Praecepta musicae poeticae
Gallus Dressler, New Critical Text, Translation, Annotations, and Indices by Robert Forgács
University of Illinois Press, 2007

Now available for the first time in English translation, this new edition of Gallus Dressler's Praecepta musicae poeticae corrects and expands upon earlier editions of one of the most important sixteenth-century treatments of musical theory and rhetoric. Robert Forgács’ detailed study of the Latin text reveals significant and original insights into the invention of fugues and the composition of opening, middle, and concluding sections. Forgács introduces the reader to Dressler's life and work and the design and sources of Praecepta musicae poeticae, places the treatise more fully in its humanist environment, presents additional classical sources for the text, and relates it to the work of Dressler’s contemporary music theorists. Copious annotations and indexes of words, names, and subjects place the treatise within the broader context of German theoretical discussion, the teaching and practice of music in the sixteenth century, and the musical life of the Lutheran Church.

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Composing Music
A New Approach
William Russo
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Aimed at those who have some knowledge of music but not formal training in composition, this concise introduction to composing starts right in with a brief composition exercise, then proceeds step by step through a series of increasingly complex and challenging problems, gradually expanding the student's musical grammar.

"This is a wonderful book for anyone who is developing improvising skills or who would like a fun way to explore music."—Jim Stockford, Co-Evolution Quarterly
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A Listener's Guide to Free Improvisation
John Corbett
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Improvisation rattles some listeners. Maybe they’re even suspicious of it. John Coltrane’s saxophonic flights of fancy, Jimi Hendrix’s feedback drenched guitar solos, Ravi Shankar’s sitar extrapolations—all these sounds seem like so much noodling or jamming, indulgent self-expression. “Just” improvising, as is sometimes said. For these music fans, it seems natural that music is meant to be composed. In the first book of its kind, John Corbett’s A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation provides a how-to manual for the most extreme example of spontaneous improvising: music with no pre-planned material at all. Drawing on over three decades of writing about, presenting, playing, teaching, and studying freely improvised music, Corbett offers an enriching set of tools that show any curious listener how to really listen, and he encourages them to enjoy the human impulse— found all around the world— to make up music on the spot.
           
Corbett equips his reader for a journey into a difficult musical landscape, where there is no steady beat, no pre-ordained format, no overarching melodic or harmonic framework, and where tones can ring with the sharpest of burrs. In “Fundamentals,” he explores key areas of interest, such as how the musicians interact, the malleability of time, overcoming impatience, and watching out for changes and transitions; he grounds these observations in concrete listening exercises, a veritable training regime for musical attentiveness. Then he takes readers deeper in “Advanced Techniques,” plumbing the philosophical conundrums at the heart of free improvisation, including topics such as the influence of the audience and the counterintuitive challenge of listening while asleep. Scattered throughout are helpful and accessible lists of essential resources—recordings, books, videos— and a registry of major practicing free improvisors from Noël Akchoté to John Zorn, particularly essential because this music is best experienced live.
           
The result is a concise, humorous, and inspiring guide, a unique book that will help transform one of the world’s most notoriously unapproachable artforms into a rewarding and enjoyable experience. 
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