New Books in Music

The English Christmas carol has been sung in court and cloister, tavern and field since medieval times. But with the first Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in 1880—and with a view to encouraging revellers into church—the humble carol became integral to the Christmas tradition. Carol concerts are attended all over the world, and the service at King’s College, Cambridge, has been broadcast since 1928 to millions of listeners.

In Christmas Carols: An English Enchantment (Yale University Press, 2026), singer and author John Potter guides us through the development of this unique tradition. Carols, originating as secular delight...

Brass bands have played a unique role in the cultural history of Britain. Amidst the industrial revolution, an increasingly urban population turned to music for mass entertainment. Brass bands became intimately associated with working men and spread across the country at breathtaking speed. At their height in the late Victorian era, there were thousands of them. 

In The Brass Band Story (Yale University Press, 2026), Professor Trevor Herbert reveals the story of these bands, from their working-class origins and the enormous popularity of Victorian contests to their sophistication in modern times. It is a tale of the survival of t...

Our Common Life: Folk Song from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall (U Illinois Press, 2026) by Stephen Wade is part memoir, part meditation on American culture, and part historical narrative of folk music. Wade centers this book around individual musicians and songs that provide a specificity to his discussion that is different from a typical historical survey. These individuals and their stories demonstrate how folklore offers a way of understanding the world. Filled with original research and abundantly illustrated with both color and black and white photography, Our Common Life illuminates the truth that creative freedom within informal t...

How did Anita O'Day-the legendary jazz singer who, along with Chet Baker, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, and Stan Getz, led the so-called "cool school" of modern jazz-define cool?

"That means doing everything that you like to do and getting away with it, you dig?"

Her traits included a frosted tone with a dash of vinegar; a blithe, airy rhythmic sense that could make almost any band swing; an ultra-hip bebop vocabulary; and a wisecracking insouciance, as though all this were just a lark. O'Day emerged in 1941 as a big-band singer whose tough look and take-charge...

Kahlil Joseph has collaborated with musicians FKA twigs, Flying Lotus, Sampha and Shabazz Palaces among many others. He has directed numerous films, music videos and advertisements across Africa, America and Europe. The award-winning filmmaker's disruptive style – which frequently merges visual representations of transcontinental experiences with the countercultural energies of Afrodiasporic music – challenges the Eurocentric biases underpinning Western media. At the same time, his works generate various contradictions and tensions because they are themselves products situated within an economic framework of neoliberal capitalism, at once offering alternative ways of being while, simultaneously, participating in and thereby sustaining the social structures that...

Today’s guest, Christopher Freeburg, is the author of Soul: A Brief History of Black Cultural Life (Yale University Press, 2026). This book explores the US history of black cultural life as a history of soul – a spiritual lived practice rooted in communally fostered music, religion, and politics. It makes the case that soul is forged through black community connections and that it’s sustained by moral principles, or pillars, which define how it is lived. The book’s four chapters are organized around four of these pillars: resonance, revelation, resilience, and transcendence. A number of black individuals are foregrounded in these...

In 1984, Paul Simon was at a professional and personal crossroads. His new marriage was failing and his career was in danger of stalling. He was forty-two, navigating a digital age, searching for inspiration in a scene driven by music videos, synthesizers, and drum machines.
Driving around that summer, a bootleg cassette of “township jive”—the street music of South Africa—kept him company. Lent to him by a friend, it reminded Simon of the sound and the joy of the early days of rock and roll. He began to invent his own lyrics to the groove, and became drawn to...

Hear "American Girl" or "Born in the U.S.A." and, like it or not, chances are you begin to hum along. The soundtrack of grocery stores, pool halls, bowling alleys, flea markets, chain restaurants, drug stores, and political rallies--heartland rock, while beloved by some and derided by others, is inescapable even today. As rollicking as the music it describes, acclaimed music critic Erin Osmon's Won't Back Down: Heartland Rock and the Fight for America (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026) tells the story of the origins, chart-topping development, and tangled legacy of heartland rock, the music that ruled the airwaves...

The first large number of Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in the 1840s, and Chinese opera troupes were not far behind. In Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth Century California and Beyond (U Illinois Press, 2025), Nancy Yunhwa Rao writes the story of the flourishing and resiliency of Chinese opera in America. Chinese opera troupes brought with them an important cultural reminder of China that helped immigrants to build community and maintain connections with their old home in their new one. At the same time, anti-Chinese violence, legislation, and prejudice was a constant and growing...

Robyn Hitchcock's second memoir, Stranded in the Future (Akashic Books, 2026), explores the formation of his seminal 1970s band the Soft Boys, and the obsessions that fueled his early creative output. Stranded in the Future is a kind of dystopian self-portrait. It's about obsession, and obsessive behavior. Spanning from 1968 to 1978, it takes in the mythology surrounding Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett (though it doesn't name him) and hinges on Robyn Hitchcock's teenage girlfriend (she isn't named either). The book explores the way that Hitchcock, in his own head, linked these two figures to each other, although they never actually met. On...

Most of the Yiddish songs we know today were created in the first half of the 20th century and distributed through commercial channels such as sheet music, concerts, radio broadcasts, records and CDs, theater stages, and more recently through songbooks produced in educational settings around the world. Our discussion focuses on lesser-known songs – Eastern Yiddish musical folklore, which emerged over a period of approximately four hundred years preceding the formation of the “popular” repertoire. Although we lack transcriptions of melodies or lyrics from before the end of the 19th century, a comparative study of documentation collected from then until the mi...

The Military Entertainment Complex: Chimurenga Afrosonic Making of Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2026) by Dr. Mhoze Chikowero is the story of the making of post-independence Zimbabwe from the sounds and songs born of the country’s armed liberation wars, waged against British Rhodesian white settler rule since the 1890s.
The war from 1896 through the twentieth century to resist the initial colonization, as well as the one waged to reclaim land from the colonial farmers in the 2000s, is known as Chimurenga, and the music it produced is thus called Chimurenga music. The sounds and music were Afrosonic—that is, deeply grou...

Scott Peeple's How Many Roads: A Life of Bob Dylan (Reaktion, 2026) chronicles Bob Dylan’s rise from apprenticeships in Minneapolis cafés and Greenwich Village folk clubs to international stardom as a breathtakingly original songwriter and singer. Scott Peeples follows Dylan through decades of radical shifts in his writing, recording and performing styles, from the intimate lo-fi Basement Tapes to the musical collage art and apocalyptic blues of the twenty-first century. Spanning Dylan’s entire career, How Many Roads illuminates Dylan’s deep respect for tradition alongside his artistic restlessness, a combination that extends into his prose writing, filmmaking and vis...

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with writer and researcher, Jehnie I. Burns about her book, Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation (Lexington, 2023). This conversation builds on earlier ones on music and technology, especially our earlier episode with Anthony Kwame Harrison about the ethnography of hiphop. Vinsel and Burns chat about the rise of mixtape culture, how it played out in different subcultures, and how it was wrapped up in and transformed by technological change. We also announce some big news at the beginning of the episode.

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The Bartered Bride, a comic opera by Bedrich Smetana, premiered in Prague on March 30, 1866. Its pastoral love story and setting in a rural Czech village eventually became an enduring symbol of Czech nationalism. In Visions of the Village: Ruralness, Identity, and Czech Opera (Oxford University Press, 2025), Christopher Campo-Bowen examines how a particular image of the rural village in a set of Czech operas written between 1866 and 1904 became a powerful signifier for Czech ethnoracial and nationalist identity. He follows this conception of Czech identity and its entanglement with opera through the political changes in the years when the Czech lands...

Rock 'n' roll appeared in the 1950s as the high-energy, electrically amplified music of young dancers and listeners, first in the United States and then around the globe, and from the beginning it symbolized more than music. First popularized as a marketing rubric to sell African-American rhythm and blues to white teenagers, it stood for racial integration, sexual freedom, youthful rebellion, and for change and modernity. It was never a single kind of music, and historians disagree about when it began and which artists or records should be included in its canon--but it was always a flashpoint, whether condemned...

Stacey Copeland, Assistant Professor of Cultural Heritage and Identity at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen, joins Jana Byars to talk about⁠ Lavender Sounds: From Lesbian Radio to Queer Feminist Soundwork⁠ (University of Michigan Press, 2026) delves into lesbian radio history and its evolution into queer feminist podcasting today, exploring the politics, aesthetics, and cultural activism embedded in queer feminist soundwork. Through deeply personal and archival explorations, Stacey Copeland traces the emergence of queer feminist soundwork—a unique blend of community-led storytelling, political resistance, and creative expression rooted in feminist and LGBTQ+ activism. At the he...

Ella Jenkins (1924–2024) was one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century, although many people have never heard of her. A pioneer in children’s music and an innovative educator, Jenkins recorded forty albums and influenced countless children and adults over a sixty-year career. Gayle Wald places Jenkins’s life and work within the larger contexts of the civil rights movement, the folk revival, and the changing worlds of children’s education and entertainment in This is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Committed to civil rights, Jenkins infused he...

This panel discussion will explore the remarkable influence of Latin American music and dance on the culture of Yiddish speaking communities in the United States. Ronald Robboy will discuss Latin American musical influences upon Yiddish theater composers, including Sholom Secunda, Abraham Ellstein, and Alexander Olshanetsky; Sonia Gollance will discuss the popularity of dances like the Tango and Mambo in the Borscht Belt, as exemplified by movies like Dirty Dancing and Mamboniks; and Josh Kun will discuss the influence of Latin American music on post-war Jewish music and the influence of Jewish music on U.S. Latino/a artists.

T...

With his shag haircut and white Stratocaster guitar, Jeff Beck was an icon known and loved by millions. Yet somehow, he maintained the ineffable low profile cool of a cult hero as he glided through six decades of musical trends with nary a lapse in taste. Not to say he ever played it safe. What other guitarist can lay claim to performing with opera star Luciano Pavarotti, mainstream television personality Kelly Clarkson, and professional degenerates like Guns N’ Roses with equal grace and wit? Or as Beck himself once quipped, “I’m an awkward son of a bitch when it com...

Minimalist Music (Bloomsbury, 2026) looks critically into the music's past, shows how the genre thrives across styles, and points the way toward minimalism's ongoing future.

Minimalism as a genre is best defined not by any style or flavor but by its means. Certain rhythms and chords in other music may identify things like jazz or bossa nova or reggae; take those same elements and put them through the processes of minimalism and you have minimalism with the hues of other musics.

A still young genre with ancient roots, minimalism is much less any kind of style...

Who gets to be a creative worker? In Blame the Intern: On (Not) Breaking Into the Creative Economy, (Princeton University Press, 2026) Alexandre Frenette, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University, examines the relationship between work and education in the difficult moment of the early career transition from university to industry. Drawing on a detailed case study of the music industry, the book explains and critiques the way internships have come to dominate routes into many careers in contemporary society. An accessible yet theoretically rich read, the book will be of interest to creative workers at any point in the...

Owning My Masters (Mastered) is a digital archive of original rap music and spoken word poetry containing two volumes of music, an annotated timeline, videos, and a digital book. In this project, A.D. Carson exposes the artificial boundaries imposed on understood ideas about knowledge production in academia by employing hip-hop creative and compositional practices to interrogate ideas of citizenship, history, historical imagination, race, home, and humanness. Using sampled and live instrumentation and repurposed music, film, and news clips, an introductory video, and original rap lyrics, heoffers a new examination of how to create theory through hip-hop.

The unma...

This episode features a conversation with Carnatic vocalist, T.M. Krishna, who is also the author of two books on this musical tradition. We began with his first book’s account of the modernization of Carnatic music through a set of social, technical, and spatial processes that transformed it from a more socially diverse practice into a predominantly Brahmin performative genre. We moved on to discuss a figure who is at the heart of his second book: the maker of the Carnatic percussion instrument, the mrdangam. This took us into an extended discussion of the changing relationship between mrdangam ma...

Philip Norman's latest biography, Mr. Moonlight (DaCapo Press, 2026) is the definitive, comprehensive biography of Brian Epstein--the man who built the Beatles. There will never be another pop manager like Brian Epstein, the young record-retailer from Liverpool behind the 20th century's greatest romance. Having achieved his much-derided aim of making the Beatles "bigger than Elvis," Brian went on to make them bigger than any earthly instrument could measure. Only a handful of years older, he nonetheless referred them as "the Boys," protecting and pampering them like the children he could never hope to have. Due to his homosexuality--and possibly his Je...

1. A complete list of University of California Press journals is available at UC Press Journals

2. Clare E. B. Cannon; Advancing sustainable transitions: A spatial analysis of socio-environmental dynamics of landfills across the United States. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12 January 2024; 12 (1): 00101: Link

3. Morrison, Matthew D. Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024. Available at: UC Press Bookstore

4. Matthew D. Morrison; Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2019; 72 (3): 781–823: Link

6. Jennifer Lynn Peterson; Scenes of Destruction and Beauty...

Sanskrit hymns of praise (stotra/stuti/stava) have been popular and influential within multiple religious traditions for thousands of years. Sanskrit hymns remain lively, meaningful parts of the religious lives of countless Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains today, and new stotras continue to be composed and recited around the world. The academic study of these hymns has made notable progress in recent decades as scholars have paid increasing attention to such compositions. A valuable pedagogical resource for educators teaching about Asian religions and literature, especially in comparative contexts, Sanskrit Hymns Across Traditions: Studying Stotras (Routledge, 2026) also establishes the foundation for futur...

In 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) marked its 60th anniversary. Created amid the optimism and urgency of the civil rights era, HUD embodied a bipartisan commitment to building stronger, more integrated, and equitable cities. How did that vision unfold alongside the music, culture, and politics that shaped urban life?

Street Level, a special audio documentary episode of Soundscapes NYC, explores the intertwined histories of urban policy, housing, and popular culture in the years following HUD’s establishment. Through archival recordings, immersive sound design, and music drawn from the neighborhoods most affected by fede...

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and today we react to Olivia Rodrigo's new album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. We analyze the lyrics and the aesthetics of the album, including the notable influence of The Cure and 80s British New Wave in particular. We offer an appreciation of Rodrigo's commitment to song craft and to live performance. And we note with pleasure that, perhaps unusually for a contemporary pop release, this album works as a coherent set of songs placed in an intentional order and with a defined narrative.

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The premiere of Oklahoma! in 1943 is commonly called a “turning point” in the history of the Broadway musical. Often characterized as the first integrated musical―meaning that the songs and other elements of the show are integrated into the story―James O’Leary offers a different interpretation of Oklahoma! and other musicals at the beginning of Broadway’s Golden Age in The Middlebrow Musical: Between Broadway and Opera in 1940s America (Oxford University Press, 2025). Contextualizing his discussion within debates among US critics, O’Leary argues that the negotiation between operatic and popular music, and between frothy comedy and more serious themes...

There is no shortage of books on music and politics, but Anna Harwell Celenza explores an interesting premise in her book On the Record: Music that Changed America (Norton, 2026). Each of the twelve chapters discusses a different instance when music, as Celenza writes, “sparked debates in the halls of Congress.” Arranged basically chronologically, Celenza tackles some of the most powerful and contentious issues in twentieth and twenty-first century American politics. From censorship to copyright law; from the Civil Rights Movement, to foreign policy during Apartheid, Celenza traces the extraordinary moments when music moved Congress, challenged power, and united people around...

How the sound of the female playback voice impacts Bollywood's cultural, musical, and cinematic environment.

Drawing on sound studies and performance theory, scholar Shikha Jhingan explores the discursive nature of the female playback voice in Bombay film songs in The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema: Voice, Body, Technology (Wayne State UP, 2025). Mapping the production, circulation, and reception of the voices of singing stars—notably Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle—Jhingan situates the singing voice as a cinematic object with limitless possibilities of distribution and dispersal. She employs the perspectives of a diverse range of listeners across a vast med...

More than 40 years after her death, the legend of Maria Callas, "La Divina Assoluta," remains unsurpassed. Much has been written about her sensational opera career and fraught private life, from her definitive mastery of iconic opera roles to her love affairs and tantrums. The prototype for the 20th century celebrity diva, Callas emblematizes the cliche of tormented talent - genius in the ring with catastrophe.

Her extraordinary voice, in particular, has become an object of cult-like adoration and cultural significance almost with a life of its own: as fetish object, as sophisticated sonic signifier, and most recently...

In this illuminating conversation with librarian-author Mary R. Lanni, we celebrate her brand new book, Using Nursery Rhymes with Today’s Kids: Their Legacy and Evolution (Bloomsbury, 2026). Mary is a professional librarian in Denver, Colorado, USA. She is also co-author of Early Learning Through Play: Library Programming for Diverse Communities (Libraries Unlimited, 2019). We talk about the potentially sordid history of famous nursery rhymes, and the possibility of supplanting problematic ancient poems with new, inclusive songs.

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It is a compulsion of the human race to find a way to memorialize those we have lost and why we have lost them, from a gravestone of a loved one to war monuments that honor thousands who died in battle. In Audible Loss: New Music and the Crisis of Memory (Fordham UP, 2025), Andrea Zarafshon Moore examines how contemporary music has been used to memorialize three recent crises in the United States: the AIDS crisis, 9-11, and ongoing anti-Black violence. Moore reads these crises and the music that memorializes them to reveal the ways the are methodologically and ideologically sim...

Explores the profound power of music to influence brain function and well-being.

IPA 2026 Distinguished Favorite in the Music Category

Why does music influence how we feel so deeply--and what are the scientific mechanisms behind this phenomenon? In Music Between Your Ears: How Musical Engagement Powers the Human Brain (JHU Press, 2025) Dr. Samuel Markind explores the intriguing relationship between music and brain function. Using evolutionary theory, he illuminates the pivotal role that music plays in human survival and procreation. From communication and caregiving to social bonding and partner selection, music has molded the human species and conti...

Reverberations of Culture: Racialized Performance in Early Twentieth-Century Musical Variety by Just a Buncha Clowns (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Shane Breaux examines musical variety clowns and the broad array of racial and ethnic impersonations they performed on four distinct touring circuits and apparatuses: the African American Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA), the Chinese American so-called Chop Suey Circuit, the Mexican and Mexican American carpas tours, and Country American barn dances.

This book explores the overlooked history of touring clown performers in early twentieth-century musical variety shows, addressing both their historical marginalization and their significant impact on popular entertainment. B...

The YIVO Sound Archive houses over 20,000 recordings (including 78, 45, and 33rpm discs, open-reel and cassette tapes, piano rolls, and compact discs and other digital formats) as well as various artifacts related to sound recordings. It is is one of the most extensive and frequently consulted Jewish music collections in the world, embracing Yiddish and Hebrew folk, pop and theater music, Holocaust songs, liturgical, choral and instrumental compositions and, of course, klezmer music, as well as spoken word, oral histories, interviews, and radio programs. In addition to serving researchers, the Sound Archive maintains a special link to the Yiddish cultural world...

Amongst the many achievements of the Castilian court of King Alfonso X (1221-184) is the Cantigas de Santa Maria, a collection of 429 songs preserved in four manuscripts. In The Cantigas de Santa Maria: Power and Persuasion at the Alfonsine Court (Oxford UP, 2024) Henry T. Drummon re-examines a subsection of this collection, the cantigas de miragre. These songs set miracle narratives to recursive, refrain-based musical structures. By situating the musical and poetic form of the cantigas de miragre against the backdrop of discourses about rhetoric animating 13th-century intellectual life, Drummond shows how these songs worked to communicate propagandistic messages on behalf of...

In What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To (U Minnesota Press, 2025) an iconic rock DJ of the Twin Cities tells her harrowing story of being stalked while living her very public life What's it like to be in the public spotlight when it just might get you killed? For Mary Lucia, becoming a wildly popular rock DJ meant connecting with a multitude of fans through a shared love of music and deep cuts. But for one listener, that connection became a dangerous obsession, catapulting Lucia into the terrifying three-year nightmare that she chronicles in th...