A note from Executive Editor, Andrea F. Bohlman Musicology Now is undergoing construction until the end of 2020. We will return in early 2021 with a website redesign and a new mission to share and broaden the work of the American Musicological Society… Read More
These days, you can’t bump the radio dial without Angela Lansbury’s matronly voice commanding we haul out that holly, just this very minute. The song is familiar… Read More
In the summer 2011 edition of JAMS, Ralph P. Locke ruminates on what he describes as musicology’s recent concern with the idea that music exists ”in and for a ‘community’ of practitioners and listeners.” As an example, the journal dedicates its discussion… Read More
By Jeremy Orosz “Old Town Road,” a country-trap<1> hit by 20-year-old rapper Lil Nas X, has become the unofficial soundtrack of 2019.<2> The song has held the coveted top spot on the US Billboard Hot 100 for the past 13 weeks—a feat… Read More
In one of the final scenes of Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2019), the camera sweeps around Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr.) memorial service, panning across generations of Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) characters, played by some of the most famous Hollywood stars. Read More
Avengers: Endgame is an unapologetic love letter to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s ( MCU’s) past, celebrating the growth that each hero has sustained over the twenty-two film franchise. Set five years after the cataclysmic events of Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Endgame sees the defeated… Read More
Recently I spoke to a reporter about the controversy over singer Kate Smith (1907–1986). Although I have written about American popular music of the 1930s and 40s and its racial politics, I have not written specifically on Kate Smith. A radio, recording,… Read More
There is a lot to unpack in Avengers: Endgame, which serves as a means to tie a ribbon on more than a decade of Marvel films while hinting at what is in the future for the studio. Alan Silvestri, now scoring his fourth Marvel… Read More
Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and directors Anthony Russo and Joseph V. Russo (collectively the Russo Brothers) have been notorious for their reluctance to give away anything that would spoil their films. Thus for Avengers: Endgame—title withheld until the end of the first trailer—they “almost opted for a… Read More
When Susan Thomas recently suggested the opportunity for a new Quick Takes blog series, I immediately thought of the Avengers: Endgame release, both as a major cinematic and musical event and as the ostensible final chapter in this phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Read More