Critics haven’t really loved Sia’s album of Christmas originals, Everyday is Christmas. For that matter, neither have listeners, as Everyday’s metacritic score is lagging significantly behind her other albums. Katherine St. Asaph at Pitchfork describes the listening experience as being “like opening a gift where someone’s forgotten to remove the… Read More
By J. Griffith Rollefson… Read More
by David Brackett [Author note: This excerpt contains excerpts from chapters one and nine.] Like many readers of this blog, after I tell people that I’m a musicologist I’m frequently asked about what type of music I study. I usually answer something like “mostly… Read More
[Ed. Note: This is the fourth of five posts in a series where teacher/scholars reflect on the challenges and opportunities of teaching music after… Read More
by Imani Mosley… Read More
by Eliot Bates Digital Tradition: Arrangement and Labor in Istanbul’s Recording Studio Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016), a book supported in part by an AMS subvention grant, is the culmination of research I’ve been conducting since 2004, including more than two years spent within… Read More
Bubblegum pop poster boy. Sophisticated soul singer. Political critic. Reluctant gay icon. Covert philanthropist. These are some of the epithets attached to George Michael, whose death on 25 December 2016 came near the end of last year’s seemingly endless list of casualties. Throughout his career, George… Read More
by Dale Cockrell Note: Our sister Society for American Music held its 2015 annual meeting in Sacramento, 4–8 March. Among the featured events was a concert by Anonymous 4 with guest instrumentalist/vocalist Bruce Molsky, titled 1865: Songs of Hope and Home from the American Civil War. The pre-concert lecture… Read More
by W. Anthony Sheppard NOTE: Here we post Tony Sheppard’s recent TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk “Pop Orientalism: Tin Pan Alley to Taiwan Today.” (Wikipedia entry on TED and TEDx HERE.) The talk considers musical representations of East Asians and of Asian music from the late nineteenth… Read More
by John Covach New York promoter Sid Bernstein called himself “the man who brought the Beatles to America.”<1> Bernstein’s oft-told story of how he came to book the Beatles for two performances in Carnegie Hall on February 12, 1964, however, has been questioned by at least one expert.<2> The chief… Read More