Music : a subversive history

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

Music : a subversive history

Ted Gioia

Basic Books, 2019

  • : hbk

Available at  / 1 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 473-487) and index

Contents of Works

  • Introduction
  • The origin of music as a force of creative destruction
  • Carnivores at the Philharmonic
  • In search of a universal music
  • Music history as a battle between magic and mathematics
  • Bulls and sex toys
  • The storyteller
  • The invention of the singer
  • The shame of music
  • Unmanly music
  • The devil's songs
  • Oppression and musical innovation
  • Not all wizards carry wands
  • The invention of the audience
  • Musicians behaving badly
  • The origins of the music business
  • Culture wars
  • Subversives in wigs
  • You say you want a revolution?
  • The great flip-flop
  • The aesthetics of diaspora
  • Black music and the great American lifestyle crisis
  • Rebellion goes mainstream
  • Funky butt
  • The origins of country music in the neolithic era
  • Where did our love go?
  • The sacrificial ritual
  • Rappers and technocrats
  • Welcome our new overlords
  • Epilogue: This is not a manifesto

Description and Table of Contents

Description

The phrase "music history" likely summons up images of long-dead composers, smug men in wigs and waistcoats, and people dancing without touching. In Music: A Subversive History, Gioia responds to the false notions that undergird this tedium. Traditional histories of music, Gioia contents, downplay those elements of music that are considered disreputable or irrational-its deep connections to sexuality, magic, trance and alternative mind states, healing, social control, generational conflict, political unrest, even violence and murder. They suppress the stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions and instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact and disguised their sources. Here, Gioia attempts to reclaim music history for the riffraff, the insurgents and provocateurs - the real drivers of change and innovation. In Music, Gioia tells the four-thousand-year history of music as a source of power, change, upheaval and enchantment. He starts by exploring humanity's first instruments, which were closely linked to the food chain: the first horns were animal horns, our earliest string instrument was a hunter's bow and our oldest known instrument, the Neanderthal flute, was constructed from a bear femur. He turns to neuroscience to explain why the Celtic love story of Tristan and Iseult echoes the eleventh century Gorgani Persian love epic about Vis and Ramin, or why the troubadours of Europe echo artisan singers of ancient Egypt. He investigates the idea of "song as sin" as Church leaders for the first thousand years of Christianity attempted to control and suppress the songs of the common people and he explains the shift of music from a social practice to an economic enterprise during the Renaissance. Gioia shows how social outcasts have repeatedly become the great trailblazers of musical expression: slaves and their descendants, for instance, have repeatedly reinvented music in America and elsewhere, from ragtime, blues, jazz, R&B, to bossa nova, soul and hip hop. A revolutionary and revisionist account, Music: A Subversive History will be essential reading for anyone interested in the meaning of music.

by "Nielsen BookData"

Details

Page Top