lit masterpost
as “a music theorist” a lot of what i read is basically a really specific slice of sociology, which may be of interest to folks here, so: here’s my reading list for comprehensive exams (skimming / intros & conclusions for now and i’m going to try and do more of a deep dive later). starred stuff is on zee lib btw (which, if you recall, still exists but under that new format where you sign up for a personal domain link). non-starred stuff might be on there too; idk (haven’t checked yet; i have some of these in physical form from my library). this stuff is all about genre theory, popular/classical crossover, music recording/production, and economics.
*adorno - current of music
*adorno - introduction to the sociology of music
*attali - noise: the political economy of music
*benjamin - “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” [a classic!]
born - rationalizing culture: ircam, boulez, and the institutionalization of the musical avant-garde
born & haworth - “from microsound to vaporwave: internet-mediated musics, online methods, and genre” [really good. plenty of old vaporwave bloggers on tumblr.edu make cameos, which is entertaining, but it’s basically about the construction of diff electronic genres around diff aesthetic values, methods of file-sharing, & community organizational properties]
brackett - categorizing sound: genre and twentieth-century popular music
burgess - the history of music production
chapman - “the one-man band and entrepreneurial selfhood in neoliberal culture”
*drott - “the end(s) of genre”
echard - psychedelic popular music
*eisenberg - the recording angel: music, records, and culture from aristotle to zappa
fabbri - “a theory of musical genres: two applications”
fellezs - birds of fire: jazz, rock, funk, and the creation of fusion
frow - genre
gjerdingen & perrott - “scanning the dial: the rapid recognition of music genres”
holt - genre in popular music
johnson - “analyzing genre in post-millennial popular music”
*kittler - discourse networks 1800/1900
*kraft - stage to studio: musicians and the sound revolution, 1890-1950
kronengold - living genres in late modernity: american music of the long 1970s
moore - “neoliberalism and the musical entrepreneur” [side note. spellcheck did not recognize the term “neoliberalism,” lol??]
negus - music genres and corporate cultures
*ritchey - composing capital: classical music in the neoliberal era
robin - “balance problems: neoliberalism and new music in the american university and ensemble”
robin - industry: bang on a can and new music in the marketplace
sterne - the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction
waksman - this ain’t the summer of love: conflict and crossover in heavy metal and punk
*williams - marxism and literature
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the thing is. it is indeed nprcore, and not JUST because of what music the individual tastemakers at npr/tiny desk happened to like at the time, and not JUST because npr is public radio whose money comes from the corporation for public broadcasting + whose member stations are owned by nonprofits w/educational ties, but ALSO because classical instrumentalism and presentational format and no audience noise and Verified Check Mark sound-source mapping and loop pedal grooves and "this performance contains explicit language and may not be suitable for all audiences" and concert black and jeans/flannel and travel mugs and left the camera running but also cut to somebody's hands shredding a flute etc.
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i think the thing about arcade fire is i find almost all of their music that i've heard to be ridiculously corny with a few tracks being, like, ok enough to transcend the inherent corn for me (sprawl ii). but they seemed to be the most iconic early/mid 2010s musicians to like successfully exist at the nexus of mumfordish stompclap, singer-songwriter-"literary"-bon-iver/fleetfoxism that was still commercially distributed (pitchfork/nprcore), and the thing people typically mean by "indie classical" which was individual orchestrators/arrangers/composers getting employed in the brooklyn-centric ymusic cinematic universe (or sort of the next wave of That Stuff after bang on a can - "cool" and "daring" classical musicians with portfolio careers getting booked in traditional concert venues).
generalizing here, but i think the majority of artistic projects* in the latter two categories would not touch stompclap with a ten foot pole for pretty clear reasons (metric & formal inflexibility, communal participation vibes, incompatibility with venue, lower emphasis on virtuosity, boomy wall-of-sound mixing, anthemic/prescriptive affect vs. idiosyncratic/expressive affect, etc). and even if the musical "type of thing" was similar in some fashion like body percussion or chorused vocals etc they would go about it in a way that was broadly uncharacteristic of stompclap. if you're tune-yards for example (someone i would situate in the npr-core part of this fake continuum) then you're not going to actually use a choir effect that mimics a big singalong with indistinct/anonymized voices; instead you're going to multitrack yourselves and hire roomful of teeth to do the backing vocals. actually multitracking and live looping are/were Huge... also i feel like collegiate a cappella had its moment around this same time (?) on the poppier side of things... hence stuff like the ben folds record that was all collegiate a cappella versions of his music. hm. anyway
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[ID: side-by-side screenshot of the titles and authors of two texts: Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture by Philip Auslander, and “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane” by Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut. end ID]
choose your fighter. lol
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music that is structurally/sonically pedagogical (introducing digestible modules, using repetition, slowly layering in timbral & textural complexity, teaching the listener about itself as it unfolds), and that harnesses this pedagogical sound as a complement to political lyrics, including & especially as satire/critique of political doctrine (i.e., mimicking political pedagogy by mock-immersing the listener in such, but in such a way that you can feel yourself becoming immersed and can hear the mechanics of your own immersion)
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students are writing a cantus firmus (which is a melody you use for the basis of bigger pieces of music, basically a musical line to write other lines against later). and so far they’re great! but it is also so funny how many of them have autocorrected to “cactus” in the title / file name. even in my own notes app i have “grade cactus firms” as a to-do item
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