New Books in Performing Arts

The Bond movies have influenced portrayals of masculinity and femininity for decades, but the Daniel Craig-era saw a revolution in depictions of sex, gender, and inclusivity. The UConn PopCast discusses with Professor Susan Burgess, author of LGBT Inclusion in American Life: Pop Culture, Political Imagination, and Civil Rights (NYU Press, 2023)

The UConn PopCast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Learn about our MA Program.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Of all the musical developments of rock in the 1960s, one in particular fundamentally changed the music’s structure and listening experience: the incorporation of extended improvisation into live performances. While many bands—including Cream, Pink Floyd, and the Velvet Underground—stretched out their songs with improvisations, no band was more identified with the practice than the Grateful Dead.

In Get Shown the Light: Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead (Duke UP, 2023), Michael Kaler examines how the Dead’s dedication to improvisation stemmed from their belief that playing in this manner enabled them to touch upon transcendence. Drawing on band testimonials and analyses of early recordings, Kaler traces how the Dead developed an approach to playing music that they believed would facilitate their spiritual goals. He focuses on the band’s early years, the significance of their playing Ken Kesey’s Acid Test parties, and their evolving exploration of the myriad musical and spiritual possibilities that extended improvisation afforded. Kaler demonstrates that the Grateful Dead developed a radical new way of playing rock music as a means to unleash the spiritual and transformative potential of their music.

Michael Kaler is Associate Professor, teaching stream, at the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy at the University of Toronto Mississauga and author of Flora Tells a Story: The Apocalypse of Paul and Its Contexts.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ask anyone outside of Austin what they know about the city and chances are the first thing they'll mention is the music. While the Armadillo Era has been well-chronicled, there is no book about Austin music in the 90s. In their new book, A Curious Mix of People: The Underground Scene of '90s Austin (University of Texas Press, 2023), veterans of the sccene Greg Beets and Richard Whymark have put together an oral history of the decade. Beets and Whymark are not trying to cover all of the music made in Austin during the 1990s; they're most interested in the underground/punk community in which they participated. While a few of those bands got big (e.g., Spoon), the music remained mostly local, DIY. It was driven by live shows, though local media (radio, TV, print), record stores, and a few labels were also important to the story. Beets and Whymark devote chapters to those elements, but almost half of the chapters are based around a particular club. Organizing the book around physical spaces is not only appropriate for telling the story of the music, it is nice framing for the larger story of Austin. As the authors note, the city was still a relatively sleepy place in the early 1990s, with vacant blocks downtown and loads of small clubs that opened and closed simply because music-minded people wanted a place to play. By 1999, longtime venues like the Electric Lounge and Liberty Lunch were bulldozed to make way for development and tech companies.

Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, I am happy to be interviewing historian and author Dr. Jacqueline R. Braitman about her very engaging biography, She Damn Near Ran the Studio: The Extraordinary Lives of Ida R. Koverman (University Press of Mississippi, 2020).

This very detailed and comprehensively researched book tells the story of Ida Koverman, whose life was almost accidentally remarkable. She was not only Louis B. Mayer’s gatekeeper at MGM for over two decades but also a major mover and shaker in the conservative wing of the California Republican party throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Coming from humble beginnings in Ohio, when Ulysses S. Grant was president, Koverman worked tirelessly to elect Herbert Hoover to the White House. In addition, she made a remarkable contribution to American culture, scouting and nurturing the iconic stars of the future at MGM, while also acting as a spokesperson for the studio and its relationship to the politicians of the day.

In this interview, Dr. Braitman describes how she came to admire Ida Koverman, whose politics are far to the right of the author’s views, and how she was met with surprises throughout the years-long process of writing She Damn Near Ran the Studio.

I hope you’ll join me for this engaging and informative conversation with Dr. Jacqueline R. Braitman.

Bruce Shapiro is a recently retired professor of theater at several universities, primarily in the areas of drama, directing and acting.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The role of music during the German occupation of Norway (1940-45) proves to be an exceptional case for cultural opposition in a dictatorship. Few famous musicians, some local celebrities and innumerous hardly known activists preferred artistic instead of militant means to demonstrate reluctance, spread information, contradict the legitimacy of the German occupants and raise the moral strength of fellow countrymen in Norway and abroad, while risking to be caught, incarcerated and driven into exile. The indispensable advantage was the popular belief of art as an apolitical matter so that music even could reach into fields that would have been inaccessible to open political agitation. 

Based on considerable findings in public archives and private collections, Michael Custodis' Music and Resistance: Cultural Defense During the German Occupation of Norway 1940-45 (Waxmann Verlag, 2021) discusses music in concentration camps in Norway and the fate of Jewish musicians, portrays choirs, military ensembles, orchestral and church music in Norway. It further analyzes Harald Sæverud's 5th symphony and Moses Pergament's choir symphony Den judiska sången, illustrates the exile of musicians in Stockholm and discusses resistance music in historic media such as the Errol Flynn-movie Edge of Darkness (1943), recapitulated by a model for music as resistance.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Recall This Book listeners already know the inimitable Martin Puchner (Professor of English and Theater at Harvard, editor of more than one Norton Anthology, and author of many prizewinning books) from that fabulous RTB episode about his “deep history” of literature and literacy, The Written World. And you know his feelings about Wodehouse from his Books in Dark Times confessions.

Today you get to hear his views on culture as mediation and translation, all the way down. His utterly fascinating new book, Culture: The Story of Us from Cave Art to K Pop (Norton, 2023) argues that mediators, translators and transmitters are not just essential supplements, they are the whole kit and kaboodle—it is borrowing and appropriation all the way down.

Mentioned in the episode:

Recallable Books: 



Read the episode here.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2023) investigates how northern French vernacular poets and musicians writing in the late middle ages expressed relationships between people and their environments. It explores medieval French song through the critical and disciplinary lenses of ecocriticism and environmental history. The repertoire under scrutiny embraces the gamut of forms and genres of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French music, considering the songs of the trouvères, the ars antiqua motet, the formes fixes, the plays of Adam de la Halle, and the lyric-infused narrative poetry of Guillaume de Machaut. Although these works have never before been conceptualized as a corpus of nature poetry, they routinely evoke nature and the outdoors. They feature the gardens, meadows, and trees found in the countryside that many of their authors inhabited, and they conceptualize nature as crucial to poetic inspiration, to the fulfillment of desire, and as a space symbolic of the sacred. Through a deep contextualization of these songs and the people who wrote them, Song, Landscape, and Identity offers a novel account that demonstrates how song could present modalities of engagement with nature that were determined by geography, gender, and status. Key questions include: How realistic is the nature imagery in these songs? What ways of interaction with a landscape do they encourage? Where, and for whom, were such experiences available? The answers to these questions reposition medieval song as a privileged vehicle through which songwriters expressed relationships between nature, place, and class.

Jennifer Saltzstein is a Presidential Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches courses on the music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque eras. She is author of The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013) and editor of Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

Áine Palmer is a PhD candidate in Music History at Yale University. Her work considers trouvère song and the anthologies that collect them in the long thirteenth century.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The remarkable, must-read story of Charlie Chaplin’s years of exile from the United States during the postwar Red Scare, and how it ruined his film career, from bestselling biographer Scott Eyman.

Bestselling Hollywood biographer and film historian Scott Eyman tells the story of Charlie Chaplin’s fall from grace. In the aftermath of World War Two, Chaplin was criticized for being politically liberal and internationalist in outlook. He had never become a US citizen, something that would be held against him as xenophobia set in when the postwar Red Scare took hold.

Politics aside, Chaplin had another problem: his sexual interest in young women. He had been married three times and had had numerous affairs. In the 1940s, he was the subject of a paternity suit, which he lost, despite blood tests that proved he was not the father. His sexuality became a convenient way for those who opposed his politics to condemn him. Refused permission to return to the US from a trip abroad, he settled in Switzerland, and made his last two films in London

In Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided (Simon & Schuster, 2023), bestselling author Scott Eyman explores the life and times of the movie genius who brought us such masterpieces as City Lights and Modern Times. This is a perceptive, insightful portrait of Chaplin and of an America consumed by political turmoil.

Scott Eyman was formerly the literary critic at The Palm Beach Post and is the author or coauthor of sixteen books, including the bestseller John Wayne and You Must Remember This with actor Robert Wagner. Eyman also writes book reviews for The Wall Street Journal, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. He and his wife, Lynn, live in West Palm Beach.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Is art education worthwhile? In The Value of Art Education: Cultural Engagements at the Swedish Folk High Schools (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), Henrik Fürst, Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Stockholm University and Erik Nylander, Associate Professor in Education at Linköping University, explore this question using the case study of a unique form of educational institution in Sweden. Drawing on a project that examined questions of admissions, teaching, assessments, students’ experiences, and the value and values of art itself, the research delivers a comprehensive picture of why and how art education matters. Rich in detail and offering more general reflections on the importance of the arts, the book is essential reading across the social sciences and humanities, as well as for those interested in defending arts education.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Part 3 features close-readings from Professor Laurie Maguire of some of the play’s key speeches: Caliban’s extraordinarily lyrical description of the island; Prospero’s beautiful and disturbing evocation of theatre, and perhaps the world, coming to an end; and Prospero’s renunciation of his magic. Speeches and performers: Caliban, 3.2, “Be not afeard …” (Kelly Hunter, MBE) Prospero, 4.1, “Be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended …” (Anton Lesser) Prospero, 5.1, “You elves of hills …” (Dame Harriet Walter)

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.