Sound Philosophy

This episode explores the rise to prominence of brass bands or marching bands after the U.S. Civil War. We discuss the shift in ideals of patriotism that follows the war,  the emergence of the brass bands as an emblem of middlebrow nationalism, and the rejection of highbrow music at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. We then discuss John Phillip Sousa's contributions to the arguments surrounding copyright and his qualms about recorded music. We then examine Sousa's approach to march composition and the way in which it combines images of "barbaric splendor" and elements of the parlor song to give rise to a new vision of masculinity and its role in nationalism. 

This episode examines the 19th-century parlor ballad as a genre that helped to define shifting notions of the family and womanhood in the United States. I start by reviewing the prerequisites for a robust music industry (necessary to support a prolific production of song) and then discuss changes the family underwent in the early 19th century with the shift from an agrarian lifestyle to a more modern, urbane mode of living. I then discuss the role of nostalgia and the idealization of women in the parlor ballad. Examples are drawn from Thomas Moore, Stephen Foster, and George Frederick Root. 

This episode covers a difficult but central part of the history of American popular music: the rise of blackface minstrelsy in the late 1820s and early 1830s. In order to come to grips with the emergence of what was widely considered the first truly "American" form of music and theatrical entertainment, this episode explores the contradictory ways of understanding Blackness that suffused the practice of African transatlantic slavery, discusses the political and social situation of working-class Whites and free Blacks, the role of Irish immigration in early minstrelsy, and the formation of two American minstrel archetypes: Jim Crow and Zip Coon. 

This episode discusses the musical culture of the North American colonies and the early United States culminating in the Copyright Act of 1790. We will suggest that this law was an important step on the way toward establishing mass art as the primary form of cultural expression in the United States. We will also see that this law is not nearly as straightforward philosophically and legally as it might, at first, seem. 

This, the first episode of Sound Philosophy, discusses some of the objections to popular music by philosophers and critics such as Gilles Deleuze, Theodor Adorno, Dwight Macdonald, and Clement Greenberg. We then discuss the notion of popular music as mass art.