Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music
ISBN: 9780520965317
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Popular music genres -- Social aspects -- United States; Popular music -- United States -- History and criticism;

Categorizing Sound addresses the relationship between categories of music and categories of people, particularly how certain ways of organizing sounds becomes integral to how we perceive ourselves and how we feel connected to some people and disconnected from others. Presenting a series of case studies ranging from race music and old-time music of the 1920s through country and R&B of the 1980s, David Brackett explores the processes by which genres are produced. Using in-depth archival research and sophisticated theorizing about how musical categories are defined, Brackett has produced a markedly original work.

David Brackett is Professor of Music History/Musicology at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. He is also the author of Interpreting Popular Music and The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates .