Print Price: $80.50

Format:
Hardback
336 pp.
10 figures, 60 music examples, 6 1/8" x 9 1/4"

ISBN-13:
9780195309461

Publication date:
August 2008

Imprint: OUP US

Sounds of the Metropolis

The 19th Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris and Vienna

Derek B. Scott

The phrase "popular music revolution" may instantly bring to mind such twentieth-century musical movements as jazz and rock 'n' roll. In Sounds of the Metropolis, however, Derek Scott argues that the first popular music revolution actually occurred in the nineteenth century, illustrating how a distinct group of popular styles first began to assert their independence and values. London, New York, Paris, and Vienna feature prominently as cities in which the challenge to the classical tradition was strongest, and in which original and influential forms of popular music arose, from Viennese waltz and polka to vaudeville and cabaret.

Scott explains the popular music revolution as driven by social changes and the incorporation of music into a system of capitalist enterprise, which ultimately resulted in a polarization between musical entertainment (or "commercial" music) and "serious" art. He focuses on the key genres and styles that precipitated musical change at that time, and that continued to have an impact upon popular music in the next century. By the end of the nineteenth century, popular music could no longer be viewed as watered down or more easily assimilated art music; it had its own characteristic techniques, forms, and devices. As Scott shows, "popular" refers here, for the first time, not only to the music's reception, but also to the presence of these specific features of style. The shift in meaning of "popular" provided critics with tools to condemn music that bore the signs of the popular-which they regarded as fashionable and facile, rather than progressive and serious.

A fresh and persuasive consideration of the genesis of popular music on its own terms, Sounds of the Metropolis will appeal to students of music, cultural sociology, and history.

Reviews

• "In the field of popular music studies, the nineteenth century hasn't received nearly the attention it deserves. Derek Scott's book has the potential to change that. For anyone who wants to know more about why and how popular music developed-not just the economic and social reasons but also the musical ones, Sounds of the Metropolis will prove an eye-opening read." --Michael V. Pisani, author of Imagining Native America in Music
• "Popular music studies by in large come to the subject's history in medias res. Derek Scott takes a longer look, back to the future of the nineteenth century and the urban vernaculars of London music hall, New York minstrelsy (and its European reception), Parisian cabaret, and Viennese social dancing. Scott hears the sounds, and he puts them into dialogue with the cultural, economic, ideological, and aesthetic systems of their time--and ours--with characteristic thoroughness and brilliance. By no means least, he has a good story to tell, which he narrates at once gracefully and compellingly."--Richard Leppert, Samuel Russell Distinguished Professor of Humanities, University of Minnesota
• "This is the first book to show just when and where the music-making we call 'popular music' first appeared internationally. Professor Scott surveys the music business and moral issues over popular songs with a suave sophistication, and then looks deeper into blackface minstrels, music-hall Cockneys, and Montmartre cabarets. Scholars in many fields will find this history invaluable."--William Weber, Professor of History, California State University, Long Beach