Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., is an award-winning musicologist, music historian, composer, and pianist whose prescient theoretical and critical interventions have bridged Black cultural studies and musicology. Representing twenty-five years of commentary and scholarship, these essays document Ramsey’s search to understand America’s Black musical past and present and to find his own voice as an African American writer in the field of musicology. This far-reaching collection embraces historiography, ethnography, cultural criticism, musical analysis, and autobiography, traversing the landscape of Black musical expression from sacred music to art music, and jazz to hip-hop. Taken together, these essays and the provocative introduction that precedes them are testament to the legacy work that has come to define a field, as well as a rousing call to readers to continue to ask the hard questions and write the hard truths.
Table of Content
Contents
Foreword by Tammy L. Kernodle
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Who Hears Here Now?
1. Cosmopolitan or Provincial? Ideology in Early Black Music Historiography, 1867–1940
2. Who Hears Here? Black Music, Critical Bias, and the Musicological Skin Trade
3. The Pot Liquor Principle: Developing a Black Music Criticism in American Music Studies
4. Secrets, Lies, and Transcriptions: New Revisions on Race, Black Music, and Culture
5. Muzing New Hoods, Making New Identities: Film, Hip-Hop Culture, and Jazz Music
6. Afro-Modernism and Music: On Science, Community, and Magic in the Black Avant-Garde
7. Bebop, Jazz Manhood, and “Piano Shame”
8. Blues and the Ethnographic Truth
9. Time Is Illmatic: A Song for My Father, A Letter to My Son
10. A New Kind of Blue: The Power of Suggestion and the Pleasure of Groove in
Robert Glasper’s Black Radio
11. Free Jazz and the Price of Black Musical Abstraction
12. Jack Whitten’s Musical Eye
13. Out of Place and Out of Line: Jason Moran’s Eclecticism as Critical Inquiry
14. African American Music
Onward: An Afterword by Shana L. Redmond
Notes
Index
About the author
A Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a prize-winning music historian, pianist, composer. He is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.
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