Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
National Phonography: Field Recording, Sound Archiving, and Producing the Nation in Music

National Phonography: Field Recording, Sound Archiving, and Producing the Nation in Music

Western, Tom
Brennan, Matt
Frith, Simon

Hardcover

Series: Alternate Takes: Critical Responses to Popular Music

General Political ScienceMusic Recording & ReproductionWorld Music

PREORDER - Expected ship date March 16, 2028

ISBN10: 1501338897
ISBN13: 9781501338892
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Mar 16 2028
Pages: 208
Language: English

Nationalism is back at the top of the political agenda across Europe, in America, and throughout other regions of the world. Music is embroiled in these developments, and the resurgence of nationalism has run in parallel with an explosion of interest in historical field recordings of traditional musics. Interpreted as truthful transmissions of national pasts, these field recordings tend to be understood as existing outside of mass culture and mass mediation, feeding into desires for national purity and for authentic expressions of nationness.

National Phonography challenges this idea, listening to how field recording and sound archiving have been used to bring nations into being and examining how they are just as intertwined with mass media and standard recording practices as other musics. Tom Western rethinks the very idea of national music, positing it as a form of cultural production and sonic creation that is also built upon acts of silencing, with dangerous effects on the present. This book asks several bodies of literature-on traditional musics, folk revivals, sound archives, histories of sound recording, and historical ethnomusicology-to reconsider the relations between music, sound, technology, territory, archives, nations and borders.

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