Reviews for How to Understand Music

The average rating for How to Understand Music based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-08-30 00:00:00 Craig Morrison Between Montmartre And the Mudd Club🍒🍒🍒 By Bernard Gendron 2002 The University of Chicago Press Written by professor of philosophy, Bernard Gendron, this is a study of musical genres, and how they influenced the social, cultural, and historical history of France and USA. Lowbrow, highbrow, this also references the many subcultures of musical history and art, with many references for each.The central object of this book is to explain why rock music has been able to expand its base and jazz has not....to show the dramatic shifts between popular music and avant garde and it's reflection in music. Very good and interesting book

Review # 2 was written on 2019-01-23 00:00:00 Robert Sanchez This fascinating and extremely well-written book examines the relationship between art, the avant-garde, and popular music from the late 19th century Parisian cabaret scene through the late 20th century New York punk and new wave scene. Along the way, Gendron follows the post-WWI European avant-garde's fascination with jazz and the mechanisms through which rock music gained cultural capital and critical approbation in the late 1960s. I kind of wish Gendron had given a little more attention to the ways race and gender intersected with all of this, but perhaps that really needs a separate book to cover adequately. Nonetheless, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club does a wonderful job of looking at the relationships and tensions between avante-garde art and popular music. I especially enjoyed the exploration of the New York new wave scene, since I am a fan of a lot of music that came out of it.