Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music is now out in paperback
Selling Sounds chronicles the rise of music as big business in the early twentieth century, spanning from Tin Pan Alley pop songs to the career of legendary tenor Enrico Caruso, by way of phonographs, player-pianos, copyright law, advertising, and the transformation of the everyday American soundscape. It was published by Harvard University Press, in 2009.
- A Choice “Outstanding Academic Titles of 2009
- Winner of the Hagley Prize for the best book in business history for 2009.
- Winner of the 2011 DeSantis Prize of the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.
- Honorable mention, 2010 Woody Guthrie Prize, International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), U.S. branch.
- Certificate of Merit, 2010 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, Best Research in General History of Recorded Sound Category, Association for Recorded Sound Collections
“The story of Selling Sounds . . . is especially timely,” writes Ken Emerson in the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post welcomes this “meticulously researched” book. Popmatters.com describes it as “[a] really wonderful book.” Click here for more review attention from The Nation, Wilson Quarterly, Washington Times, Forbes.com, Los Angeles Times blog, and others.
Also available:
Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, co-edited by David Suisman and Susan Strasser, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, with an introduction by David. The book is the latest addition to the series Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture. More info here.
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ONLINE SUPPLEMENT TO SELLING SOUNDS: For sound files, images, and videos to supplement Selling Sounds, click here.
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RECENT AND UPCOMING APPEARANCES:
May 11, 4:00 PM, a talk at Drexel University, Department of Culture and Communications, “Sound Thinking: The Early Career of Tony Schwartz, Guru of the Electronic Age”
May 2, 7:00 PM, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, DE: Public lecture, “The Commercial Revolution in American Music.” If you have any interest in coming to this talk, do. The Hagley is an unbelievably beautiful place in springtime.
April 20, Milwaukee: A paper on on-going research on sonic booms, “The Sound of Freedom: Supersonic Aviation and the Cold War’s Acoustic Battleground,” at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians.
Mar. 25, Pop Conference, New York City: A talk on the United States’s second-greatest sound recordist (after Alan Lomax, of course), Tony Schwartz. You can find an abstract of that talk here.
Mar. 8, 2012, 1:00 A.M., and Mar. 19, 2012, 7:00 P.M. (GMT): Streaming of an original mix The Slowness of Madame de T., on Radio Borecast, curated by Vicki Bennett for the multimedia AV Festival. Based on a text by Milan Kundera, The Slowness of Madame de T. features music and sound by David Toop, Nino Rota, Helen Gurley Brown, Karen Dalton, Henry Flynt, Frederic Rzewski, Gasoline Stew and the Dump, The Stooges, Kinski, The Mebusas, Delia Derbyshire, Dudley Simpson, Brian Hodgson & David Vorhaus, Bernard Purdie, Julie London, Wizz Jones, Janet Cardiff, Åke Sandin, Slap Happy Humphrey, Michael Harrison, Blossom Dearie, Henry Jacobs, Scott Tuma, and Jacques Tati.
November 2011: a lecture University of Virginia, Music Department, “Soundscape Politics: The Forgotten History of Sonic Booms”
