University of California Press
Available for purchase now on major retailers
30% off on UCPress website with UCPSAVE30
University of California Press
Available for purchase now on major retailers
30% off on UCPress website with UCPSAVE30
A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry.
Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
Blacksound as an idea is not the music or sounds produced by Black Americans but instead the material and fleeting remnants of their sounds and performances that have been co-opted and amalgamated into popular music. Morrison unpacks the relationship between performance, racial identity, and intellectual property to reveal how blackface minstrelsy scripts became absorbed into commercial entertainment through an unequal system of intellectual property and copyright laws. By introducing this foundational new concept in musicology, Blacksound highlights what is politically at stake—for creators and audiences alike—in revisiting the long history of American popular music.
Matthew D. Morrison, Ph.D., a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is a musicologist, violinist, and Associate Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Matthew holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University, an. M.A. in Musicology from The Catholic University of America, and was a Presidential music scholar at Morehouse College. He was a Susan McClary and Robert Walser Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies Fellow (2021-2022), where he held residencies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, and the Dahlem Humanities Center at the Freie Universität, Berlin. His published work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, the Grove Dictionary of American Music, Oxford Handbooks, art forums/publications, and on Oxford University Press's online music blog.
Matthew has held fellowships with the American Council of Learned Societies, Harvard University, the American Musicological Society, Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Tanglewood Music Center, and the Center for Popular Music Studies/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He has also served as a consultant and facilitator with arts organizations on programming and issues related to equity and justice, such as The Schubert Club and “The Sound Track of America” opening concert series at the SHED, NYC, along with Quincy Jones, Steve McQueen, and Maureen Mahon. From 2017-2018, Matthew has collaborated on planning and moderating the multi-city touring forum with the Glimmerglass Festival Opera to discuss the role of art in stimulating public discussion about equity, diversity and inclusion in opera, as well as operas commissioned by the Breaking Glass project. He has also consulted with major music labels on the history and future of the music industry and on related projects.
"Matthew Morrison has written a modern classic that elegantly and meticulously illustrates how the rise of the music industry is inseparable from structures of racism and copyright. His concept of Blacksound will resonate with audiences across a wide range of disciplines for decades to come."
"Morrison's brilliantly unique, wide-ranging, and rigorously researched book brings to light how, as Europeans and Americans of many ethnicities deployed sonic blackface as part of an ongoing identity and citizenship project, the US entertainment industry's construction of Blacksound became fundamental to popular music around the world."
"Blacksound is a profound original study of the foundations of Black performance in the Americas. It is at once ethnomusicology, cultural history, and critical race theory, built on rigorous archival research and sophisticated engagement with a vast body of scholarly research. An engrossing and expansive text, Blacksound will be an indispensable addition to the study of race and African American culture."
Manhattan, NY
Manhattan, NY
Chicago, IL
NYC
NYC
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Manhattan, NY
Manhattan, NY
As a musicologist, violinist, scholar, consultant, lecturer, and writer, Matthew's work resonates beyond the academy to various communities, businesses, and other creative industries -- with a particular focus on equity and justice.
For booking or media inquiries, please contact Matthew D. Morrison, Ph.D., below.
For more on Matthew, please click here.
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