Named by Rolling Stone as one of the 25 Best Music Books of 2024.
University of California Press
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Animated Discussion of Blacksound
About the Book
A new concept for understanding the history of the American popular music industry.
(see accompanying video for animated discussion)
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.
About the Author
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.
Event photos from Blacksound book release at Theory HQ (Metpacking District, NYC)
