Hearing the Americas (Web Resource)
Title: Hearing the Americas
Author: Mathew Karush
Author: Michael O'Malley
Abstract: The website is at link: https://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/welcome "Hearing the Americas explores the first decades of recorded music, revealing how ideas about genre, race, and nation were formed in the transnational circulation of people and records. We focus on the United States and Latin America, whose vibrant musical interactions originated in the African diaspora and were reactivated in new ways by the advent of the record industry. Our goal is to overcome the barriers of time and technology to make this music easier to hear, appreciate, and understand. In this period, the broad genres we tend to take for granted, like blues, jazz, folk, country, or Latin, didn’t yet exist. Record companies were still figuring out how to market recorded music, and they looked for novel ways to re-package earlier conventions. For example, a record marketed as a “blues” in 1914 might sound like a marching band playing a tango. We want to make sense of these strange-sounding records."
Year: 2022
Primary URL: http://hearingtheamericas.org/s/the-americas/page/about
Primary URL Description: Hearing the Americas explores the first decades of recorded music, revealing how ideas about genre, race, and nation were formed in the transnational circulation of people and records. We focus on the United States and Latin America, whose vibrant musical interactions originated in the African diaspora and were reactivated in new ways by the advent of the record industry. Our goal is to overcome the barriers of time and technology to make this music easier to hear, appreciate, and understand. In this period, the broad genres we tend to take for granted, like blues, jazz, folk, country, or Latin, didn’t yet exist. Record companies were still figuring out how to market recorded music, and they looked for novel ways to re-package earlier conventions. For example, a record marketed as a “blues” in 1914 might sound like a marching band playing a tango. We want to make sense of these strange-sounding records. Modern genre conventions often depend on some idea of racial or folk authenticity

Permalink: https://apps.neh.gov/publicquery/products.aspx?gn=MN-268896-20