Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., is an award-winning musicologist, music historian, composer, and pianist, whose prescient theoretical and critical interventions have worked to build a bridge between Black cultural studies and musicology. Representing twenty-five years of commentary and scholarship, these essays document Ramsey’s search to understand America's Black musical past and present and to find his own voice as an African American writer in the field of musicology. This far-reaching collection embraces historiography, ethnography, cultural criticism, musical analysis, and autobiography, traversing the landscape of Black musical expression from sacred music to art music, and jazz to hip hop. Taken together, these essays and the provocative introduction that precedes them are testament to the legacy work that has come to define a field, as well as a rousing call to new readers to continue to ask the hard questions and write the hard truths.
Contents Foreword by Tammy L. Kernodle Acknowledgments Introduction: Who Hears Here Now? 1. Cosmopolitan or Provincial? Ideology in Early Black Music Historiography, 1867–1940 2. Who Hears Here? Black Music, Critical Bias, and the Musicological Skin Trade 3. The Pot Liquor Principle: Developing a Black Music Criticism in American Music Studies 4. Secrets, Lies, and Transcriptions: New Revisions on Race, Black Music, and Culture 5. Muzing New Hoods, Making New Identities: Film, Hip-Hop Culture, and Jazz Music 6. Afro-Modernism and Music: On Science, Community, and Magic in the Black Avant-Garde 7. Bebop, Jazz Manhood, and “Piano Shame” 8. Blues and the Ethnographic Truth 9. Time Is Illmatic: A Song for My Father, A Letter to My Son 10. A New Kind of Blue: The Power of Suggestion and the Pleasure of Groove in Robert Glasper’s Black Radio 11. Free Jazz and the Price of Black Musical Abstraction 12. Jack Whitten’s Musical Eye 13. Out of Place and Out of Line: Jason Moran’s Eclecticism as Critical Inquiry 14. African American Music Onward: An Afterword by Shana L. Redmond Notes Index
A Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a prize-winning music historian, pianist, composer. He is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.
Reviews for Who Hears Here?: On Black Music, Pasts and Present
The book stands as a testament to [Guthrie's] commitment. His 14 essays capture a range of perspectives and musical styles as he traces the history of Black music from the Civil War through to the work of one of the brightest stars currently on the scene, Robert Glasper. Ramsey brings a depth and an essential understanding to the discussion of American popular music. * Christian Science Monitor *
