Trouble Songs
Subtitle: A Musicological Poetics
Publisher: punctum books
Published: 2018
Place of publication: Earth, Milky Way
Number of pages: 204
ISBN-13: 9781947447455
Subjects: Theory of music & musicology
Description: Trouble Songs is a hybrid serial work that tracks the appearance of the word “trouble” in 20th- and 21st-century American music. It reads (and sings) songs and poems, with reference to cultural events ranging from the death of a pop singer to the growth of popular resistance movements. The trouble singer invokes the word “trouble” in place of actual trouble—the song is a spell that conjures trouble (from bad luck and disaffection to infidelity, impotence, destitution, and the specter of death) in a temporary form that can be dis-spelled, if only for the length of the song. Singer and song also open a critical space for making trouble, for stirring the heart and mind. This space is a disjunction in time (and a superimposition of events) where singer and listener collaborate on meaning (un/)making as they temporarily transform trouble.
Notes: Open Access Unrestricted online access

Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

English