Music and Urban Geography

by Adam Krims

Music and Urban Geography is the first book to theorize musical aspects of the tremendous changes that have overtaken major cities in the developed world over the past few decades. Drawing on musicology, music theory, urban geography, and historical materialism, Krims maps changes not only in how music represents cities, but also in how music sounds and is deployed socially in new urban contexts. Taking on venerable musicological debates from entirely new perspectives, Krims argues that the cultural-studies approach now predominant in cultural musicology fails to address contemporary realities of production and consumption; instead, the social effects of space and new patterns of urban production play a shaping role, in which music takes on new forms and functions, with representation playing a significant but not always decisive role. While music scholars increasingly concern themselves with place, Krims theorizes it together with the shaping role of space.

Pushing urban geography into new cultural contexts Music and Urban Geography will offer those concerned with the social effects of space newtheoretical models. Ranging from Anonymous 4 to Alanis Morissette, from Curaçao to Seattle, Music and Urban Geography presents a truly wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and theoretically ambitious view of both musical and urban change.

Genres: Music, Sociology, Nonfiction

246 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2004

Reviews

[FL · Rating 3 out of 5]

Krims' work on rap music is foundational, and I had high hopes for this book. Unfortunately, the technical theories of both music and geography are so jargony and unrelated that it's hard for him to do much justice to either. Some passages are interesting case studies, but it's not clear why it matters that it's music.