Bernstein’s relationship with Aaron Copland was one of the most significant of his life. Starting with their first meeting in 1937, this chapter considers Copland’s musical influence on Bernstein as an emerging composer and the support and opportunities Copland provided during Bernstein’s formative years. It then goes on to explore the importance of Bernstein’s Copland advocacy on the conducting podium, with reference to major commissions, concerts, and recordings. Drawing on both their public and private comments and correspondence, the changing nature of their relationship and views on each other’s activities are traced, resulting in a shared portrait of more than five decades of friendship and musical connections.

To ask ‘how do you do what you do?’ is both a technical and personal question. Brandi Wilkins Cantanese, Nicola Mārie Hyland, and Ben Spatz complicate the idea that methods are separable from researchers’ lives, while advocating for decolonizing research. Methods implicate both what and when: they are immanent in everything the scholar does. Exploring methods that gather information in relational and communal ways, the conversants reflect on how using various media in performance research (re-)contextualizes methods and the binary between bodily presence and recorded acts. They conclude that interdisciplinary research should invest in decolonizing methodologies as an ethical practice that both augments and challenges academic training.

This introduction establishes the wide variety of cultural and historical contexts that Jazz and American Culture covers by revisiting five moments across the past century. Beginning with the first recording by a Black woman in 1920 and moving to the pandemic summer of 2020, these five vignettes present us not with a straight line through American history but instead offer a series of nodes that suggest the complicated ways jazz has been entangled with American politics, aesthetic upheavals, technological and economic changes, and the lived experience of the everyday. Most importantly, these select moments across the history of jazz and American culture– spanning Jim Crow to George Floyd– remind us how the music’s development out of African American expressive culture is key to understanding both its ongoing response to the violence of American racism and its incisive critique of American democracy’s failures.

Liner notes evolved during the twentieth century as a new genre of music writing, one that served as both a compliment and a complement to the pioneering jazz recordings it set out to describe. Prior to the purchase of a jazz album, liner notes gave consumers a preview of the sounds they would soon hear (and the messages they might receive). As decades passed, some liner notes became as memorable as the albums they graced. When writers as diverse as Ira Gitler, Amiri Baraka, and Stanley Crouch emerged as tastemakers in jazz circles, it was not only for their music criticism, but also for the liner notes they placed on albums by John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, and Wynton Marsalis. This essay considers a host of writers who made liner notes a key factor within jazz culture, and within American discourse more generally.

This chapter considers Puccini’s interest in technology of various types. It examines, first, his passion for speed, encapsulated in an early enthusiasm for motoring. The author discusses the models of car owned by Puccini as well as his various motorboats. Puccini’s enthusiasm for hunting is discussed from a technological perspective. The chapter considers how technology even had an impact upon Puccini’s compositional output, discussing various attempts the composer made to harness electricity for musical purposes, even attempting to invent new instruments to make particular sonic effects. The gramophone played a vital role in disseminating Puccini’s works, though his enthusiasm for the medium of recording was tempered by the difficulties he experienced in recouping royalties. Finally, embryonic radio technology was a source of fascination to the composer.

This chapter surveys the interaction between Puccini’s works and various forms of popular culture since the mid-twentieth century. The author examines how Puccini’s music quickly came to be widely absorbed into the popular musical memory through a wide variety of genres. It surveys early recordings of Puccini’s arias and their association with particular recording stars such as Caruso. A discussion of the use of Puccini’s music in films from the 1930s to the present follows, analysing the ways in which it has been employed as a device in films ranging from gentle romances to violent Hollywood blockbusters, sometimes symbolising the essence of Italianness. The author then discusses how excerpts from Puccini’s music have been incorporated into popular songs of a wide range of types and how Puccini arias have made their way into the world of popular television via talent shows, sports programming (notably the use of ‘Nessun dorma’ for the Italia 90 World Cup), chat shows, and advertising.

This chapter discusses the singers who have performed and recorded Puccini’s works since the mid-twentieth century. The author analyses changing trends in Puccini performance, particularly in terms of the sorts of voices that were considered most suitable for singing this repertory in audio recordings. The chapter begins with a discussion of the rivalry between Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, two sopranos who took quite different approaches to the performance of Puccini’s female roles. Mirella Freni and Tebaldi took a more lyrical approach than their immediate predecessors. By the 1960s and 70s – the era of the long-playing record – a new breed of international sopranos and tenors with opulent voices was emerging, including Montserrat Caballé, Luciano Pavarotti, and Placido Domingo. The 1970s and 80s was the era of the big-budget studio recording, featuring starry conductors and casts and the world’s greatest orchestras. The 1990s saw a drop-off in recordings by major labels, yet a new generation of bankable stars was emerging, including Roberto Alagna, Angela Gheorghiu, and (in the 2000s) Jonas Kaufmann. The chapter concludes with a discussion of a recent turn towards lighter voices tackling this repertory, epitomised by the success of the compelling Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho, who brings into question the idea of what an ‘authentic’ Puccini singer might be.

This chapter explores the direct experiences of renowned record producers, working with metal music, to construct an in-depth understanding of the genesis, and development, of recorded metal music. Technological democracy has changed the experience of making metal records, affording creative flexibility and control that would historically have been out of reach, technologically and financially. Multitrack technologies and fragmented production processes are also examined. Framed by the experiences of producers that have shaped the recording careers of artists such as Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, this chapter links the direct experiences of record-making to musical, sociocultural and technological development.

This chapter examines constitutional theory and doctrine as applied to emerging government regulations of video image capture and proposes a framework that will promote free speech to the fullest extent possible without facilitating unnecessary intrusions into legitimate privacy interests.

This chapter examines constitutional theory and doctrine as applied to emerging government regulations of video image capture and proposes a framework that will promote free speech to the fullest extent possible without facilitating unnecessary intrusions into legitimate privacy interests.

The first book of its kind, Property Law: Comparative, Empirical, and Economic Analyses, uses a unique hand-coded data set on nearly 300 dimensions on the substance of property law in 156 jurisdictions to describe the convergence and divergence of key property doctrines around the world. This book quantitatively analyzes property institutions and uses machine-learning methods to categorize jurisdictions into ten legal families, challenging the existing paradigms in economics and law. Using also other cross-country data, this book empirically tests theories about property law and comparative law. Using economic efficiency as both a positive and a normative criterion, each chapter evaluates which jurisdictions have the most efficient property doctrines, concluding that the common law is not more efficient than the civil law. Unlike many prior studies on empirical comparative law, this book provides detailed citations to laws in each jurisdiction. Data and documentation are released with the book.

The Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century was heavily invested in the value of orature, characteristically associated with peasant culture as the living remnant of pre-modern society, which is typically seen as being on the verge of its final disappearance. Focusing on Augusta Gregory and W. B. Yeats, this essay resituates the relationship between orature and modernity in Irish culture in the context of technology, noting that the Revival coincides exactly with the period – from the late 1880s to the early 1920s – that saw the emergence of key technologies of sound: the telephone, the gramophone/phonograph, and later radio. A key concept here is the idea of over-lapping histories of technology; running alongside histories of technological innovation, political economy, and social change is a hidden history of technologies of sound as the ghost of oral culture, imbricated in some of the same literary narratives that memorialise the pre-modern.

This chapter provides an introductory coverage of the major issues involved in designing and executing sociolinguistic research with a focus on spoken Arabic in natural settings. It explains the concept of the observer’s paradox and suggests methods to reduce its effects in sociolinguistic interviews. It covers ethnographic, qualitative, and quantitative methods. The use of dependent and independent variables is explained in detail, with a focus on age as a social variable. The chapter ends with ethical considerations as an integral part of research and research conduct.

This chapter examines Britten’s recording and television activities in the 1950s and 1960s and considers how they track the rise of — and the anxiety surrounding — recording technology in mid-century British musical life. In particular, this chapter explores his collaboration with John Culshaw, who served as the producer for Britten’s Decca records and operas on BBC television. I argue that he and Britten sought to tap into elements of the live performance to fashion new musical experiences via technology. To illustrate this point, I focus primarily on their audio recording of the War Requiem, as well as three operas put on BBC television: The Burning Fiery Furnace, Peter Grimes, and Owen Wingrave. Ultimately, I show that, instead of treating technological reproduction as a substitute for live performance, Culshaw and Britten saw the relationship between technology and live performance as a symbiotic one, each helping to reinforce the other.

This chapter examines skills developed by, and brought to play in, fieldwork. Progressing from generic skills used and refined through fieldwork, the discussion focuses on the geographical nature of skills used across all fieldwork activities, to the key geographical skills and tools that can be drawn upon to construct authentic fieldwork experiences for students. Fieldwork has always been an important facet of geography, helping to inform, validate, and consolidate the study of people and place. Fieldwork remains, to this day, rather simple and straightforward. It involves the gathering of primary data in the field. The ‘process’ of fieldwork occurs through the use and application of a wide variety of geographic and generic skills. The following discussion of fieldwork skills will examine the place of: • fieldwork skills in students wider learning, • fieldwork skills for thinking geographically, • specific geographic fieldwork skills, • geographic fieldwork tools and technology.

The chapter discusses how cultural institutions and artefacts affect the shared workspace framework. We first consider the integration of linguistic and non-linguistic information in the shared workspace when interlocutors do such things as jointly constructing flat-pack furniture. We show how the framework is ideally suited for such integration of signs and non-signs as part of the activity. We then consider how different activity types serve to refine dialogue games. Finally we consider how cultural artefacts augment the shared workspace to support alignment. We consider the role of illustration, recording and other communication technologies.

This essay sketches a history of Mahler on record, focusing not on when a recording was made or what stylistic qualities it embodies, but when it became available to the public in a durable form. For a history of recording, performance practice is less significant than the ways in which record production and marketing shaped Mahler’s reception and enhanced the reputations of conductors, orchestras, and labels. At the center of these developments has been the evolution of the recorded Mahler cycle, the first appearance of which, over half a century ago, transformed the ways in which audiences, collectors, and commentators came to view the composer. After a brief consideration of 78s and the early history of the LP, the chapter lays out commercial, administrative, and technological conditions that led to cycles by Leonard Bernstein, Maurice Abravenel, Bernard Haitink, and Rafael Kubelik.

The future development of literary radio studies as a discipline requires moving beyond the lingering (and completely understandable) text-fetishism of its early years. Archival lacunae covering the early years of radio, key years for modernist production – the difficulty of hearing works, let alone hearing them in context – has paradoxically flattened broadcast into script, an elision often perpetuated in scholarship. All this has created a critical environment in which the claim that radio is an intrinsically modernist medium is often supported, in circular fashion, by enumerating the already-recognized modernists within broadcast ranks, or citing the importance of radio as a disseminator of modernist poetry – in other words, eliding the medium itself in order to stress its efficacy as a delivery system. To move beyond the invaluable spadework of the recent ‘boom’, then, requires a more robust methodology for tracing the resonances of radio – an intermedial vocabulary not grounded exclusively in inscription