Sound and The City

Listening to the History of New York
The story of sound and music in New York City from the Ice Age to the present day: vast, bewildering, intoxicating

From Gustav Mahler to Debbie Harry, from Miles Davis to Lou Reed and hip-hop, Sound and The City is a book that aims to saturate readers in the sounds and music of New York City. The book will argue that the sound of the city has been as crucial to its identity, and to its energy and mystique, as the visual splendour of its skyscrapers, skyline and majestic bridges. If New York is indeed that perpetual movie set of popular myth, the role that sound plays has often been overlooked - time now to recognise that sound has shaped the character and mood of the city too, and the link between its music and architecture.

Running alongside the story of how musicians and writers have gorged on the sound of the city is an investigation into what makes New York sound like New York. It pieces together the particles of New York's sonic DNA, plundering urban history, folklore and mythology, geography and geology, architecture and the history of immigration, the impact of the Wall Street Crash in 1929, and political intrigues that stretch across the decades. In a flashback, the book reaches back fifty thousand years, to the Ice Age, when ice carved out the Hudson River and landscaped the island of Manhattan, and nature began to scoop out this playground of sound.

Sound and The City is about Lou Reed and Edgard Varèse, Debbie Harry and John Cage, Bob Dylan and Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis and Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Coltrane, Leonard Bernstein and Patti Smith, David Bowie and Louis Armstrong, Sun Ra and The Notorious B.I.G, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop and David Bryne, Madonna and DJ Kool Herc, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Talking Heads and Wu-Tang Clan, Grandmaster Flash and Bruce Springsteen: about Broadway musicals and CBGBs; about folk music and Latin sambas and rumbas; about the jitterbugging joy of Tin Pan Alley pop songs in the 1930s and the hedonism of Disco in the 1970s; about the rise of rap and hip-hop; about the high-speed hysteria of bebop and punk, and about the trance-like stillness of meditative electronic music and John Cage's 'silent' 4'33".

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• Rest of the World: 9 to 21 working days

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