Professor David Brackett wins the Irving Lowens Book Award for his book Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music

We are proud to announce that Professor David Brackett recently won the Irving Lowens Book Award, for his book Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music (University of California Press). This award is given annually by the Society of American Music for a book that makes an outstanding contribution to American music studies.

"David Brackett’s Categorizing Sound brilliantly tackles one of the most contentious issues in popular music studies today, that of genre, through an adept mixture of historical, musical, and interpretive analysis. Relying upon an extraordinary amount of archival research as well as the sounds of the music itself, Brackett leads the reader with clarity and assurance through the bewildering maze of categories for popular music in the twentieth century, exposing the fluid interactions between genre and demographics. Beautifully illustrated by helpful tables, images, and musical examples, Categorizing Sound is a watershed publication that sets a new standard for how scholars can and must examine the ways we categorize all forms of music." Society of American Music

Categorizing Sound addresses the relationship between categories of music and categories of people, particularly how certain ways of organizing sounds becomes integral to how we perceive ourselves and how we feel connected to some people and disconnected from others. Presenting a series of case studies ranging from race music and old-time music of the 1920s through country and R&B of the 1980s, David Brackett explores the processes by which genres are produced. Using in-depth archival research and sophisticated theorizing about how musical categories are defined, Brackett has produced a markedly original work.

To read more about the Irving Lowens Book Award, click here.

To purchase Categorizing Sound, click here.