Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (The MIT Press)

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Collaborating with authors, instructors, booksellers, librarians, and the media is at the heart of what we do as a scholarly publisher. In tying his epistemological argument to an ethical claim Devine follows much recent theorizing of “materiality. With numerous examples that range from comedy clubs, football strategies, recipes, and the fashion industry, this book explains how the myth of copyright protection as the hallmark of market capitalism makes no sense.

How Music Works is David Byrne's buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. The one constant about ODAP poisoning, however, very simply put, is this: those who will be hit the hardest are always young men between the ages of 15 and 25 and who are essentially starving or ingesting very limited calories, who have been engaged in heavy physical activity, and who suffer trace-element shortages from meager, unvaried diets. With both of these books, I donate 100% of my proceeds to Kidznotes, a local North Carolinian organization, which provides underserved youth ensemble-based music instruction for personal, social, academic, and musical development and growth. Devine holds out hope for a shift in consciousness, similar to the one that has taken place in our relationship with food.Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization-an evolution from physical discs to invisibl… More. After initial questioning proved unfruitful, the suspects were asked to line up, place their sickles on the ground and step back. Stoever opens up new ways for us to listen to familiar voices, such as those of WEB du Bois, Lena Horne, Lead Belly, Richard Wright, and many more.

He reveals how a range of apparently peripheral people and processes are actually central to what music is, how it works, and why it matters. Here Devine is especially insightful in discussing the irrationalities that beset the industry as it cycled through formats.Not only did this entail damage to trees during harvesting and the use of pesticides to preserve forests where the resin is produced, it also meant brutal, colonial-era working conditions for labor that was precarious, gendered, and badly paid. Kyle Devine, in his recent book, “ Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” thoroughly dismantles that seductive illusion. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Devine’s critical history of recording formats throws a necessary wrench into that mythology of musical purity. When Devine goes back to the beginnings of the recording industry, he notes how often the innovations of Thomas Edison, Emile Berliner, and others were tied up in the science and business of chemicals.