Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production

In Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958-1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed's term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes's collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka's work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez's albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes.

Author: Anthony Reed
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 01/08/2021
Pages: 280
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.84lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.59d
ISBN13: 9781478011279
ISBN10: 1478011270
BISAC Categories:
- Music | Genres & Styles | Jazz
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies
- Literary Criticism | Poetry

About the Author
Anthony Reed is Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and author of Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing.