Audiobooks by Mark Katz

Music and Technology: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd Edition

This Very Short Introduction takes an expansive and inclusive approach meant to broaden and challenge traditional views of music and technology. In its most common use, 'music technology' tends to evoke images of twentieth and twenty-first century electronic devices: synthesizers, recording equipment, music notation software, and the like. This volume, however, treats all tools used to create, store, reproduce, and transmit music-new or old, electronic or not-as technologies worthy of investigation. In this broad view, technology in music encompasses instruments, whether acoustic, electric or electronic; engraving and printing; sound recording and playback; broadcasting; software; and much more. Mark Katz challenges the view that technology is unnatural, something external to music. It was sometimes said in the early twentieth century that so-called mechanical music (especially player pianos and phonographs) was a menace to 'real' music; alternatively, technology can be freighted with utopian hopes and desires, as happens today with music streaming platforms like Spotify. Positive or negative, these views assume that technology is something that acts upon music; by contrast, this volume characterizes technology as an integral part of all musical activity and portrays traditional instruments and electronic machines as equally technological.

Mark Katz (Author), Chris Abernathy (Narrator)

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Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World

Since 2001, the US Department of State has been sending hip hop artists abroad to perform and teach as goodwill ambassadors. There are good reasons for this: hip hop is known and loved across the globe, acknowledged and appreciated as a product of American culture. Hip hop has from its beginning been a means of creating community through artistic collaboration, fostering what hip hop artists call building. A timely study of US diplomacy, Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World reveals the power of art to bridge cultural divides, facilitate understanding, and express and heal trauma. Yet power is never single-edged, and the story of hip hop diplomacy is deeply fraught. Drawing from nearly 150 interviews with hip hop artists, diplomats, and others in more than thirty countries, Build explores the inescapable tensions and ambiguities in the relationship between art and the state, revealing the ethical complexities that lurk behind what might seem mere goodwill tours. Author Mark Katz makes the case that hip hop, at its best, can promote positive, productive international relations between people and nations. A US-born art form that has become a voice of struggle and celebration worldwide, hip hop has the power to build global community when it is so desperately needed.

Mark Katz (Author), Michael Butler Murray (Narrator)

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