New Books in Music

Abstract

New Books in Music. URL: https://newbooksnetwork.com/category /music/ New Books in Music is public musicology writ large. A remarkably successful tool for disseminating music scholarship to academics, students, and (in particular) the general public, it is one component, or "channel," of the New Books Network (NBN), 1 an online library of podcast interviews with nonfiction authors that is available free to anyone with an Internet connection. The network consists of ninety channels organized in five different categories: Arts & Letters, People & Places, Politics & Society, Religion & Faith, and Science & Tech. New Books in Music is located in the first of these, together with fourteen other channels that cover a wide range of topics, including Architecture, Folklore, Film, Literary Studies, Literature, Art, Photography, and Popular Culture.The NBN is the brainchild of Marshall Poe, a historian of early Russia. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Poe-although the author of numerous print publications-became increasingly disenchanted with print as the predominant means of sharing scholarship. Many scholarly books are full of fascinating information and insights, he argued, but are virtually unknown outside academia because they are marketed almost exclusively to university libraries and to a small niche of like-minded scholars. He believed that inquisitive members of the general public would be interested in such books if a new means of dissemination could be created. 2 Around this time, Poe was exploring how new media systems shape social practices and values, research that convinced him that the average twenty-first-century person much prefers listening to reading. 3 So he began to consider blogs and websites as new means of distributing scholarship.As an experiment, in 2007 he created the online New Books in History Network to host a series of "radio shows" (interviews, or "episodes") with historians about their recent monographs. The episodes are not reviews of books, but rather an opportunity for authors to describe the most important ideas in their work, as well as the ways in which their research fits with other 1. https://newbooksnetwork.com/. Unless otherwise noted, the links cited in this review were accessed in January 2020.