Voicing the Popular already marks one of the paradigmatic moments in popular-music studies in the twenty-first century. Richard Middleton makes a turn toward a new set of issues of a humanistically based scholarship – poverty, working-class culture, racism, gender. Precisely because of his conviction that it is music that "voices the popular," he refuses to neglect the music. In Voicing the Popular Richard Middleton launches his most intensive examination of race and racism to date. In the early chapters he opens an analytical space between study of the blues and the historical trajectory of the minstrel stage, culminating in a powerful reading of Show Boat. In subsequent chapters we witness him again insisting that interpretation of the music, too, must accompany our location of the voice, as he analyzes a history of standards that stretches from Monteverdi to Percy Sledge. The book closes with a fresh approach to authenticity, which does not hesitate to confront the reader with the troubling contexts within which popular music has been created in the recent past, particularly through his examination of the Buena Vista Social Club. It is in Voicing the Popular that Richard Middleton most passionately locates popular music in the domain of the people themselves.—Philip V. Bohlman, University of Chicago, author of The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World and World Music: A Very Short Introduction
Richard Middleton's Voicing the Popular cannot but inspire profound admiration. On the one hand, it displays a vast, astounding knowledge in contemporary critical theory and an impressive mastery and lucidity in treating its object, popular music, and on the other hand his devoted and passionate conceptual work shows the ways in which both things, the theoretical concepts and the popular, can be brought together in a way to elucidate each other, comment and displace each other, so that we are brought to experience both, the theory and the popular culture, in new ways, with new eyes and ears. From Mozart’s Magic Flute to the Spice Girls his magisterial voice leads us through the multi-faceted network of modernity’s popular underside.—Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana, author of A Voice and Nothing More
The publication of Voicing the Popular is a threshold event in the study of popular culture and for that matter in the study of culture generally. No concept has been more, well, popular in the past half-century than the "popular," and none has been more loosely conceptualized and taken for granted. No longer. Richard Middleton has raised a discussion to which he has himself already contributed invaluably to an unprecedented level of intellectual rigor and theoretical sophistication. His specific historical thesis linking the popular to modernity is one that is bound to become fundamental for the future study of either. And those interested particularly in the "voicing" part—that is, in the role of music in the construction of the popular—will be amply provoked and enlightened by what they find here.—Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University, author of Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge and Musical Meaning: Towards a Critical History
