Modernity's Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music

Inside the global music industry and the racialized and gendered assumptions we make about what we hear

Fearing the rapid disappearance of indigenous cultures, twentieth-century American ethnographers turned to the phonograph to salvage native languages and musical practices. Prominent among these early “songcatchers” were white women of comfortable class standing, similar to the female consumers targeted by the music industry as the gramophone became increasingly present in bourgeois homes...