Sound and the City

An ambitious, sprawling biography of the musical soundscape of New York City from the Ice Age to the present, examining how the landscape, architecture, and politics of the city formed the music that emanated from it and changed how musicians and writers across all genres thought about their work, by the award-winning author of Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time

From Gustav Mahler to Laurie Anderson, from John Coltrane to Lou Reed and hip-hop, Sound and the City immerses readers in the sounds and music of New York City. Panoramically written and sweeping in scope, this book argues that the sound of the city has long been as crucial to its identity, and to its energy and mystique, as the visual splendor of its skyscrapers, skyline and majestic bridges. If New York is indeed that perpetual movie set of popular myth, the role that sound plays has often been overlooked—and it’s now time to recognize that sound has shaped the character and mood of the city, too.

Running alongside the story of how musicians and writers have gorged on the sound of the city is the story of what makes New York sound like New York. It pieces together the particles of New York’s sonic DNA, plundering urban history, folklore and mythology, geography and geology, architecture and the history of immigration, the impact of the Wall Street Crash in 1929, and political intrigues that stretch across the decades. The book reaches back some fifty thousand years, to the Ice Age, when ice carved out the Hudson River and landscaped the island of Manhattan, and nature began to scoop out this playground of sound.

At its heart, Sound and the City is about Broadway musicals and musicians of the street; about Edgard Varèse and the birth pangs of American electronic music; about John Dos Passos, F Scott Fitzgerald and Ralph Ellison hearing the city as they wrote; about folk music and jazz, with ripples of Latin sambas and rumbas; about the Harlem Renaissance and Studio 54; about the jitterbugging joy of Tin Pan Alley pop songs in the 1930s and the hedonism of Disco in the 1970s; about the ascent of rap and hip-hop; about the high-speed hysteria of bebop and punk, and about the trance-like stillness of meditative drones and John Cage’s ‘silent’ 4’33”. As the book winds towards its conclusion, it also looks forward to the future, analyzing exactly how a younger generation of NYC-based musicians instinctively float between composed music, rock, folk and jazz have built around the legacy of everything that came before them.