Dear Screen-L:


The University of California Press  is pleased to announce the publication of:

Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media

Michael Long is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University 
at Buffalo, State University of New York.

http://go.ucpress.edu/Long

Beautiful Monsters explores the ways in which "classical" music made 
its way into late twentieth-century American mainstream culture-in 
pop songs, movie scores, and print media. Beginning in the 1960s, 
Michael Long's entertaining and illuminating book surveys a complex 
cultural field and draws connections between "classical music" (as 
the phrase is understood in the United States) and selected "monster 
hits" of popular music. Addressing such wide-ranging subjects as surf 
music, Yiddish theater, Hollywood film scores, Freddie Mercury, 
Alfred Hitchcock, psychedelia, rap, disco, and video games, Long 
proposes a holistic musicology in which disparate musical elements 
might be brought together in dynamic and humane conversation. 
_Beautiful Monsters _brilliantly considers the ways in which critical 
commonplaces like nostalgia, sentiment, triviality, and excess might 
be applied with greater nuance to musical media and media reception. 
It takes into account twentieth-century media's capacity to suggest 
visual and acoustical depth and the redemptive possibilities that lie 
beyond the surface elements of filmic narrative or musical style, 
showing us what a truly global view of late twentieth-century music 
in its manifold cultural and social contexts might be like.

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