Alive in the Sound

Black Music As Counterhistory

Ronald Radano

$351

Hardback

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English

Duke University Press
29 August 2025

Music; Theory of music & musicology; Music reviews & criticism; History: specific events & topics; Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies

Series: Refiguring American Music

In Alive in the Sound, Ronald Radano proposes a new understanding of US Black music by focusing on the key matter of value, manifested musically in its seemingly embodied qualities - spirit, soul, and groove. While acknowledging these qualities are always embedded in Black music, Radano shows they developed not simply from performance but from musicians’ status as laborers inhabiting an enduring racial-economic contradiction: Black music originated publicly as an exchangeable property owned by people whose subhuman status granted them - as “natural” musicians - indelible properties of sound. As a contradiction of the rules of ownership, where enslaved property was forbidden the right to own, modern Black music emerges after emancipation as a primary possession, moving dialectically into commercial markets and counterhistorically back into Black worlds. Slavery’s seminal contests of ownership underlie modern musical sensations of aliveness, which become the chief measure of value in popular music. By reconceiving US Black music history as a history of value, Radano rethinks the music’s place in US and global culture.

By: Ronald Radano
Imprint: Duke University Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 572g
ISBN: 9781478028918
ISBN 10: 1478028912
Series: Refiguring American Music
Pages: 576
Publication Date: 29 August 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Ronald Radano is Professor Emeritus of African Cultural Studies and Music at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Among his books is Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews for Alive in the Sound: Black Music As Counterhistory

""Uncovering striking and novel parallels across various forms of African American music while challenging conventional formulations of identity and historical periodization, Ronald Radano upends settled wisdom around African American music and presents a new historical and critical model for its development.""--George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music