Bookmarks spotlights the personalities and published books of faculty, staff and alumni.
Today, Music History professor Emily Abrams Ansari, author of The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War, answers questions on her ‘bookishness’ and writing.
Ansari teaches courses on 19th- and 20th-Century music history at the undergraduate and graduate level. She is particularly interested in offering her students the chance to think about music in its social and political contexts, while simultaneously seeking an intimate understanding of the music itself.
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What book do we find you reading tonight?
As is often the case, I’m reading a novel and an academic study in tandem. The novel is Joyce Carol Oates’ A Book of American Martyrs and the monograph is Anatol Lieven’s America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. Both are rather terrifying analyses of contemporary American culture.
How you decide what to read? Reviews, word of mouth, maybe occasionally judge a book by its cover?
For fiction reading, my approach is entirely unsystematic. Usually, I end up buying new novels in airports. Occasionally, I will actually do some research, read some reviews, and buy a bunch of things online.
Name one book you wish you had written. And why.
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. He is absolutely brilliant at writing about music history in a compelling way for a general audience.
Name one book you could never finish. And why.
I prefer not to leave books unfinished – at least novels.
Any genres you avoid? And why.
I’m not much of a fan of science fiction. The real world is fascinating enough for me.
If you could require every university president to read one book, what would it be? And why.
Any of the recent compelling studies of the damaging effects of neoliberalism and corporate thinking on the modern university.
What sort of objects are must-haves in your writing environment?
Many cups of tea. (I am British, after all.) Preferably amidst a quiet hum of conversation in one of London’s charming coffee shops.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Jane Austen (for her acerbic feminist wit); Virginia Woolf (to hear the gossip from inside the Bloomsbury Group); and John le Carre (for real life Cold War horror stories).
How do you explain what your latest book is about to them?
It’s about what happened to composers interested in writing ‘American’-sounding classical music when their country entered the ideologically polarized climate of the early Cold War.
Who would you want to write your life story?
The day someone expresses interest in writing the life story of a musicologist, I will begin to seriously contemplate this question.
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The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War by Emily Abrams Ansari (Oxford University Press, $44.95) is available through The Book Store at Western or other outlets.