I have an essay in the Cultural History of Western Music (Vol. 5)

The Cultural History of Western Music is a massive undertaking and not exactly a cheap set of books. Each of the series’ six volumes returns to the same keywords and investigates them for a different period. I got to write about Popular Culture for Vol. 5 (“The Industrial Age”), edited by Alexander Rehding and Naomi Waltham-Smith. It’s a piece I’m immensely proud of and one that allowed me to think and write about some music that I’ve never gotten to write about — Gustav Holst’s The Planets, Johann Strauss’s waltzes and Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. (I also wrote about Wagner. Of course I also wrote about Wagner.)