From Broadway to The Bronx
The depiction of New York City in song across a variety of different genres, focusing on jazz genres, as well as the work of both New York born artists like Billy Joel or Lin-Manuel Miranda and artists living most of their life in New York City like Shinehead or Debbie Harry, that are intimately connected with the city.
The book analyzes songs written about New York City, and engage with the depiction of the city within them, but mainly use it as a way to deal with several musical genres that the city has been home to, and instrumental in developing. These include the musical theatre scene on Broadway and beyond, but also early 20th century sheet music, hip hop, disco, punk, dancehall, jazz, swing, rock or pop music. The collection includes essays from authors with a cultural studies, media studies, cultural history or musicology background, making possible a far-ranging treatment of the interconnection of the city space and its musical history.
Sabrina Mittermeier is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in British and North American history at the University of Kassel, Germany. She is the author of A Cultural History of Disneyland Theme Parks – Middle-Class Kingdoms (Intellect, 2021), the (co)editor of, among other volumes, Fighting for the Future – Essays on Star Trek: Discovery (Liverpool University Press, 2020), The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek (2022) and Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect, 2022). Her research on theme parks, film and television has also been published in several collections and journals, such as the Journal of Popular Culture and Science Fiction Film and Television.
Veronika Keller is a research associate at the institute for musicology and music pedagogy at the University of Kobenz, Germany. Her research interests include (classical) music in different media and popular music in the late 20th and early 21st, mainly in the USA, Germany and South Korea as well as its transcontinental exchanges.