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Sounding Brass: Brasswind Instruments And How They Work
By Arnold Myers, Murray Campbell, Joël Gilbert. 2025
A lone bugler sounds the Last Post at a Festival of Remembrance. Overlapping horn arpeggios conjure up the flowing waters…
of the Rhine in Wagner&’s opera &“Das Rheingold&”. Seventy-six trombones lead the big parade; trumpets sound ceremonial fanfares, and power the horn sections in jazz and funk bands. The sounds of brass instruments enrich many of our most inspiring musical experiences. But what defines a &“brass instrument&”? How is a stream of air blown through a small gap in the player&’s lips transformed into a sound which fills a concert hall? When did brass instruments originate, and how did they evolve into the instruments of the modern orchestra? These are some of the questions addressed in this book. The authors, professional scientists but also experienced brass players, explain how recent research has illuminated our understanding of brass instruments. The presentation is aimed at a general readership, including players, teachers, and lovers of all types of music. No mathematical background is assumed. Descriptions of many experiments on brass instruments carried out by the authors and others bring out the musical significance of the results. A novel approach to the systematic classification of brass instruments is outlined and graphically illustrated. Separate chapters are devoted to trumpets and related instruments, horns, trombones, tubas, brass instruments with toneholes, and instruments from antiquity including the Celtic carnyx. The final chapter reviews the application of electronic enhancement techniques to brass instruments. The book is generously illustrated with colour photographs, musical examples, and explanatory figures.
The Choir Member's Companion
By Ginger G. Wyrick. 1997
The Choir Member's Companion is designed for use by individual choir members in a local church adult choir. The book…
is intended for choir members to better understand musical symbols, terminology, and symbols used in choral music. CONTENTS: 1. Introduction to Choir Membership 2. Basic Music Reading Skills 3. Musical Road Map 4. Basic Vocal Techniques 5. Sight-reading New Music 6. How to Mark Your Music 7. Preparation for Worship 8. Preparation for Other Performances 9. Glossary of Musical Terms and Symbols
Founding Folks: An Oral History of the Winnipeg Folk Festival
By Kevin Nikkel. 2025
The story of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, from the folks who were there Every July since 1974, Manitoba’s Birds Hill…
Provincial Park has been home to one of Canada’s most vibrant and storied celebrations of folk music—the Winnipeg Folk Festival. Founding Folks tells the festival’s origin story, from founder Mitch Podolak’s unlikely dream of bringing folk music to prairie stages to how it became one of the most influential Folk Festivals in North America. Through conversations with staff, volunteers, and musicians—including Bruce Cockburn, Tom Jackson, and David Amram—filmmaker Kevin Nikkel offers a nuanced look at community building, explores the relationships between politics and culture, and provides fascinating insight into the lifelong friendships that developed among some of folk music’s most defining figures. Brought to life by more than ninety photographs, this book is a testament to the vitality of prairie arts and culture. Founding Folks captures the spirit and enthusiasm of those early festival days and preserves this legacy for festival goers, students of culture and history, music enthusiasts, and folkies everywhere.
Tango Dance and Music: A Choreomusical Exploration of Tango Argentino
By Kendra Stepputat. 2025
This book investigates choreomusical aspects of tango argentino in translocal practice, in particular its current manifestation in Europe. It looks…
at translocal tango argentino in its many facets: movement structures, sound structures, dancers and musicians, and the complex relations between these factors that all have their share in shaping the practice. Beyond being the first extensive monograph about translocal tango music and dance, the book crosses borders in the use of both qualitative and quantitative methods, ranging from participant observation to statistical data evaluation, including optical motion capture for movement analysis. The book contains a brief historical overview of tango argentino practice in the twentieth century, bringing together the development of music and dance in a holistic way to better understand the background of the current interconnectedness. The first main part of the book focuses on the “danceability” aspect of tango music. The exploration is based on tango DJs’, tango dance teachers’, and tango musicians’ view of tango danceability as well as experimental approaches. The second part is dedicated to tango dance and its “musicality”. It investigates with quantitative and qualitative methods tango movement repertoire and principles and how these relate to tango musical features.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA)] license.
Fiddling Is My Joy: The Fiddle in African American Culture (American Made Music Series)
By Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje. 2025
In Fiddling Is My Joy, Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje examines the history of fiddling among African Americans from the seventeenth to…
the mid-twentieth century. Although music historians acknowledge a prominent African American fiddle tradition during the era of slavery, only recently have researchers begun to closely examine the history and social implications of these musical practices. Research on African music reveals a highly developed tradition in West Africa, which dates to the eleventh or twelfth century and continues today. From these West African roots, fiddling was prominent in many African American communities between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and the fiddle became an important instrument in early twentieth-century blues, jazz, and jug bands. While less common in late twentieth-century African American jazz and popular music groups, the fiddle remained integral to the musicking of some Black musicians in the rural South.Featured in Fiddling Is My Joy is access to a comprehensive online eScholarship Companion that contains maps, photographs, audiovisual examples, and other materials to expand the work of this enlightening and significant study. To understand the immense history of fiddling, DjeDje uses geography to weave together a common thread by profiling the lives and contributions of Black fiddlers in various parts of the rural South and Midwest, including the mountains and along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. In addition to exploring the extent that musical characteristics and aesthetics identified with African and European cultures were maintained or reinterpreted in Black fiddling, she also investigates how the sharing of musical ideas between Black and white fiddlers affected the development of both traditions. Most importantly, she considers the contradiction in representation. Historical evidence suggests that the fiddle may be one of the oldest uninterrupted instrumental traditions in African American culture, yet most people in the United States, including African Americans, do not identify it with Black music.
Cabo Verdean Rhythms examines the rhythms, movements, and performances of Kolá San Jon, a performative tradition central to Cabo Verde’s…
Festas Juninas, as a lens for understanding the ongoing negotiations of social and cultural boundaries in Cabo Verde.The book examines Kolá San Jon as a site of spatialization and creolization, processes that are closely linked to the colonial and postcolonial histories of the archipelago. Beginning with an examination of the concept of Creolidade as a dynamic and contested process, the book goes on to trace the historical connections between the islands of São Vicente and Santo Antão, exploring how these inter-island relationships have shaped the Kolá San Jon tradition. It analyzes the construction of identity and sense of belonging through drumming and dance, and considers processional performances as key moments of spatial and social organization. Through the concept of ritual failure, the book reflects on the fragility and contested nature of these practices.Bringing together the interdisciplinary fields of ethnomusicology, postcolonialism, and spatial politics, Cabo Verdean Rhythms offers novel perspectives for understanding the nexus of sound, space, and identity, which will be of interest to both researchers and postgraduate students.
Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History
By Julie Hubbert. 2011
Celluloid Symphonies is a unique sourcebook of writings on music for film, bringing together fifty-three critical documents, many previously inaccessible.…
It includes essays by those who created the music—Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein and Howard Shore—and outlines the major trends, aesthetic choices, technological innovations, and commercial pressures that have shaped the relationship between music and film from 1896 to the present. Julie Hubbert’s introductory essays offer a stimulating overview of film history as well as critical context for the close study of these primary documents. In identifying documents that form a written and aesthetic history for film music, Celluloid Symphonies provides an astonishing resource for both film and music scholars and for students.
The story of the Bee Gees: children of the world
By Bob Stanley. 2024
A renowned pop music scholar presents a dazzling biography of the Bee Gees--Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb, which is an…
extraordinary human story of career highs and lows that shows, even in the Gibbs' darkest times, their music was rarely out of the charts
Selena: como la flor
By Joe Nick Patoski. 2022
"A lovingly documented biography of music superstar Selena Quintanilla's life, work, and musical legacy. Selena Quintanilla was a vibrant musical…
performer, wildly popular in the growing field of Tejano music. But her rising star suddenly fell when she was murdered at the age of 23. At the time of her death, Selena was poised to break into the mainstream music scene. But as she enjoyed professional success beyond her wildest dreams, her personal life had more than its share of troubles. There was family tension surrounding her marriage to guitarist Chris Perez, and mounting pressure between her and the manager of her fashion boutiques, Yolanda Saldivar. Bestselling author Jo Nick Patoski recounts both the ups and downs of Selena's life, as well as her stunning transformation into a sensual Latina superstar. Most of all, he pays tribute to the life of this one-of-a-kind talent and a young life cut short by murder, but one that will never be forgotten." -- Provided by publisher
Broadcasting the Ozarks: Si Siman and country music at the crossroads (Ozarks studies)
By Kathryn Ledbetter. 2024

Who took the cookies from the cookie jar?
By Bonnie Lass. 2000
Help Skunk solve the mystery as he asks each of his animal friends, Mouse, Raven, Squirrel, Rabbit, Turtle, Raccoon, Snake,…
Beaver, and Frog, who took the cookie from the cookie jar? For preschool to grade 2
On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking through Synesthesia (Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics)
By Liesl Yamaguchi. 2025
Treatments of synesthesia in the arts and humanities generally assume a clear distinction between the neurological condition and the literary…
device. Synesthetes’ descriptions of colors seen in connection with music, for example, are thought to differ fundamentally from common expressions that rely on transpositions across sensory dimensions (“bright vowels”). This has not always been the case. The distinction emerged over the course of the twentieth century, as scientists sought to constitute “synesthesia” as a legitimate object of modern science.On the Colors of Vowels investigates the ambiguity of visual descriptions of vowels across a wide range of disciplines, casting several landmark texts in a wholly new light. The book traces the migration of sound-color correspondence from its ancient host (music) to its modern one (vowels), investigating the vocalic Klangfarben of Hermann von Helmholtz’s monumental Sensations of Tone, the vowel colors reported in early psychology surveys into audition colorée (colored hearing), the mis-matched timbres that form poetry’s condition of possibility in Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Verse,” and the vowel-color analogy central to both the universal alphabets of the nineteenth century and the phonological universals of the twentieth. The book’s final chapter turns to an intricately detailed account of vowel-color correspondence by Ferdinand de Saussure, suggesting how the linguist’s sensitivity to vowel coloration may have guided his groundbreaking study of Indo-European vocalism.Bringing out the diverse ways in which visual conceptions of vowels have inflected the arts and sciences of modernity, On the Colors of Vowels makes it possible to see how discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries crafted the enigma we now readily recognize as “synesthesia.”
Hell on Color, Sweet on Song: Jacob Wrey Mould and the Artful Beauty of Central Park
By Francis R. Kowsky. 2023
WINNER, VICTORIAN SOCIETY IN AMERICA BOOK AWARDWINNER, 2024 PUBLICATION PRIZE, FRIENDS OF THE UPPER EAST SIDE HISTORIC DISTRICTSReveals new and…
previously unknown biographical material about an important figure in nineteenth-century American architecture and music.Jacob Wrey Mould is not a name that readily comes to mind when we think of New York City architecture. Yet he was one-third of the party responsible for the early development of the city’s Central Park. To this day, his sculptural reliefs, tile work, and structures in the Park enthrall visitors. Mould introduced High Victorian architecture to NYC, his fingerprint most pronounced in his striking and colorful ornamental designs and beautiful embellishments found in the carved decorations and mosaics at the Bethesda Terrace. Resurfacing the forgotten contributions of Mould, Hell on Color, Sweet on Song presents a study of this nineteenth-century American architect and musical genius.Jacob Wrey Mould, whose personal history included a tie to Africa, was born in London in 1825 and trained there as an architect before moving to New York in 1852. The following year, he received the commission to design All Souls Unitarian Church. Nicknamed “the Church of the Holy Zebra,” it was the first building in America to display the mix of colorful materials and medieval Italian inspiration that was characteristic of High Victorian Gothic architecture. In addition to being an architect and designer, Mould was an accomplished musician and prolific translator of opera librettos. Yet anxiety over money and resentment over lack of appreciation of his talents soured Mould’s spirit. Unsystematic, impractical, and immune from maturity, he displayed a singular indifference to the realities of architecture as a commercial enterprise. Despite his personal shortcomings, he influenced the design of some of NYC’s revered landmarks, including Sheepfold, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the City Hall Park fountain, and the Morningside Park promenade. From 1875 to 1879, he worked for Henry Meiggs, the “Yankee Pizarro,” in Lima, Peru.Resting on the foundation of Central Park docent Lucille Gordon’s heroic efforts to raise from obscurity one of the geniuses of American architecture and a significant contributor to the world of music in his time, Hell on Color, Sweet on Song sheds new light on a forgotten genius of American architecture and music.Funding for this book was provided by: Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund
Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature
By Brett Brehm. 2023
What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity reexamines the development…
of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative literature, the history of science, and urban studies, Brehm builds a bridge between visual culture and sound studies.Kaleidophonic Modernity places the poet and inventor Charles Cros and his lover, the celebrated concert pianist and salonnière Nina de Villard at the heart of modern aesthetic and scientific vanguards. Cros's scientific endeavors ranged from color photography, to telecommunications, to mechanical sound reproducibility. In his poetry the Surrealists found an ancestor and inspiration. His literary and scientific works prove startling and relevant to predicaments of technological media in his own time and ours. For nearly twenty years Nina de Villard presided over a supremely daring intellectual salon. There, she welcomed manifold literary, artistic, and musical luminaries into a veritable crucible of the artistic avant-garde and precursor to the famous Chat Noir cabaret. Together, these two forgotten but pivotal figures, Cros and Villard, help reframe our thinking on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walt Whitman, icons of urban modernity who can now be seen and heard in a kaleidophonic light, one that offers a compelling new perspective on modern mediascapes.In elaborating this transatlantic phenomenon, Kaleidophonic Modernity illuminates the prehistory of the phonograph as it intersects with the aesthetics of sound reproducibility, Franco-American literary exchange, Poe’s aesthetic and intellectual legacy, the sounds of modern cities and technologies, and the genealogy of audiovisual experimentation found in such movements as Dada, Futurism, and the sound art of today.
The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory)
By Julie Beth Napolin. 2020
Shortlisted, 2021 Memory Studies Association First Book AwardThe Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which…
theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. Arguing that narrative theory has been founded on an exclusion of sound, the book poses a missing counterpart to modernism’s question “who speaks?” in the hidden acoustical questions “who hears?” and “who listens?”For Napolin, the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic. The book captures and enhances literature’s ambient sounds, sounds that are clues to heterogeneous experiences secreted within the acoustical unconscious of texts. The book invents an oblique ear, a subtle and lyrical prose style attuned to picking up sounds no longer hearable. “Resonance” opens upon a new genealogy of modernism, tracking from Joseph Conrad to his interlocutors—Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman—the racialized, gendered, and colonial implications of acoustical figures that “drift” through and are transformed by narrative worlds in writing, film, and music.A major synthesis of resources gleaned from across the theoretical humanities, the book argues for “resonance” as the traversal of acoustical figures across the spaces of colonial and technological modernity, figures registering and transmitting transformations of “voice” and “sound” across languages, culture, and modalities of hearing. We have not yet sufficiently attended to relays between sound, narrative, and the unconscious that are crucial to the ideological entailments and figural strategies of transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific modernism. The breadth of the book’s engagements will make it of interest not only to students and scholars of modernist fiction and sound studies, but to anyone interested in contemporary critical theory.
From the Bronx to the Bosphorus: Klezmer and Other Displaced Musics of New York
By Walter Zev Feldman. 2025
Discover the vibrant journey of music from New York’s melting pot to the mystical shores of the BosphorusFrom the Bronx…
to the Bosphorus explores the vibrant, yet largely concealed, musical culture of New York, tracing its origins to a period when the city served as a crucible for immigrants and their diverse musical expressions. Walter Zev Feldman chronicles his journey through the musical landscapes of post–WWII New York—from the declining world of East European immigrant klezmorim to the dynamic environments of Greek, Armenian, and Caucasian musicians.These experiences culminate in the klezmer revitalization movement of the late 1970s. Feldman, whose father emigrated from Bessarabia—a region known for its rich interactions among Jewish, Roma, and Greek musicians—connects various musical worlds. From the local Turkish Sephardi synagogue and the Greek Orthodox cathedral in Washington Heights to the lively Armenian and Greek nightclubs of Manhattan, his interactions with a diverse group of musicians, including an Armenian virtuoso who once performed for Stalin and the Shah of Iran, enhance his understanding and appreciation of these interconnected cultures. Finally, at age twenty-five, in a sense he returned to his father’s shtetl and studied with Dave Tarras, the greatest living klezmer in America, who had learned his key musical lessons in that very same Bessarabian town following World War I. From the Bronx to the Bosphorus is not just a chronicle of music but a poignant examination of the power of music to connect cultures, transcend borders, and preserve the echoes of a nearly vanished world.
Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical
By Roger Mathew Grant. 2020
Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement in European music theory of the…
eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for such theories, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability, beyond the rare thunderclap or birdcall.Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music, postulating that music’s physical materiality as sound vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. It is a pendant to contemporary theories of affect, and one from which they have much to learn. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it gives renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects.
Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Commonalities)
By Naomi Waltham-Smith. 2021
A missed phone call. A misheard word. An indiscernible noise. All these can make the difference between life and death.…
Failures to listen are frequently at the root of the marginalization and exclusion of certain forms of life. Audibility decides livability. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates for the first time the intimate and complex relation between life and sound in recent European philosophy, as well as the political stakes of this entanglement.Nowhere is aurality more pivotal than in the dialogue between biopolitical theory and deconstruction about the power over and of life. Closer inspection of these debates reveals that the main points of contention coalesce around figures of sound and listening: inarticulate voices, meaningless sounds, resonant echoes, syncopated rhythms, animal cries, bells, and telephone rings.Shattering Biopolitics stages a series of “over-hearings” between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben who often mishear or completely miss hearing in trying to hear too much. Notions of power and life are further diffracted as Hélène Cixous, Catherine Malabou, and Jean-Luc Nancy join in this high-stakes game of telephone. This self-destructive character of aurality is akin to the chanciness and risk of death that makes life all the more alive for its incalculability.Punctuating the book are a series of excurses on sound-art projects that interrogate aurality’s subordination and resistance to biopower from racialized chokeholds and anti-migrant forensic voice analysis to politicized speech acts and activist practices of listening.Shattering Biopolitics advances the burgeoning field of sound studies with a new, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the political imbrications of its object of inquiry. Above all, it is sound’s capacity to shatter sovereignty, as if it were a glass made to vibrate at its natural frequency, that allows it to amplify and disseminate a power of life that refuses to be mastered.
Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred
By Peter C. Bouteneff, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Robert Saler. 2021
Scholarly writing on the music of Arvo Pärt is situated primarily in the fields of musicology, cultural and media studies,…
and, more recently, in terms of theology/spirituality. Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred focuses on the representational dimensions of Pärt’s music (including the trope of silence), writing and listening past the fact that its storied effects and affects are carried first and foremost as vibrations through air, impressing themselves on the human body. In response, this ambitiously interdisciplinary volume asks: What of sound and materiality as embodiments of the sacred, as historically specific artifacts, and as elements of creation deeply linked to the human sensorium in Pärt studies? In taking up these questions, the book “de-Platonizes” Pärt studies by demystifying the notion of a single “Pärt sound.” It offers innovative, critical analyses of the historical contexts of Pärt’s experimentation, medievalism, and diverse creative work; it re-sounds the acoustic, theological, and representational grounds of silence in Pärt’s music; it listens with critical openness to the intersections of theology, sacred texts, and spirituality in Pärt’s music; and it positions sensing, performing bodies at the center of musical experience. Building on the conventional score-, biography-, and media-based approaches, this volume reframes Pärt studies around the materiality of sound, its sacredness, and its embodied resonances within secular spaces.
Rockin' the Bronx
By Larry Kirwan. 2025
Discover the untold story of 1980s Irish New York, where love, politics, and rock 'n' roll collide in a gritty…
urban tale that's as passionate as it is poignant.Rockin’ The Bronx vividly transports readers to the vibrant and chaotic world of 1980s Bronx, where Irish immigrants forged a new community amidst the backdrop of political upheaval and cultural transformation. Larry Kirwan, leader of the revolutionary band Black 47, blends drama, passion, and musical evolution into a narrative that captures the essence of an era defined by its challenges and triumphs. Through the eyes of characters like the groundbreaking gay hero, a book-loving, hard-hitting immigrant with IRA roots, and the central couple, Seán and Mary, who navigate this raucous landscape, Kirwan explores the intersecting worlds of personal identity and communal struggle. Set during significant historical moments—the deaths of John Lennon and Bobby Sands, the AIDS crisis, and the birth of new musical movements—this novel not only tells the story of its characters but also of a neighborhood echoing with the rhythms of change. As these Irish immigrants carve out their destinies, they leave behind a legacy of resilience and rebirth, encapsulated in a narrative that moves irrepressibly to the beat of the 1980s. Rockin' The Bronx is more than a novel; it’s a chronicle of a time when being Irish in New York could mean everything from strapping on a Stratocaster to knocking down walls both structural and cultural." data-fwclientid="8689d109-65f9-4971-bf1f-858e6c13ac9c" data-preservehtmlbullets="1" data-allowlists="0" data-crlfsubmit="1" autocomplete="off" spellcheck="true" class="field_input_main field_input_copytext field_input_copytext_body copytextheight-normal field_input_disabled fieldkeycheck-setup copytext-setup" contenteditable="false">Discover the untold story of 1980s Irish New York, where love, politics, and rock 'n' roll collide in a gritty urban tale that's as passionate as it is poignant.Rockin’ The Bronx vividly transports readers to the vibrant and chaotic world of 1980s Bronx, where Irish immigrants forged a new community amidst the backdrop of political upheaval and cultural transformation. Larry Kirwan, leader of the revolutionary band Black 47, blends drama, passion, and musical evolution into a narrative that captures the essence of an era defined by its challenges and triumphs. Through the eyes of characters like the groundbreaking gay hero, a book-loving, hard-hitting immigrant with IRA roots, and the central couple, Seán and Mary, who navigate this raucous landscape, Kirwan explores the intersecting worlds of personal identity and communal struggle. Set during significant historical moments—the deaths of John Lennon and Bobby Sands, the AIDS crisis, and the birth of new musical movements—this novel not only tells the story of its characters but also of a neighborhood echoing with the rhythms of change. As these Irish immigrants carve out their destinies, they leave behind a legacy of resilience and rebirth, encapsulated in a narrative that moves irrepressibly to the beat of the 1980s. Rockin' The Bronx is more than a novel; it’s a chronicle of a time when being Irish in New York could mean everything from strapping on a Stratocaster to knocking down walls both structural and cultural.