Ingrid Monson Books

Freedom Sounds addresses the impact of the Civil Rights Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s, and develops a new framework for thinking through the relationships among music, politics, aesthetics, and activism by carefully addressing the hot button racial and economic issues that generated contentious and soul-searching debate.

In this work, Ingrid Monson juxtaposes musicians' talk and musical examples to ask how musicians go about saying something through music in a way that articulates identity, politics, and race.

With an innovative historical framework, Carol J. Oja explores the emergence during World War II of Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green.