Liz William, "Rough Music: Folk Customs, Tran...

The Bartered Bride, a comic opera by Bedrich Smetana, premiered in Prague on March 30, 1866. Its pastoral love story and setting in a rural Czech village eventually became an enduring symbol of Czech nationalism. In Visions of the Village: Ruralness, Identity, and Czech Opera (Ox ...  Show more

Rock 'n' roll appeared in the 1950s as the high-energy, electrically amplified music of young dancers and listeners, first in the United States and then around the globe, and from the beginning it symbolized more than music. First popularized as a marketing rubric to sell African ...  Show more

Lucinda Williams is defying convention. While most of her peers have settled into a well worn groove, the alt-country icon just released an album that's way more punk than country. She spoke with Bruce Headlam from her home in Nashville about her evolving sound and how her new al ...  Show more

Flora Willson explores the struggle of four women composers to have their work heard, and Biancamaria Fontana on the late David Graeber’s survey of Madagascan pirate kingdoms.‘Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World’ by Leah Broad‘Pirate Enlightenment: Or the Real Liber ...  Show more

In this enchanting episode, Dr. Eleanor Janega dissolves the boundaries between history, folklore, and music to explore the haunting world of medieval ballads. Joined by author Amy Jeffs, illustrator Gwen Burns and composer/singer Natalie Brice, Eleanor uncovers the timeless stor ...  Show more

The pub is an English institution. Yet its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In Pub (Bloomsbury, 2025) a new addition to the Object Lessons series, Dr. Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and e ...  Show more