Steven Rings - "What Did You Hear?" - Martha Feldman

Steven Rings will discuss his new book What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan. Steven will be in conversation withMartha Feldman. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Co-op

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About the Book: Folk troubadour, rock star, country crooner—for a musician who adopted so many personas, Bob Dylan always sounds like himself. While he’s written many of the most iconic and impactful lyrics of the past sixty years, Dylan’s music has also reshaped our sonic imagination with his ragged voice, wailing harmonica, and rough-hewn guitar. 

Music theorist Steven Rings argues that such sonic imperfections are central to understanding Dylan’s songs and their appeal. These blemishes can invoke authenticity or persona, signal his social commitments, and betray his political shortcomings. Rings begins—where else?—with Dylan’s voice, exploring its changeability, its unmistakable features, and its ability to inhabit characters, including the female narrator of “House of the Rising Sun.” Rings then turns to Dylan as an instrumentalist, examining his infamous adoption of the electric guitar in 1965, as well as his stylistically varied acoustic playing, which borrows sounds and techniques from Black blues musicians, among other influences. Rings charts the histories audible in Dylan’s harmonica as well as piano, which has been central to his music making since his earliest days of imitating Little Richard in his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. Finally, Rings guides readers through one of Dylan’s most famous songs, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” analyzing its musical sources as well as variations in live performances. A companion website of audio and video examples helps readers notice the nuances and idiosyncrasies inherent in Dylan’s work and, even more importantly, their effects.

A close look at an underdiscussed but essential aspect of Dylan’s oeuvre, What Did You Hear? offers a fresh understanding of a singular performer, his musical choices, and the meanings that we can hear in his imperfect sounds.

About the Author: Steven Rings is associate professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Tonality and Transformation and the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory.

About the Interlocutor: Martha Feldman is a cultural historian of European vernacular musics, ca. 1500-1950, with a concentration on Italy. Her projects have explored the senses and sensibilities of listeners, the interplay of myth, festivity, and kingship in opera, issues of cinema, media, and voice, and various incarnations of the musical artist. Running throughout her work are questions about mediations between social, political, and artistic phenomena. Her first monograph, City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice (University of California Press, 1995; winner of the Bainton Prize of the Sixteenth-Century Society and Conference in conjunction with the Centre for Reformation Studies), dealt with madrigals within the civic culture of Renaissance Venice. Her Renaissance interests have extended to the music of courtesans, with results published in conjunction with an international team of scholars together with her graduate students in The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (co-edited, Oxford, 2006; winner of the 2007 Ruth A. Solie Award of the American Musicological Society). In 2007, she published a book on 18th-century opera seria as a manifestation and refraction of changing notions of sovereignty and festivity during the later eighteenth century. That work, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy, won the Gordon J. Laing Award of the University of Chicago Press (2010) for the faculty book "published in the previous three years that brings the Press the greatest distinction." 

In addition to Music, Feldman is on the faculty of Romance Languages and Literatures and is a member of the Faculty Committee of Theater and Performance Studies.