An interview with Ted Gioia on Music: A Subversive History

This fall Syncopated Times reporter Steve Provizer met with Ted Gioia, author of many important jazz histories, to discuss his latest project Music: A Subversive History. Steve Provizer: Do you remember when you got the germ of the idea for this book? Ted Gioia: I can tell from my journals that I started the research that led to Music: A Subversive History back in 1991. That’s scary for me to contemplate—that it can take more than a quarter of a century to put together all the pieces you need for an ambitious project. But the scope required it. This is the biggest thing I’ve ever tackled. Even so, my starting point was a simple one. I had a hunch that if I looked at the history of music from an upside down perspective, it would reveal new insights. Almost all music history focuses on elites—the composers hired by kings and popes and the respectable songs embraced by ruling institutions. I thought that there might be a whole different musical life flourishing in the private lives of individuals outside the power structure. This alternative approach yielded extraordinary results, but only after many years of digging into details left out of conventional music history books. [S.P.] What was the thing that you discovered that lifted the veil on the musical “cycle of subversion,” if I may call it that? [T.G.] I uncovered many surprising things, and in the end had t