In his new book, John Howland showcases a set of ‘entertainment practices and aesthetics’ (13) geared towards lushness, glamour, and sophistication, and traces their lineage across genres and generations. One of the refreshing aspects of his approach is the way he takes mass enjoyment seriously as a historical phenomenon, bringing it from the overlooked background to the foreground of interest. Many genre and style histories pivot on subcultural or vanguard innovations and give short shrift to the vast middle-of-the-road sonic terrains with which they commingle and cross-fertilize. Howland takes us to the soft, luscious centre. In this, he participates in the recent advancement of scholarship into middlebrow musical taste and discourse. His cross-genre perspective frees him to appreciate hybrids (e.g., ‘jazz-with-strings’, ‘symphonic soul’, ‘jazz-meets-pop’) and fuzzy adjacencies (‘a large family of “jazzy”, syncopated popular musics’, 85), while shining light on some lesser-known entertainment forms (e.g., ‘the big-band venue of movie theater prologue-revue shows’, 93). Far from resulting in a bland porridge, the impure exchanges and mongrelizations he highlights are multiform and vibrant with stylistic collisions.

The book fleshes out a historical narrative, covering four distinct eras:

The first three eras occupy two or three chapters each, with post-1980 trends addressed in a prefatory first chapter and an Afterword. Howland's modus operandi is to select a handful of case studies as illustrations of the recombinant styles and associated social meanings at work in each era. Thus discursive, contextualizing passages are studded with detailed descriptions of influential big-band arrangements or studio recording tracks. The dedication of so much space to formal diagrams, meticulous transcriptions, and discussions of timbre and gesture is one of the book's strengths. It is incredibly useful to see snippets from Jay-Z, Artie Shaw, the Beach Boys, and Isaac Hayes laid out as full-score excerpts, which must represent untold hours of effort on the part of the author.

Influence chains. The book's main scaffolding is a proposed lineage of ‘important craft and style connections’ (22) running from Paul Whiteman's symphonic jazz to contemporary orchestral pop. Howland adumbrates the trajectory of the book in his first diagram (23), a chart that traces a direct line of collaborations connecting Jay-Z back to 1920s symphonic jazz in only six degrees of separation. By taking the long view, Howland counters the boasts of pop artists along the way who claim to have invented the fashionable clash of high- and lowbrow. He shows how such artists are participating in an established practice that deserves to be understood as its own tradition, one he dubs ‘luxe pop’. In another background/foreground reversal, he gives major credit to arrangers such as Arthur Lange, Ray Heindorf, Nelson Riddle, Axel Stordahl, and Pete Rugolo, arguing for their centrality to the story of taste-making and stylistic influence.

In fact, the book's pages are packed with personnel, both notable and obscure, from the varied realms of dance bands, crooners, girl groups, MOR, soft rock, soul, disco, and hip-hop. The range of the author's erudition is astounding, but it also poses a challenge for the general reader, who may possess cultural competence in only a subset of the music covered. I confess to many moments of bewilderment negotiating thickets of allusions such as this one, about the Nat Cole track ‘Lush Life’:

My limited knowledge of certain genres rendered me unable to grasp the fine points, or test the validity, of Howland's web of classifications. I hope multiple readings will increase my comfort with the nitty-gritty and allow the broader outlines of the argument to emerge more clearly.

Howland locates the origin of luxe practices in the ‘vaudeville aesthetic’ that ‘coalesced in the melting pot of 1920s New York’ (52):

As for the other end of the historical arc, he somewhat confusingly posits two outcomes, one of decline and fall, and one of renewed proliferation. His final chapter on Barry White considers ‘the fall from grace of luxe-pop idioms’ by the early 1980s, when they are widely derided as commercial, kitschy, and out of date (285). This is less than convincing as a closing gambit, first, because Howland has shown how luxe productions were dogged by negative reception throughout the century without abating in popularity; why should this latest critical contretemps be singled out as a death blow? Second, in his Afterword, it is not long before Howland begins to backpedal, until the ‘temporary decline’ (322) becomes scarcely a blip. One paragraph begins by stating how luxe production declined ‘in the pop charts across the early 1980s’. But only a few sentences later, he qualifies this claim: ‘Nonetheless, from the early 1980s … luxe-orchestration practice, centrally with strings, survived in the milieu of big, MOR pop-ballad and mid-tempo production, which remained relevant well into the 1990s (and beyond)’ (322). The entire ‘Afterword’, though printed in shrunken font as if to reduce its implications, bursts with interesting further developments across the subsequent decades. Unfortunately, this section is not organized beyond a series of lists and loose threads, thus distracting from any conclusion to a historical argument.

Taste cultures. Broadly speaking, Howland grounds his approach to the various case studies in ‘recent class and taste-culture theory from central figures like Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Peterson’ (5). As he follows the evolution of taste over time and from genre to genre, he turns to culture-specific studies to sharpen the focus and provide appropriate context. For instance, the film scholarship of Henry Jenkins helps to distil the ethos of 1920s variety entertainments; sociologist Herbert Gans analyses the habitus of American ‘lower-middlebrow’ culture ‘amid the shifting cultural tides of the 1960s’ (178); the aspirations to luxury of Isaac Hayes and Barry White are interpreted in light of racialized discourses of respectability and ‘Black excellence’ (316), in conversation with a previous study by Mitchell Morris.

Overall, the thrust of Howland's book in its evaluative aspect is to identify each manifestation of luxe aesthetics as a ‘critically disparaged gray area’ (106), carefully sort through the relevant cultural associations and hierarchies of prestige, and reassess the music in terms of the positive meanings it held for its audiences. This involves productive engagement with the themes of the music's negative critical reception, as in the following putdowns of the MOR output of soul artist Sam Cooke:

Howland is skilled at mining the critical literature for telling value-laden passages of essentially ‘anti-middlebrow discourse’ while refuting ‘its original presumed authority as to the cultural worth of the luxe music it aimed to defame’ (78). This perspective permits us to respect the aesthetic choices of luxe producers and consumers and apply a different set of values to the disputed qualities of excess, sensuousness, stylistic mixture, and broad appeal.

So what are the positive meanings listeners elicit from the luxe pop tradition? The answer is slightly different in each case, but common themes emerge. Most prominent is a matter of sociocultural positioning. Howland shows how audiences have perceived luxe orchestrations as conveying a symbolic elevation of entertainment forms. The term for such enhancement in the 1920s was ‘glorification’, as in the promotional slogan ‘Glorifying American Jazz’ (76). For the Ronettes in the 1960s, it was ‘fabulousness’ (150). The concept of elevation also resonates in the fleeting 1970s designation of ‘sophistisoul’ (240). Howland is careful to distinguish such middlebrow aspirations towards classiness and polish from attempts to cross into the realm of the highbrow: ‘Symphonic jazz sought not so much to position popular music as high art, but rather to dress such music in lavish arrangements that conveyed an aura of contemporary sophistication, glamour, and refinement’ (76). The connotation of the ‘classy’ as opposed to the ‘classical’ is a recurring leitmotif. In response to Michael Long's claims as to the importance of a classical register in popular music, Howland contends that symbolic elevation and ‘conspicuous symphonization’ (39) are well understood through the inherent conventions of luxe pop without reference to elite artistic registers. He frames the aspirational notions invoked by his case studies in terms of socioeconomic status and lifestyle glamour ‘rather than high-culture pretension’ (115).

A second source of enjoyment is the spark created by the clash of high and low. This aesthetic reflects the exciting intermingling of classes and idiolects in modern urban life, ‘where the underworld can meet the elite’ (in the words of the song ‘42nd Street’, 51):

Generalizing from Howland's examples, one infers that at times the mixture of high and low affords an enticing upward pull, and at other times a noisy, vibrant polarity-in-stasis. (For the latter, he sometimes uses the term ‘mongrelization’, following historian Ann Douglas.) But what about the pull downward? He concludes his first (and most recent) case study by interpreting Jay-Z's luxe productions as a ‘subversive act of vulgarizing [the] lofty standards’ of High Culture: ‘Rapping in front of an orchestra is a playful inversion and skew(er)ing of traditional class, culture, and race assumptions through a range of Black signifying practices’ (45). This is a highly intriguing proposition, that in the right hands, luxe can convey a disillusionment with, as well as faith in, cultural aspirations. But this interpretation is unique in the book; after the opening glimpse of strategic vulgarization, the rest of his examples revolve around glorification (as his book title implies). This leaves the lower quadrants of Howland's affective-aesthetic grid underexplored. It is understandable, given his continuing efforts to counteract derogatory views of middle-to-low taste, that he would maintain distance from the discourse of debasement. But it is puzzling that he begins his book with a positive deployment of such discourse without informing us whether there are other examples or considering the implications for his framework of cultural positioning.

Mixed signifiers. At the micro-level, Howland's interpretations are premised on musical topic theory, whereby ‘the stylistic markers of luxe pop can trigger a dense fabric of associations’ (21). Crucial to his repertoire is the mixture of topics from different registers. Following Diana Taylor, he espouses a view of hybridity that emphasizes artful collision and sustained heterogeneity rather than integration or fusion (48–9), a view that allows for semiotic dissonance and dialogic play within a single hybrid work. I would have appreciated a clear exposition of a fundamental set of stylistic markers signifying ‘luxe practice’, as well as illustrations of how they collide with other signifiers. But I find this semiotic aspect gets lost among the other ambitious tasks Howland has set for himself. One has to hunt for a list of identifying musical features. These include massed strings, instruments marked as ‘orchestral’, elaborate formal plans, and ‘classicistic’ allusions. But other markers (or broader topical fields) appear and disappear along the way, some of which remain frustratingly imprecise: the spectacular, the melodramatic, the exotic, the cinematic. Of course luxe markers will change relative to the various local ecosystems under scrutiny, but readers could use more help in orienting themselves.

The close readings of his selected case studies would be a suitable place for Howland to engage in a granular investigation of topics and their impact, and indeed he provides lovingly thick descriptions of individual pieces. But in my experience, it is not always clear what point the abundant musical specifics are meant to illustrate, and they tend to contribute to the narratives of stylistic lineage rather than semiotic framing. In chapter conclusions, he may return to a very general parsing of high/low signification, as in the excerpt about Phil Spector quoted earlier. But there is a notable disconnect between his consideration of the musical surface and his middle-ground deductions; the signifiers themselves go in and out of focus.

As for the technical aspect of book production, it creates an unfortunate impression when Jon Pareles's name is misspelled on the first page of chapter 1, and when Jerry Leiber has his vowels transposed fully half of the time, but these distractions are tiny in the scheme of things. More concerning are lapses in the management of notational detail; for example, harmonic errors in Exx. 1.4 and 6.5b; chord symbol notation (123 and Ex. 4.1) where you cannot tell if the flat sign applies to the chord root to its left or the added tone to its right; a mistaken labelling of a ‘Mixolydian/dominant scale’ that does not match the transcription (297). The lapses I noticed are relatively few, but they do underscore how much trust we are placing in the author at the molecular level of transcriptions that are unverifiable except by ear.

That said, I love this book for its championing of style, its critical edge, its humorous voice, its generosity, extravagance, and immersiveness, even when it makes my head spin.