cover story
Happy holidays, friends! 2021 is fast approaching. When we last communicated, I reported that my book would ship on Inauguration Day. Alas, pandemic book-production shenanigans have pushed that back a bit; the new shipping date is Feb 8, and the official release date is now Feb 22. Pre-order now!
A more exciting thing that happened, maybe a day or two after the last newsletter, is that my book finally got a cover! It’s pretty great, right?
Figuring out what I’d want my book cover to ideally look like was not an easy task. The basic challenge came from the subject matter: a music festival run by three composers. If you write a biography of one person, then sure, you put their picture on the cover. But if you’re writing a book about three people (and a bunch of other stuff), putting a triple-portrait on the cover is possibly going to look odd. There are lots of fun photos of the Bang founders (check them out on Canland), like this one by Robert Lewis, but it was hard for me to imagine them making a strong book cover.
Especially because the three people are composers, which means you can’t get a cool photo of them actually, say, playing instruments. Plus, the book wasn’t just about three people — it was about their organization, and the larger musical and institutional landscape that was changing around them as their organization grew.
Another logical cover would be some kind of performance photo from a Bang on a Can marathon, and I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what might work. One of my favorites is this (by the late photographer Lona Foote), which showed up in a New York Times review of the 1991 festival, but it’s from a Harry Partch concert (those are some of his cloud chamber bowls) which unto itself doesn’t scream *Bang on a Can*. Cool image, but not a good fit.
There are plenty of fantastic photos of the All-Stars performing, and I tracked down a couple that will be within the book itself. One potential photo, from Music for Airports at Lincoln Center in 1999 (by Stephanie Berger), seemed like a cool potential cover, but my editor worried it would look too busy, and I ultimately agreed. (I did track down the original, and it’s in the book!)
So, leaving behind people, then, we could look to more abstract designs, which Bang on a Can has had in plenty — they’ve had a strong visual aesthetic since their very first concerts. But again, tricky to figure out what would work best. A gloss on, say, one of their late ‘80s posters wouldn’t really give any music-specific flair.
Or, having already ripped off the title for their 1995 Sony album, I guess I could have tried to rip off the cover, too, but again, no real music connection here.
Ultimately, I could come up with only one image that felt like it would work *really well* and it also happens to be pretty much the first Bang on a Can image that there is: the poster for the 1987 festival.
You have hammers banging on cans, and some staff paper that gives it a specific this-book-is-about-music vibe. The poster was created by the performance artist Papo Colo, who was married to Jeanette Ingberman, who founded and ran the Exit Art gallery where Bang had its first festival. When I visited the Exit Art materials, part of NYU’s Fales Library archives, a couple years back, I found the negatives from the photo shoot (presumably, Colo himself holding up the hammer and can) and a bunch of prints. Here’s a very crappy photo of one of them:
Bang on a Can generously gave me and Oxford permission to mess around with the image for cover purposes.
I also spent a lot of time — in dialogue with my wife Emily Platt, who has a fantastic eye — thinking about the style of the cover, aka looking at a lot of book covers that I felt worked and didn’t work. Here are a bunch that I really liked and sent to Oxford as suggestions (these are all great books too!)
Anyway, that gives some sense of the thought that goes into something like this. I’m grateful to Bang on a Can for granting image permission, and to Oxford’s design team, and specifically Brady McNamara, for what they came up with!
In other book news, I’ve now got a book page up on my website!
https://williamrobin.com/industry/
It includes some links to newsletter entries that might be helpful to readers, as well as a playlist I’ve created for readers. You might as well give it a listen now!