Unpicking the musical city: On Adam Krims’s Music and Urban Geography

This essay reflects on Adam Krims’s Music and Urban Geography. The importance of this particular book, it is suggested here, is that it provides a deeply integrated analysis of the often overlooked interconnections between music and urban spaces. This essay looks across the arguments made in Music and Urban Geography and attempts to outline the key aspects of Krims’s approach and of the form of analysis that he explores. This piece argues that Krims’s book provides a model for developing sonically aware urban cultural studies. It uses Krims’s book as the basis for exploring a situated form of analysis in which the recursive relations between music and the city are understood within a set of complex and interwoven relations. As such, this piece uses Krims’s work as a guide to unpicking the musical city.