wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Author Robert Farris Thompson joins us to discuss his new book Tango: The Art History of Love, which explores the cultural roots of the Argentinean dance form. Thompson is a renowned Yale art historian, and Publishers Weekly calls his new book "an antidote to those trite coffee-table books that treat the tango with purple prose." We then turn our attention to the Oral History of American Music archive (OHAM), which is housed at Yale and is the place to go for an insiders' look at the history of American music. We're joined by OHAM founding director Vivian Perlis and associate director Libby Van Cleve. Their new book, Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington, is culled from taped interviews with more than 300 composers, musicians, and others ranging from Ellington and Ives to Copland and Cowell.