Reviewed by: Broadway Rhythm: Imaging the City in Song by Dominic Symonds Ellen M. Peck Broadway Rhythm: Imaging the City in Song. By Dominic Symonds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. pp. ix + 300. $80.00 hardcover. A map is often a tourist's first experience of a city, a tool to navigate an unfamiliar place. But maps show only the basic outlines: streets, buildings, and major points of interest. They are static and two-dimensional, offering orientation but little sense of place. Dominic Symonds's "performance cartography" proposes a dynamic map of New York City as experienced on a series of virtual walks through the city based on some of its most famous songs. Using performance studies and cartographic theory methods, Symonds ditches the traditional paper map in favor of one that views New York from the vertical and horizontal, as well as the bird's eye: the "surge upward and plunge below" (129). Symonds's map of New York includes fire escapes, lost neighborhoods (like the portion of the West Side demolished to make room for Lincoln Center), imaginary places (like Sarah Brown's Save A Soul Mission), elevators, and subway trains. But unlike a traditional map that would simply identify where these structures are, Symonds digs into them to discover why and how they are, providing considerably more detail and nuance than Google Street View can ever hope to. The map motif, therefore, is only a starting point: The range of songs that typify the "Broadway Rhythm" makes possible endless permutations of a "map" of New York. Starting and ending points, and all stops in between, are determined by the whims of the explorer. Symonds begins his book not with a preface but with a "Pre-amble," a scholarly itinerary of the walks he will take his readers on. His methodology is rooted in the studies of cartographic theorists J. B. Harley, Nigel Thrift, and Paul Carter, as well as poststructural scholars Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Based on the premise that New York's rich musical history is reflected in its physical attributes, Symonds suggests that we can discover musicality in its buildings, infrastructure, traffic patterns, and pace of life. "By engaging with the city," he states, "walking, mapping, dancing, or singing—we play its score, and to whatever extent that represents, constructs, or reveals, we are performing its cartography" (26). Each chapter is one potential "walk" around the city to "map" its various musical points of interest. He ends his "pre-amble" with an invitation to the first walk, invoking lyricist Dorothy Fields: "For now, grab your coat and get your hat; let's take that walk" (31). Symonds is the best of all tour guides: beginning and ending each chapter with a friendly "Come this way," then imparting meticulous historical research and thoughtful analysis. [End Page 237] "Walk One: A Glance at New York" delves into the city's history via the then-popular "bird's-eye view" map of 1873. This type of map—common in the nineteenth century—offered a long view of the city from its southernmost point, as if the viewer were flying into the city. As such, many streets are indistinct, but one stands out as it streaks its way north: Broadway. Symonds anchors his walk on this longest and widest of streets and narrates a history of the formation of the city's grid pattern. Although Lower Manhattan retains its original jumble of streets winding in different directions, the grid dominates the majority of the island. But Broadway defies it, slicing straight up through Lower and Midtown, then jutting west above Sixtieth Street. Symonds discusses some of the earliest popular songs about Broadway that helped to establish it as New York's most iconic boulevard. After the Civil War, Broadway began to play host to theatres and other entertainment venues, further cementing the street's cultural primacy. Symonds's analysis of "Broadway Melody" (written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown in 1929) introduces the reader to the "gapped scale," a type of musical construction evident in many songs about New York, in which the melody spans intervals of a tone and a tone and a...
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Dec 19, 2023
Sarah Brown 
Open Access