Sacred sound

This innovative book explores religion through music, the only art form named after a divinity and one of the most universally recognized forms of human experience.Music has been documented from prehistory to the present age in virtually all known cultures. For many, it is a vehicle for spiritual...

Last night a dj saved my life

Freshly revised and chock-full of new, vibrant stories, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life is the “lively and . . . necessary” (New York Times Book Review), and first and foremost definitive history of the musical outlaws who revolutionized the music industry: the disc jockeysTwenty-five years since i...

Alien listening

An examination of NASA's Golden Record that offers new perspectives and theories on how music can be analyzed, listened to, and thought about—by aliens and humans alike.In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space. The Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecrafts contained world music and sounds ...

Audible loss

An innovative and much-needed critical work on music and memorialization in relation to AIDS, 9/11, and anti-Black violence in AmericaMusic has long served as a powerful medium for communal mourning and remembrance in times of crisis. Audible Loss examines musical responses to three major crises ...

Nuthin' but a "g" thang

In the late 1980s, gangsta rap music emerged in urban America, giving voice to—and making money for—a social group widely considered to be in crisis: young, poor, black men. From its local origins, gangsta rap went on to flood the mainstream, generating enormous popularity and profits. Yet the hi...

Ocean of sound

The classic account of ambient music, with a new foreword by Michel Faber

The american musical and the formation of national identity

The American musical has achieved and maintained relevance to more people in America than any other performance-based art. This thoughtful history of the genre, intended for readers of all stripes, offers probing discussions of how American musicals, especially through their musical numbers, adva...

The american musical and the performance of personal identity

The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramat...

Maps of sorrow

This book takes readers through the polycentric world of the pre-colonial period in AfroAsia, which involved systems, processes and interactions that were interconnected through long-distance trade, slavery and migration.

Castrato phantoms

A new mapping of castrato afterlives in modern RomeAround 1830, opera houses stopped using castrati, and Rome and the Vatican became home to their glorious singing, engineered by surgery and intensive vocal training. Castrati were long mired in secrecy, obfuscations, and lies about their origin a...

Postcolonial repercussions

The anthology gathers heterogeneous approaches to emancipatory forms of ontological listening as well as pleas for critical fabulation and a practice of care. It tells us about opportunities, perspectives and the (im)possibility of decolonised listening.

Hard rain

Bob Dylan’s iconic 1962 song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” stands at the crossroads of musical and literary traditions. Alessandro Portelli explores the power and resonance of the song, considering the meanings of history and memory in folk cultures and in Dylan’s work.

Hearing sexism

Analyzing the voices of Kurt Cobain, Kate Bush, Björk and others, Müller demonstrates how gender is performed vocally and interacts with gendered aspects of embodiment and affect.

Shattering biopolitics

Failures to listen or mishearings can be a matter of life and death. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates the intimate and complex relation between life and sound in philosophy, political theory, and sound-art.

The forgotten songs of the newfoundland outports

The Forgotten Songs of the Newfoundland Outports brings to light the best of the remaining unpublished material in Peacock’s 1951-1961 field collection. It aims to address the lacuna between Peacock’s massive field collection and what he eventually published in Outports.

The riot grrrl collection

The original manifestos, calls to arms, and rallying cries of the Riot Grrrl revolution, collected here for the first time.

Women in irish traditional music

Traces the position, experiences and reception of women in Irish traditional music through detailed ethnographic and statistical findings.This book is the first of its kind to engage with the larger subject of women in commercial Irish traditional music. It considers the experiences of performers...

Community music at the boundaries

Community Music at the Boundaries examines how music enhances the lives of those living in what might be considered marginalized settings. Built on foundational principles of community music, it addresses music and accessibility, health, justice and the prison system, faith, and education, by int...

Encyclopedia of political record labels

A love letter to over 750 record labels which produced political music as a medium for improving our communities and world.

The sounds of poetry viewed as music

Poets, literary critics, and lovers of poetry often speak of the “music of poetry.” This book gives substance to the metaphor by building on recent research in linguistics and music theory to propose a theory of the sounds of poetry conceived in musical terms.

The discourse community of electronic dance music

Anita Jóri considers the world of electronic dance music as a discourse community. She gives an overview on the language use and discourse characteristics of this community while applying a mixed methodology of linguistic discourse analysis and cultural studies.

Music – media – history

This volume considers audiovisual material as a primary source for historiography. By analyzing how the same sounds are used in different media contexts at different times, the contributors challenge the linear perspective of music history based on canonical authority.

The work of opera

Music at the limits

Music at the Limits is the first book to bring together three decades of Edward W. Said's essays and articles on music. Addressing the work of a variety of composers, musicians, and performers, Said carefully draws out music's social, political, and cultural contexts and, as a classically trained...

Kompositionen für hörbaren raum / compositions for audible space

The integration of audible space is a central aspect of electroacoustic music. Ever since the earliest analogue days of electroacoustic music, pioneers of the genre – including Pierre Schaeffer, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono – used special devices and methods for their com...

A short history of opera

When first published in 1947, A Short History of Opera immediately achieved international status as a classic in the field. Now, more than five decades later, this thoroughly revised and expanded fourth edition informs and entertains opera lovers just as its predecessors have.The fourth edition i...

Anonymity performance in electronic pop music

This study sketches two musico-artistic projects of anonymity performance as forms of immanent and particulate critical practice in the sense of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. Adopting performance in a reflexive and performative writing style, this performance ethnography calls for a radical ...

Women's leadership in music

The contributors ask what can be considered as leadership in culture from a female point of view today.

Curating contemporary music festivals

Brandon Farnsworth lays out a theory for understanding curatorial practices in contemporary music and how they could be a solution to the field’s diminishing social relevance. He focuses on two case studies, the Munich Biennale for New Music Theatre, and the Maerzmusik Festival at the Berliner Fe...

Musical elaborations

Filling a significant gap in contemporary cultural studies, Musical Elaborations examines the intersection of the public and private meaning of music. Incorporating the music criticism of Adorno, musical ideas from literary works by Proust, and criticism by Benjamin and de Man into his work, note...

Dvs mindz

DVS Mindz might be the greatest rap group you’ve never heard of. Geoff Harkness takes readers on a unique two-decade journey alongside the members of DVS Mindz, chronicling their childhoods, their brush with success, and what became of them in the years that followed.

Music practices across borders

Reconnecting migration studies and the theory of valuation, this collection offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of transnational music practices. Through these practices, values are created and shared which connect a way of music making with objects and places of experiencing music ...

Decentering musical modernity

This collection investigates the concept of modernity in music and its multiple interpretations in Europe and Asia. Through contributions by both European and Asian musicologists it discusses decentering understanding of musical modernity, while attentive to the specificities of local music.

The velvet lounge

Troubled urban neighborhoods and jazz-club havens were the backdrop of Gerald Majer's life growing up in sixties and seventies Chicago. The Velvet Lounge, an original hybrid of memoir, biography, and musical description, reflects this history and pursues a sustained meditation on jazz along with ...

Experiencing music video

Music videos have ranged from simple tableaux of a band playing its instruments to multimillion dollar, high-concept extravaganzas. Born of a sudden expansion in new broadcast channels, music videos continue to exert an enormous influence on popular music. They help to create an artist's identity...

Musical practice as a form of life

How is musical practice connected with everyday life? Eva-Maria Houben shows that performing music as an activity—indeed, as playing—allows meaning to unfold in specific situations, places, and relationships.

Tuning up! the innovative potential of musikvermittlung

Various actors in the field of classical music have developed a wide range of new artistic and educational practices over the last two decades, aiming to facilitate in-depth aesthetic experiences, bond with new audiences, and encourage active cultural participation. The contributors focus on the ...

Popular music and public diplomacy

In the early years of the Cold War, Western nations increasingly adopted strategies of public diplomacy involving popular music. While the diplomatic use of popular music was initially limited to such genres as jazz, the second half of the 20th century saw a growing presence of various popular ge...

Tyranny of style

A defence of the composer’s duty to the text: not to entertain, not to soothe, but to translate meaning with precision and depth.

Music, madness, and the unworking of language

In the romantic tradition, music is consistently associated with madness, either as cause or cure. Writers as diverse as Kleist, Hoffmann, and Nietzsche articulated this theme, which in fact reaches back to classical antiquity and continues to resonate in the modern imagination. What John Hamilto...

Transfigured new york

Transfigured New York presents conversations with iconic, genre-bending artists who shaped the sounds of experimental movements like no wave, avant-jazz, and electronic music.