Applied Ethnomusicology
Applied ethnomusicology is an approach guided by social responsibility toward solving concrete problems. This volume brings together diverse perspectives on its potential in contributing to sustainable music cultures and the use of music in conflict resolution.
Bruce Springsteen’s America
Moving from jargon-free critical analysis to a fan’s passionate participatory research, this book places work and class at the centre of Bruce Springsteen’s oeuvre. It presents him as the bard of the downtrodden and is testament to the life-giving power of rock and roll.
Diversity in Australia’s Music
This volume showcases the rich diversity of music in Australia from colonial times to the present. Starting with an overview of developments during the past 50 years, the contributions discuss both Western and non-western genres and the history of music-making in the country.
This volume explores Roberto Gerhard’s work from the early Wind Quintet through to the late period Metamorphoses. It suggests evidence that situates his idiosyncratic experiments alongside, rather than after, the total serialist works of his European counterparts.
This book offers a multidisciplinary approach to music in Turkey. Chapters explore topics ranging from the cognitive responses of musicians listening to atonal chords, to Turkey’s heavy metal scene, and the historical mission to “contemporize” music.
Irish Music Abroad
This musical ethnography of Birmingham, 1950–2010, traces how Irish music moved from private arenas to the city’s public heart. It shows how the community conquered challenges, like the IRA bombings, to create its massive St Patrick’s Parade.
This book explores the surprisingly diverse musical landscape of Invercargill, a city at the bottom of Aotearoa/New Zealand. It illustrates the importance of music in local communities, enriching social connectedness, local identity, and the lives interwoven through them.
Many Voices
This collection of essays re-thinks music and national identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The papers offer various perspectives on the interconnections between music and identity, aiming to open up critical discourse on the many sounds of a diverse nation.
Music and Minorities from Around the World
The study of music has become an important gateway into understanding the culture of minorities. This volume attends to Jewish themes, with authors from four continents. Its global scope and varied approaches represent the broad range of modern ethnomusicology.
Music as a Spandrel of Evolutionary Adaptation for Speech
Music makes no sense in the light of evolution. This book reveals it as an innate language that unlocks our imagination, allowing us to transcend reality and create. Not bad for what began as a spandrel of speech.
This compendium of interdisciplinary research presents new “readings” on topics from opera by Handel and Mozart to 1960s popular sound. Chapters discuss operatic lighting, Wagner’s leitmotif technique, music and social media, and the art and politics of the collective Laibach.
Opera as Anthropology
Kotnik considers the relationship between opera and anthropology. His study rests on the following central arguments: on the one hand, opera is a new and “exotic” topic for anthropologists, while, on the other, anthropology is still seen as an unusual approach to opera.
Over the Edge
The authors in this volume bring new ideas from their research to help us create spaces we can claim as our own. These essays explore culturally produced markers of identity, revealing connections that challenge our perspective of scholarly subjects.
Philosophical Considerations on Contemporary Music
Fronzi describes how complexity in music of the 20th and 21st centuries can be tackled philosophically, starting from certain characteristics. He identifies nine characteristics that permit us to open up philosophical-cultural paths and interpret contemporary music developments.
Popular Music, Ethnicity and Politics in the Kenya of the 1990s
Okatch Biggy was the single most dominant benga artiste of the 1990s. Mboya analyzes Biggy’s songs as works of art, identifying the aesthetic and rhetorical conventions that are deployed in the songs, and exploring the central messages of the music, and their significance.
Postgraduate Voices in Punk Studies
The first academic collection of postgraduate research on the punk scene. These cutting-edge, interdisciplinary studies explore themes of gender, race, and sexuality, covering topics from French straight-edge to the links between punk and 90s rave culture.
Rock n Roll and Nationalism
In essays on countries from the United States to Russia, scholars, performers, and journalists explore the fascinating interplay between national identities and the rock music idiom, leading to a new understanding of rock and nationalism.
Small Places, Operatic Issues
Through its analysis of five different social positions or characterisations of opera from 1748 to 2005, this book creates a fruitful interpretative encounter of the academic domains of opera studies, historical sociology, cultural sociology and social and cultural anthropology.
Sonic Mediations
Sonic Mediations is a collection of essays that invites readers to rethink mediation by examining the relationships between the body, sound, and technology. It addresses key questions about performance, perception, and the role of the listener.
Sound in Motion
This collection sheds light on the intimate relationship between music and audiovisual culture in contemporary society. It includes indispensable studies on music and cinema, as well as original research on music in videogames and television.