Music reviews and criticism Books

Popular music is increasingly being represented and celebrated as an aspect of contemporary cultural history and heritage. In many places across the world, popular music heritage sites - including museums, archives, commemorative plaques adorning...

The thrilling conclusion to the Saga of Beef. Will Bottle explode into a cloud of shrapnel? Will Skip the Editor even really learn to stop caring about Bottle's confuddling approach to reality? Will GREGORY ever find a piano to keep his fidgeting fingers...

This book studies Crumb's Winds of Destiny and Black Angels as artefacts of collective memory and cultural trauma. It situates these two pieces in Crumb's output and unpacks the complex methodologies needed to understand these pieces as contributions and...

The Symphony remained a major orchestral form in Australia between 1960 and 2020, with a body of diverse and interesting symphonies produced during the 1960s and 70s that defied the widespread modernist trends of serialism, electronic music and...

In his third volume on musical expressive meaning, Robert S. Hatten examines virtual agency in music from the perspectives of movement, gesture, embodiment, topics, tropes, emotion, narrativity, and performance. Distinguished from the actual agency of...

This book explores the transformation of ideas of the material in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century musical composition. New music of this era is argued to reflect a historical moment when the idea of materiality itself is in flux...

The transition from the valveless natural horn to the modern valved horn in 19th-century Paris was different from similar transitions in other countries. While valve technology was received happily by players of other members of the brass family, strong...

The music we hear is always inhabited by voices of previous performances. Because listening is now so often accompanied by moving images, this process is more complex than ever. Music videos, television and film music, interactive video games, and social...

What the Pluck? is a study of the harp as a powerful visual cue in the cinema. From Walt Disney to the Marx brothers, Gone with the Wind to The Wedding March and Small Time Crooks, this ancient instrument has acted as a symbol of immortality,...

One Hundred Years of Music provides a full account of the history of music from the death of Beethoven to the modern era

In The History of Music Production, Richard James Burgess draws on his experience as a producer, musician, and author. Beginning in 1860 with the first known recording of an acoustic sound and moving forward chronologically, Burgess charts the highs and...

This is the first study to survey the development of musical thought in modern Irish cultural history. It registers the function of music as a dynamic agent in the history of Irish ideas in the period 1770 - 1970. Ireland's verbally dominated culture has...

Under the dictatorships of the twentieth century, music never ceased to sound. Even when they did not impose aesthetic standards, these regimes tended to favour certain kinds of art music such as occasional works for commemorations or celebrations,...

Women's Music for the Screen: Diverse Narratives in Sound shines a long-overdue light on the works and lives of female-identifying screen composers. Bringing together composer profiles, exclusive interview excerpts, and industry case studies, this volume...

In 1939, a new record from a shadowy storefront on Detroit's east side starts showing up in juke boxes all over town. It quickly becomes a smash hit, sending men scrambling to cash in, by creating Detroit's first home-grown record company! Here's the...

Teenage Nervous Breakdown: Music and Politics in the Post-Elvis Era combines music and cultural history and criticism to examine how rock and the rock lifestyle have been merchandised first to a teenage audience and eventually to a worldwide consumer...

Material Cultures of Music Notation brings together a collection of essays that explore a fundamental question in the current landscape of musicology: how can writing and reading music be understood as concrete, material practices in a wider cultural...

Who inspired Johannes Brahms in his art of writing music? In this book, Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes provides a fresh look at the ways in which Brahms employed musical references to works of earlier composers in his own instrumental music. By analyzing newly...

Rock and roll music evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s, as a combination of African American blues, country, pop, and gospel music produced a new musical genre. Even as it captured the ears of the nation, rock and roll was...

The Eurovision Song Contest is famous for its camp spectacles and political intrigues, but what about its actual music? With more than 1,500 songs in over 50 languages and a wide range of musical styles since it began in 1956, Eurovision features...

Singing Soviet Stagnation: Vocal Cycles from the USSR, 1964-1985 explores the ways in which the aftershock of an apparent crisis in Soviet identity after the death of Stalin in 1953 can be detected in selected musical- literary works of what has become...

In this edited volume, contributors explore an essential element of the influential television series Twin Peaks: the role of music and sound. From its debut in 1990 to its return to television in 2017, Twin Peaks has amassed a cult following, and...

The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus is a critical account of the history of Andalusian music in Iberia from the Islamic conquest of 711 to the final expulsion of the Moriscos (Spanish Muslims converted to Christianity) in the early 17th century. This...

Prof. Hugh Miller's History of Music was first published in 1947, and quickly became a reference for students of music history worldwide. This thorough revision incorporates new knowledge on music, an updated 20th century section, and a brand new section...

What can psychoanalysis learn from music? What can music learn from psychoanalysis? Can the analysis of music itself provide a primary source of psychological data?Drawing on Freud's concept of the oral road to the unconscious, Melodies of the Mind...

Establishing an intersection between the fields of traditional music studies, English folk music history and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this book responds to the problematic emphasis on cultural identity in the way traditional...

The song remains the most basic unit of modern pop music. Shaped into being by historical forces-cultural, aesthetic, and technical-the song provides both performer and audience with a world marked off by a short, discrete, and temporally demarcated...

The violinist Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987) is considered among the most influential performers in history. Focussing on Heifetz and his extensive performing relationship with the Bach solo violin works (BWV 1001-1006), Dario Sarlo examines one of the most...

This book provides the first scholarly history of the　viola d'amore, a popular bowed string instrument of the Baroque era, with a unique tone produced by a set of metal sympathetic strings. Composers like Bach made use of the viola d'amore for its...

Concepts of Time in Post-War European Music gives a historical and philosophical account of the discussions of the nature of time and music during the mid-twentieth century.The nature of time was a persistent topic among composers in Paris and Darmstadt...

Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions shows how the present is troubled by the past and by the future, using the idea of haunting to explore psychoanalytically how identities, beliefs, intimacies and hatreds are transmitted across...

Has the virtual invaded the realm of the real, or has the real expanded its definition to include what once was characterized as virtual? With the continual evolution of digital technology, this distinction grows increasingly hazy. But perhaps the...

This volume brings together leading voices from the new wave of research on musical instruments to consider how we can connect the material aspects of instruments with their social function, approaches that have been otherwise too frequently separated in...