Theory of music and musicology Books

Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo is the first book to address the question: How did a centuries-old, Swiss mountain tradition make its way into American country music? Along the way, the reader discovers that yodeling is not just a Swiss thing--everyone from Central...

Alison McQueen Tokita presents a series of case studies that demonstrate the persistence of Japanese sung narratives in a multiplicity of genres over ten centuries, including the way they flourished and declined, together with factors contributing to...

WINNER OF THE 2019 SOCIETY OF ETHNOMUSICLOGY ELLEN KOSKOFF PRIZE FOR EDITED COLLECTIONSThe Routledge Companion to the Study of Local Musicking provides a reference to how, cross-culturally, musicking constructs locality and how locality is constructed by...

The manuscript Seville, Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular 5-2-25, a composite of dozens of theoretical treatises, is one of the primary witnesses to late medieval music theory. Its numerous copies of significant texts have been the focus of substantial...

What does a one hour contemporary orchestral piece by Georg Friedrich Haas have in common with a series of glitch-noise electronic tracks by Pan Sonic? This book proposes that, despite their differences, they share a particular understanding of sound...

Carl Schachter is the world's leading practitioner of Schenkerian theory and analysis. His articles and books have been broadly influential, and are seen by many as models of musical insight and lucid prose. Yet, perhaps his greatest impact has been...

Giacomo Puccini is one of the most frequently performed and best loved of all operatic composers. In Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini's Late Style, Andrew Davis takes on the subject of Puccini's last two works to better understand how the composer...

Approaches to Meaning in Music presents a survey of the problems and issues inherent in pursuing meaning and signification in music, and attempts to rectify the conundrums that have plagued philosophers, artists, and theorists since the time of...

In the summer of 1972, a group of young people in Bloomington, Indiana, began a weekly gathering with the purpose of reviving traditional American old-time music and dance. In time, the group became a kind of accidental utopia, a community bound by...

Much music was written for the two most important dances of the 18th and 19th centuries, the minuet and the waltz. In Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz, Eric McKee argues that to better understand the musical structures and expressive meanings...

This book uniquely and successfully sustains a cohesive analysis of the work, career, and reception of a single artist. That the artist is Neil Young, one of the most confounding and mysterious of rock stars, is an added bonus. Finally someone will...

It was Carl Dahlhaus who coined the phrase 'dead time' to describe the state of the symphony between Schumann and Brahms. Christopher Fifield argues that many of the symphonies dismissed by Dahlhaus made worthy contributions to the genre. He traces the...

Beginning with Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, Indian art music is renowned internationally for its improvised raga performance. This ancient tradition has for centuries been transmitted orally within the seclusion of hereditary families. Few such...

Music in Conflict studies the complex relationship of musical culture to political life in Palestine-Israel, where conflict has both shaped and claimed the lives of Palestinians and Jews. In the context of the geography of violence that characterizes the...

Music Saved Them, They Say: Social Impacts of Music-Making and Learning in Kinshasa (DR Congo) explores the role music-making has played in community projects run for young people in the poverty-stricken and often violent surroundings of Kinshasa, the...

Few other nations have undergone as profound a change in their social, political, and cultural life as Mongolia did in the twentieth century. Beginning the century as a largely rural, nomadic, and tradition-oriented society, the nation was...

The aim of this book is to stimulate debate by offering a critique of discourse about African music. Who writes about African music, how, and why? What assumptions and prejudices influence the presentation of ethnographic data? Even the term "African...

This Will End in Tears is the first ever and definitive guide to melancholy music. Author Adam Brent Houghtaling leads music fans across genres, beyond the enclaves of emo and mope-rock, and through time to celebrate the albums and artists that make up...

How is creativity understood and facilitated across music education settings? What is the power of creativity in enhancing individual and group learning? How is musical creativity used as a tool for cross-community integration? How can we research the...

Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300-1918 presents a range of historical case studies on the sounding worlds of the European past. The chapters in this volume explore ways of thinking about sound historically, and seek to...

Why has the female voice-as the resonant incarnation of the female body-inspired both fascination and ambivalence? Why were women restricted from performing on the Chinese public stage? How have female roles and voices been appropriated by men throughout...

For decades, scholars have been trying to answer the question: how was colonial Burma perceived in and by the Western world, and how did people in countries like the United Kingdom and United States form their views? This book explores how Western...

What does it mean to talk about musical coherence at the end of a century characterised by fragmentation and discontinuity? How can the diverse influences which stand behind the works of many late twentieth-century composers be reconciled with the...

The conversations generated by the chapters in Music's Immanent Future grapple with some of music's paradoxes: that music of the Western art canon is viewed as timeless and universal while other kinds of music are seen as transitory and ephemeral; that...

The Singer-Songwriter in Europe is the first book to explore and compare the multifaceted discourses and practices of this figure within and across linguistic spaces in Europe and in dialogue with spaces beyond continental borders. The concept of the...

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...

This book examines the meanings, uses, and agency of voice, noise, sound, and sound technologies across Asia.

The Routledge Companion to Ethics and Research in Ethnomusicology is an in-depth survey of the moral challenges and imperatives of conducting research on people making music. It focuses on fundamental and compelling ethical questions that have challenged...

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...

A formidable challenge to the study of Roma (Gypsy) music is the muddle of fact and fiction in determining identity. This book investigates Gypsy music as a marked and marketable exotic substance, and as a site of active cultural negotiation and...

John Williams is one of the most renowned film composers in history. He has penned unforgettable scores for Star Wars, the Indiana Jones series, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jaws, Superman, and countless other films. Fans flock to his many concerts, and...

As the heyday of the lumber camps faded, a young scholar named Franz Rickaby set out to find songs from shanty boys, river drivers, and sawmill hands in the Upper Midwest. Traveling mostly on foot with a fiddle slung over his shoulder, Rickaby fell into...

How do the temporal features of sacred music affect social life in South Asia? Due to new time constraints in commercial contexts, devotional musicians in Bengal have adapted longstanding features of musical time linked with religious practice to promote...

Old Salem at Sea in Ballad and Song is a collection of sea songs, sea shanties and ballads that reflects Salem's rich maritime history and its relationship to the sea. Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the maritime history of America. Salem's...

The Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights is a collection of case studies spanning a wide range of concerns about music and human rights in response to intensifying challenges to the well-being of individuals, peoples, and the planet. It brings...

The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music assembles a broad spectrum of contemporary perspectives on how "sound" functions in an equally wide array of popular music. Ranging from the twang of country banjoes and the sheen of...

This companion to The Ethnomusicologists' Cookbook combines scholarship with a unique approach to the study of the world's foods, musics, and cultures. Covering over four dozen regions, the entries in these collection each include a regional...

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,...

While grief is suffered in all cultures, it is expressed differently all over the world in accordance with local customs and beliefs. Music has been associated with the healing of grief for many centuries, with Homer prescribing music as an antidote to...

With technology, music has never been more constant. It is heard on phones and in waiting rooms, in coffee shops and on television. Despite such exposure, the number of people able to make music for themselves is dwindling. Classical Christian schools...

As the fastest growing sector of the U.S. music market, world music has embedded itself in the fabric of American life. Artists such as Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon and the Talking Heads have all utilized characteristics of the "world" sound in their music,...