The social history of music in Britain since 1950 has long been the subject of nostalgic articles in newspapers and magazines, nostalgic programmes on radio and television and collective memories on music websites, but to date there has been no proper scholarly study. The three volumes of The History of Live Music in Britain address this gap, and do so from the unique perspective of the music promoter: the key theme is the changing nature of the live music industry. The books are focused upon popular music but cover all musical genres and the authors offer new insights into a variety of issues, including changes in musical fashions and tastes; the impact of developing technologies; the balance of power between live and recorded music businesses; the role of the state as regulator and promoter; the effects of demographic and other social changes on music culture; and the continuing importance of do-it-yourself enthusiasts. Drawing on archival research, a wide range of academic and non-academic secondary sources, participant observation and industry interviews, the books are likely to become landmark works within Popular Music Studies and broader cultural history.

Despite the musical and social roles they play in many parts of the world, wind bands have not attracted much interest from sociologists. The Sociology of Wind Bands seeks to fill this gap in research by providing a sociological account of this musical universe as it stands now. Based on a qualitative and quantitative survey conducted in northeastern France, the authors present a vivid description of the orchestras, the backgrounds and practices of their musicians, and the repertoires they play. Their multi-level analysis, ranging from the cultural field to the wind music subfield and to everyday life relationships within bands and local communities, sheds new light on the social organisation, meanings and functions of a type of music that is all too often taken for granted. Yet they go further than merely portraying a musical genre. As wind music is routinely neglected and socially defined in terms of its poor musical quality or even bad taste, the book addresses the thorny issue of the effects of cultural hierarchy and domination. It proposes an imaginative and balanced framework which, beyond the specific case of wind music, is an innovative contribution to the sociology of lowbrow culture.

This collection of essays, documented by an international and interdisciplinary array of scholars, represents the first academically focused volume exploring the creative idiolect of Frank Zappa. Several of the authors are known for contributing significantly to areas such as popular music, cultural, and translation studies, with expertise and interests ranging from musicology to poetics. The publication presents the reader with an understanding of the ontological depth of Zappa's legacy by relating the artist and his texts to a range of cultural, social, technological and musicological factors, as encapsulated in the book's title - Frank Zappa and the And. Zappa's interface with religion, horror, death, movies, modernism, satire, freaks, technology, resistance, censorship and the avant-garde are brought together analytically for the first time, and approached non chronologically, something that strongly complies with the non linear perspective of time Zappa highlights in both his autobiography and recordings. The book employs a variety of analytical approaches, ranging from literary and performance theory, 'horrality' and musicology, to post modern and textually determined readings, and serves as a unique and invaluable guide to Zappa's legacy and creative force.

Susan Burney (1755-1800) was the third daughter of the music historian Charles Burney and the younger sister of the novelist Frances (Fanny) Burney. She grew up in London, where she was able to observe at close quarters the musical life of the capital and to meet the many musicians, men of letters, and artists who visited the family home. After her marriage in 1782 to Molesworth Phillips, a Royal Marines officer who served with Captain Cook on his last voyage, she lived in Surrey and later in rural Ireland. Burney was a knowledgeable enthusiast for music, and particularly for opera, with discriminating tastes and the ability to capture vividly musical life and the personalities involved in it. Her extensive journals and letters, a selection from which is presented here, provide a striking portrait of social, domestic and cultural life in London, the Home Counties and in Ireland in the late eighteenth century. They are of the greatest importance and interest to music and theatre historians, and also contain much that will be of significance and interest for Burney scholars, social historians of England and Ireland, women's historians and historians of the family.

Here is the story of the boy from Brixton who became one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, returned to prominence in the 21st with music and visions informed by a sense of his own mortality and who through his life and work, changed lives and those of generations to come. David Bowie's music is loved by many and known by all as the soundtrack to the world of changes that was heralded by the creation of Ziggy Stardust. Through the hits and personas that followed, the work in art, drama, film and fashion, Bowie's voice rang clearly across the decades summoning everyone to a party where strangeness would be celebrated and the 'now' would always be new. Yet David Bowie remained forever the outsider, observing, creating, collaborating, inspiring and moving forward. This book follows a life that as much as any other was a personal journey but one in which so many joined and made part of their own.

For many people step dancing is associated mainly with the Irish step-dance stage shows, Riverdance and Lord of the Dance, which assisted both in promoting the dance form and in placing Ireland globally. But, in this book, Catherine Foley illustrates that the practice and contexts of step dancing are much more complicated and fluid. Tracing the trajectory of step dancing in Ireland, she tells its story from roots in eighteenth-century Ireland to its diverse cultural manifestations today. She examines the interrelationships between step dancing and the changing historical and cultural contexts of colonialism, nationalism, postcolonialism and globalization, and shows that step dancing is a powerful tool of embodiment and meaning that can provoke important questions relating to culture and identity through the bodies of those who perform it. Focusing on the rural European region of North Kerry in the south-west of Ireland, Catherine Foley examines three step-dance practices: one, the rural Molyneaux step-dance practice, representing the end of a relatively long-lived system of teaching by itinerant dancing masters in the region; two, RinceoirA na RA ochta, a dance school representative of the urbanized staged, competition orientated practice, cultivated by the cultural nationalist movement, the Gaelic League, established at the end of the nineteenth century, and practised today both in Ireland and abroad; and three, the stylized, commoditized, folk-theatrical practice of Siamsa TA re, the National Folk Theatre of Ireland, established in North Kerry in the 1970s. Written from an ethnochoreological perspective, Catherine Foley provides a rich historical and ethnographic account of step dancing, step dancers and cultural institutions in Ireland.

Despite their central role in many forms of music-making, drummers have been largely neglected in the scholarly literature on music and education. But kit drummers are increasingly difficult to ignore. While exponents of the drum kit are frequently mocked in popular culture, they are also widely acknowledged to be central to the musical success and aesthetic appeal of any musical ensemble in which they are found. Drummers are also making their presence felt in music education, with increasing opportunities to learn their craft in formal contexts. Drawing on data collected from in-depth interviews and questionnaires, Gareth Dylan Smith explores the identities, practices and learning of teenage and adult kit drummers in and around London. As a London-based drummer and teacher of drummers, Smith uses his own identity as participant-researcher to inform and interpret other drummers' accounts of their experiences. Drummers learn in multi-modal ways, usually with a keen awareness of exemplars of their art and craft. The world of kit drumming is highly masculine, which presents opportunities and challenges to drummers of both sexes. Smith proposes a new model of the 'Snowball Self', which incorporates the constructs of identity realization, learning realization, meta-identities and contextual identities. Kit drummers' identities, practices and learning are found to be intertwined, as drummers exist in a web of interdependence. Drummers drum; therefore they are, they do, and they learn - in a rich tapestry of means and contexts.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Jazz on the Line: Improvisation in Practice presents an ethnographic reflection on improvisation as performance, examining how musicians think and act when negotiating improvisational frameworks. This multidisciplinary discussion-guided by a focus on recordings, composition, authenticity, and venues-explores the musical choices made by performers, emphasizing how these choices can be logically understood within the context of controlled, musical outputs. Throughout the text, the author engages directly with musicians and their varied practices-from canonized dogmas to innovative experimentalism-offering interviews both planned and spontaneous. Musical agency is posited as a tightrope balancing act, signifying the skill and excitement of improvisational performativity and exemplifying the life of a jazzaerialist. With a travel journal approach as a backdrop, Jazz on the Line provides concepts and theories that demystify the creative processes of improvisation.

The Sound State of Uzbekistan: Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era is a pioneering study of the intersection between popular music and state politics in Central Asia. Based on 20 months of fieldwork and archival research in Tashkent, this book explores a remarkable era in Uzbekistan's politics (2001-2016), when the Uzbek government promoted a rather unlikely candidate to the prominent position of state sound: estrada, a genre of popular music and a musical relic of socialism. The political importance it attached to estrada was matched by the establishment of an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus for state oversight. The Sound State of Uzbekistan shows the continuing legacy of Soviet concepts to frame the nexus between music, artists and the state, and explains the extraordinary potency ascribed to estrada. At the same time, it challenges classical readings of transition and also questions common binary models for researching culture in totalitarian or authoritarian states. Proposing to approach lives in music under authoritarianism as a form of normality instead, the author promotes a post-Cold War paradigm in music studies.

The role of motion pictures in the popularity of rock music became increasingly significant in the latter twentieth century. Rock music and its interaction with film is the subject of this significant book that re-examines and extends Serge Denisoff's pioneering observations of this relationship. Prior to Saturday Night Fever rock music had a limited role in the motion picture business. That movie's success, and the success of its soundtrack, began to change the silver screen. In 1983, with Flashdance, the situation drastically evolved and by 1984, ten soundtracks, many in the pop/rock genre, were certified platinum. Choosing which rock scores to discuss in this book was a challenging task. The authors made selections from seminal films such as The Graduate, Easy Rider, American Graffiti, Saturday Night Fever, Help!, and Dirty Dancing. However, many productions of the period are significant not because of their success, but because of their box office and record store failures. Risky Business chronicles the interaction of two major mediums of mass culture in the latter twentieth century. This book is essential for those interested in communications, popular culture, and social change.

JIMI is the ultimate tribute to the greatest guitar player in rock and roll history, celebrating what would have been Jimi Hendrix's 80th birthday on November 27, 2022. This comprehensive visual celebration is an official collaboration with Jimi's sister, Janie Hendrix, and John McDermott of Experience Hendrix L.L.C. JIMI significantly expands on the authors' previously published titles, including An Illustrated Experience, and features a new introduction by Janie, extensive biographical texts, and a trove of lesser known and never-before-published photographs, personal memorabilia, lyrics, and more. Additionally, JIMI includes quotations by legendary musicians, such as Paul McCartney, Ron Wood, Jeff Beck, Lenny Kravitz, Drake, Dave Grohl, and others who have spoken about Hendrix's lasting influence. In the four years before his untimely death at age 27, Jimi Hendrix created a groundbreaking musical legacy, one that includes revered classics such as "Purple Haze" and "Voodoo Child." His signature guitar playing, provocative songwriting, and charismatic performances have continued to inspire legions of musicians and fans alike.

In Breaks in the Air John Klaess tells the story of rap's emergence on New York City's airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hop's performance culture to radio. Initially, artists and DJs brought their live practice to radio by buying time on low-bandwidth community stations and building new communities around their shows. Later, stations owned by New York's African American elite, such as WBLS, reluctantly began airing rap even as they pursued a sound rooted in respectability, urban sophistication, and polish. At the same time, large commercial stations like WRKS programmed rap once it became clear that the music attracted a demographic that was valuable to advertisers. Moving between intimate portraits of single radio shows and broader examinations of the legal, financial, cultural, and political forces that indelibly shaped the sound of rap radio, Klaess shows how early rap radio provides a lens through which to better understand the development of rap music as well as the intertwined histories of sounds, institutions, communities, and legal formations that converged in the post-Civil Rights era.

This interdisciplinary volume explores the girl's voice and the construction of girlhood in contemporary popular music, visiting girls as musicians, activists, and performers through topics that range from female vocal development during adolescence to girls' online media culture. While girls' voices are more prominent than ever in popular music culture, the specific sonic character of the young female voice is routinely denied authority. Decades old cliches of girls as frivolous, silly, and deserving of contempt prevail in mainstream popular image and sound. Nevertheless, girls find ways to raise their voices and make themselves heard. This volume explores the contemporary girl's voice to illuminate the way ideals of girlhood are historically specific, and the way adults frame and construct girlhood to both valorize and vilify girls and women. Interrogating popular music, childhood, and gender, it analyzes the history of the all-girl band from the Runaways to the present; the changing anatomy of a girl's voice throughout adolescence; girl's participatory culture via youtube and rock camps, and representations of the girl's voice in other media like audiobooks, film, and television. Essays consider girl performers like Jackie Evancho and Lorde, and all-girl bands like Sleater Kinney, The Slits and Warpaint, as well as performative 'girlishness' in the voices of female vocalists like Joni Mitchell, Beyonce, Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Kathleen Hanna, and Rebecca Black. Participating in girl studies within and beyond the field of music, this book unites scholarly perspectives from disciplines such as musicology, ethnomusicology, comparative literature, women's and gender studies, media studies, and education to investigate the importance of girls' voices in popular music, and to help unravel the complexities bound up in music and girlhood in the contemporary contexts of North America and the United Kingdom.

This book is a comprehensive guide to a career in the music industry. Offering advice as to how to get into the business, it explains the main features of a wide range of jobs, such as management, production, promotion and merchandise through to the working lives of recording artists and session musicians.

Ronnie James Dio was a heavy metal icon and frontman of three of the best-selling, most influential and famous rock bands in history: Rainbow, Black Sabbath and his own multi-million selling band, Dio. Rainbow in the Dark is a rollercoaster ride through the extraordinary highs and lows of Dio's life, and takes us from his early days as a street gang leader and Doo-wop singer in '60s Vegas through to his breakout success with Rainbow and Black Sabbath in the '70s and the stadiums of US metal in the '80s - ending in Dio's dressing room at Madison Square Garden, in June 1986, at the peak of his worldwide fame with Dio. Tragically Dio passed away from cancer in 2010, but had already begun writing a memoir before his death. Edited by the world-renowned music biographer Mick Wall, with the involvement of Dio's wife of over 35 years and personal manager Wendy Dio, Rainbow in the Dark will honour and feature Dio's never-before-seen original manuscript, while drawing on the extraordinary collection of print and audio interviews with the man himself to produce a vivid, raw and faithful portrait of one of the world's greatest ever rock legends.

When singer Amy Winehouse was found dead at her London home in 2011, the press inducted her into what Kurt Cobain's mother named the 27 Club. Now he's gone and joined that stupid club, she said in 1994, after being told that her son, the front man of Nirvana, had committed suicide. I told him not to... Kurt's mom was referring to the extraordinary roll call of stars who died at the same young age, including Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison of the Doors. All were talented. All were dissipated. All were 27. In this haunting book, author Howard Sounes conducts the definitive forensic investigation into the lives and deaths of the six most iconic members of the Club, as well as some lesser known members, to discover what, apart from coincidence, this phenomenon signifies. In a grimly fascinating journey through the dark side of the music business, Sounes uncovers a common story of excess, madness, and self-destruction. The fantasies, half-truths, and mythologies that have become associated with the Club are debunked. Instead, a clear and compelling narrative emerges, one based on hard facts, that unites these lost souls in both life and death.

Listening according to mood is likely to be what most people do when they listen to music. We want to take part in, or even be part of, the emerging world of the musical work. Using the sources of musical history and philosophy, Erik Wallrup explores this extremely vague and elusive phenomenon, which is held to be fundamental to musical hearing. Wallrup unfolds the untold musical history of the German word for 'mood', Stimmung, which in the 19th century was abundant in the musical aesthetics of the German-Austrian sphere. Martin Heidegger's much-discussed philosophy of Stimmung is introduced into the field of music, allowing Wallrup to realise fully the potential of the concept. Mood in music, or, to be more precise, musical attunement, should not be seen as a peculiar kind of emotionality, but that which constitutes fundamentally the relationship between listener and music. Exploring mood, or attunement, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of the act of listening to music.

A Treatise on Possibility: Perspectives on Humanity Hereafter by Rou Reynolds is a companion guide to the critically acclaimed sixth Enter Shikari album Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible. Human possibility. If we get our act together, our long-term potential is virtually infinite. And infinitely beautiful. But currently humanity is being guided not by wisdom, cooperation and self-reflection but by archaic systems and false assumptions. There are warning signs everywhere: ecological destruction, mental health crises and obscene levels of inequality. At a time when quite literally Nothing Is True & Everything Is Possible, Rou Reynolds has gone in deep, head first, exploring the predicaments of modernity. Using his lyrics to navigate the complicated web of problems, he arrives on the other side with his Treatise on Possibility. Hard-hitting and thought provoking, this is a unique perspective on humanity as we approach a point of great change.

This book defines the key ideas, scholarly debates, and research activities that have contributed to the formation of the international and interdisciplinary field of Metal Studies. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including popular music, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and ethics, this volume offers new and innovative research on metal musicology, global/local scenes studies, fandom, gender and metal identity, metal media, and commerce. Offering a wide-ranging focus on bands, scenes, periods, and sounds, contributors explore topics such as the riff-based song writing of classic heavy metal bands and their modern equivalents, and the musical-aesthetics of Grindcore, Doom metal, Death metal, and Progressive metal. They interrogate production technologies, sound engineering, album artwork and band promotion, logos and merchandising, t-shirt and jewellery design, and fan communities that define the global metal music economy and subcultural scene. The volume explores how the new academic discipline of metal studies was formed, also looking forward to the future of metal music and its relationship to metal scholarship and fandom. With an international range of contributors, this volume will appeal to scholars of popular music, cultural studies, and sociology, as well as those interested in metal communities around the world.

The double bass - the preferred bass instrument in popular music during the 1960s - was challenged and subsequently superseded by the advent of a new electric bass instrument. From the mid-1960s and throughout the 1970s, a melismatic and inconsistent approach towards the bass role ensued, which contributed to a major change in how the electric bass was used in performance and perceived in the sonic landscape of mainstream popular music. Investigating the performance practice of the new, melodic role of the electric bass as it appeared (and disappeared) in the 1960s and 1970s, the book turns to the number one songs of the American Billboard Hot 100 charts between 1951 and 1982 as a prime source. Through interviews with players from this era, numerous transcriptions - elaborations of twenty bass related features - are presented. These are juxtaposed with a critical study of four key players, who provide the case-studies for examining the performance practice of the melodic electric bass. This highly original book will be of interest not only to bass players, but also to popular musicologists looking for a way to instigate methodological and theoretical discussions on how to develop popular music analysis.

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 singer-songwriter is significant and much-debated for a variety of reasons. Many such musicians possess large and zealous followings, their output often esteemed politically and usually held up as the nearest popular music gets to high art, such facets often yielding sizeable economic benefits. Yet this figure, per se, has been the object of scant critical discussion, with individual practitioners celebrated for their isolated achievements instead. In response to this lack of critical knowledge, this volume identifies and interrogates the musical, linguistic, social and ideological elements that configure the singer-songwriter and its various equivalents in Europe, such as the French auteur-compositeur-interprete and the Italian cantautore, since the late 1940s. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of this figure in the post-war period, how and why its contours have changed over time and space subsequently, cross-cultural influences, and the transformative agency of this figure as regards party and identity politics in lyrics and music, often by means of individual case studies. The book's polycentric approach endeavours to redress the hitherto Anglophone bias in scholarship on the singer-songwriter in the English-speaking world, drawing on the knowledge of scholars from across Europe and from a variety of academic disciplines, including modern language studies, musicology, sociology, literary studies and history.

For five decades, as a singer, musician, songwriter, and producer, Tim O'Brien has ceaselessly explored the vast American musical landscape. While Appalachia and Ireland eventually became facets of the defining myth surrounding him and his music, he has digested a broad array of roots styles, reshaping them to his own purposes. Award-winning biographer Bobbie Malone and premier country music historian Bill C. Malone have teamed again, this time to chronicle O'Brien's career and trace the ascent of Hot Rize and its broadening and enrichment of musical traditions. At the beginning of that career, O'Brien moved from his native West Virginia to the Rocky Mountain West. In just a few years, he became the lead singer, mandolin and fiddle player, and principal songwriter of beloved 1980s bluegrass band Hot Rize. Seeking to move beyond bluegrass, he next went to Nashville. O'Brien's success in navigating the shoals of America's vast reservoir of folk musical expressions took him into the realm of what is now called Americana. The core of Tim O'Brien's virtuosity is his abiding and energetic pursuit of the next musical adventure. As a traveler, he has ranged widely in choosing the next instrument, song, style, fellow musicians, or venue. Written with O'Brien's full cooperation and the input of family, friends, colleagues, and critics, Traveler provides the first complete, behind-the-scenes picture of a thoroughly American self-made musical genius-the boy who grew up listening to country artists at the WWVA Wheeling Jamboree and ended up charting a new course through American music.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised my career has been unusual. How did I manage to do everything wrong but still end up on the front cover of magazines, headlining world tours and achieving Top 5 albums? How did I attract such obsessive and fanatical fans, many of whom take everything I do or say very personally, which is simultaneously flattering but can also be tremendously frustrating? Even this I somehow cultivated without somehow meaning to. My accidental career. Limited Edition of One is unlike any other music book you will ever have read. Part the long-awaited memoir of Steven Wilson: whose celebrated band Porcupine Tree began as teenage fiction before unintentionally evolving into a reality that encompassed Grammy-nominated records and sold-out shows around the world, before he set out for an even more successful solo career. Part the story of a twenty-first century artist who achieved chart-topping mainstream success without ever becoming part of the mainstream. From Abba to Stockhausen, via a collection of conversations and thought pieces on the art of listening, the rules of collaboration, lists of lists, personal stories, professional adventurism (including food, film, TV, modern art), old school rock stardom, how to negotiate an obsessive fanbase and survive on social media, and dream-fever storytelling.

It has taken Liverpool almost half a century to come to terms with the musical, cultural and now economic legacy of the Beatles and popular music. At times the group was negatively associated with sex and drugs images surrounding rock music: deemed unacceptable by the city fathers, and unworthy of their support. Liverpudlian musicians believe that the musical legacy of the Beatles can be a burden, especially when the British music industry continues to brand the latest (white) male group to emerge from Liverpool as 'the next Beatles'. Furthermore, Liverpudlians of perhaps differing ethnicities find images of 'four white boys with guitars and drums' not only problematic in a 'musical roots' sense, but for them culturally devoid of meaning and musically generic. The musical and cultural legacy of the Beatles remains complex. In a post-industrial setting in which both popular and traditional heritage tourism have emerged as providers of regular employment on Merseyside, major players in what might be described as a Beatles music tourism industry have constructed new interpretations of the past and placed these in such an order as to re-confirm, re-create and re-work the city as a symbolic place that both authentically and contextually represents the Beatles.