"Queer Voices" sets out both to queer the musicological and to make queer audible, arguing that the voice, particularly the singing voice, opens up a richly queer space. Using case studies from different repertoires, the book demonstrates how queer emerges particularly audibly when the voice is heard to engage with various technologies: the external technologies of music performances and recordings, technologies of power, or the internal technologies of vocal production itself.

Let's try to play the music and not the background. Ornette Coleman, liner notes of the LP "Free Jazz" 20] WhenIbegantocreateacourseonfreejazz, theriskofsuchanenterprise was immediately apparent: I knew that Cecil Taylor had failed to teach such a matter, and that for other, more academic instructors, the topic was still a sort of outlandish adventure. To be clear, we are not talking about tea- ing improvisation here-a di?erent, and also problematic, matter-rather, we wish to create a scholarly discourse about free jazz as a cultural achievement, and follow its genealogy from the American jazz tradition through its various outbranchings, suchastheEuropeanandJapanesejazzconceptionsandint- pretations. We also wish to discuss some of the underlying mechanisms that are extant in free improvisation, things that could be called technical aspects. Such a discourse bears the ?avor of a contradicto in adjecto: Teachingthe unteachable, the very negation of rules, above all those posited by white jazz theorists, and talking about the making of sounds without aiming at so-called factual results and all those intellectual sedimentations: is this not a suicidal topic? My own endeavors as a free jazz pianist have informed and advanced my conviction that this art has never been theorized in a satisfactory way, not even by Ekkehard Jost in his unequaled, phenomenologically precise p- neering book "Free Jazz" 57].

Popular music may be viewed as primary documents of society, and "America's Musical Pulse" documents the American experience as recorded in popular sound. Whether jazz, blues, swing, country, or rock, the music, the impulse behind it, and the reaction to it reveal the attitudes of an era or generation. Always a major preoccupation of students, music is often ignored by teaching professionals, who might profitably channel this interest to further understandings of American social history and such diverse fields as sociology, political science, literature, communications, and business as well as music.

In this interdisciplinary collection, scholars, educators, and writers from a variety of fields and perspectives relate topics concerning twentieth-century popular music to issues of politics, class, economics, race, gender, and the social context. The focus throughout is to place music in societal perspective and encourage investigation of the complex issues behind the popular tunes, rhythms, and lyrics.

In the last 15 years we have seen a major transformation in the world of music. - sicians use inexpensive personal computers instead of expensive recording studios to record, mix and engineer music. Musicians use the Internet to distribute their - sic for free instead of spending large amounts of money creating CDs, hiring trucks and shipping them to hundreds of record stores. As the cost to create and distribute recorded music has dropped, the amount of available music has grown dramatically. Twenty years ago a typical record store would have music by less than ten thousand artists, while today online music stores have music catalogs by nearly a million artists. While the amount of new music has grown, some of the traditional ways of ?nding music have diminished. Thirty years ago, the local radio DJ was a music tastemaker, ?nding new and interesting music for the local radio audience. Now - dio shows are programmed by large corporations that create playlists drawn from a limited pool of tracks. Similarly, record stores have been replaced by big box reta- ers that have ever-shrinking music departments. In the past, you could always ask the owner of the record store for music recommendations. You would learn what was new, what was good and what was selling. Now, however, you can no longer expect that the teenager behind the cash register will be an expert in new music, or even be someone who listens to music at all.

Despite the world-wide association of music and dance with religion, this is the first full-length study of the subject from a global perspective. The work consists of 3,816 references divided among 37 chapters. It covers tribal, regional, and global religions and such subjects as shamanism, liturgical dance, healing, and the relationship of music, mathematics, and mysticism. The referenced materials display such diverse approaches as analysis of music and dance, description of context, direct experience, observation, and speculation. The references address topics from such disciplines as sociology, anthropology, history, linguistics, musicology, ethnomusicology, theology, medicine, semiotics, and computer technology. Chapter 1 consists of general references to religious music and dance. The remaining 36 chapters are organized according to major geographical areas. Most chapters begin with general reference works and bibliographies, then continue with topics specific to the region or religion. This book will be of use to anyone with an interest in music, dance, religion, or culture.

A Book of the Year in Rolling Stone, Uncut, Mojo, The Telegraph and the Glasgow Herald This troubadour life is only for the fiercest hearts, only for those vessels that can be broken to smithereens and still keep beating out the rhythm for a new song. Last Chance Texaco is the first-ever no-holds-barred account of the life of two-time Grammy Award-winner Rickie Lee Jones, in her own words. It is a tale of desperate chances and impossible triumphs, an adventure story of a girl who beat the odds and grew up to become one of the most legendary artists of her time, turning adversity and hopelessness into timeless music. With candour and lyricism, the 'Duchess of Coolsville' (Time) takes us on a singular journey through her nomadic childhood, to her years as a teenage runaway, through her legendary love affair with Tom Waits, and ultimately her longevity as the hardest working woman in rock and roll. Rickie Lee's stories are rich with the infamous characters of her early songs - 'Chuck E's in Love,' 'Weasel and the White Boys Cool,' 'Danny's All-Star Joint' and 'Easy Money' - but long before her notoriety in show business, there was a vaudevillian cast of hitchhikers, bank robbers, jail breaks, drug mules, a pimp with a heart of gold, and tales of her fabled ancestors. In this electrifying and intimate memoir by one of the most remarkable, trailblazing and tenacious women in music are never-before-told stories of the girl in the raspberry beret, a singer-songwriter whose music defied categorization and inspired pop culture for decades.

Armed with cheap digital technologies and a fiercely independent spirit, millions of young people from around the world have taken cultural production into their own hands, crafting their own clothing lines, launching their own record labels, and forging a vast, collaborative network of impassioned amateurs more interested in making than consuming.
"DIY Style" tells the story of this international do-it-yourself (DIY) movement through a major case study of one of its biggest, but least known contingents: the "indie" music and fashion scene of the predominantly Muslim Southeast Asian island nation of Indonesia. Through rich ethnographic detail, in-depth historical analysis, and cutting-edge social theory, the book chronicles the rise of DIY culture in Indonesia, and also explores the phenomenon in Europe and the United States, painting an evocative portrait of vibrant communities who are not only making and distributing popular culture on their own terms, but working to tear down the barriers between production and consumption, third and first world, global and local. What emerges from the book is a cautiously optimistic view of the future of global capitalism - a creative, collectivist alternative built from the ground up.
This exciting and original study is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, fashion, media studies, cultural studies and sociology.

A frenetic, gonzo account of Britney Spears’s historic rise and equally tragic fall told by an iconoclastic music journalist.

America, 2003: A country at war, its shiny veneer beginning to crack. Von Dutch and The Simple Life dominate. And on the cover of every magazine, a twenty-one-year-old pop star named Britney Spears. Tracking her every move for a third-tier gossip rag in Los Angeles was an unknown young writer taking whatever job he could while pursuing his distant literary dreams. He'd instead become an eyewitness to the slow tragedy of a changing nation, represented in spirit by “the coy it-girl at the end of history.”

Years later, after finally establishing himself as a celebrated journalist, Jeff Weiss presents Waiting for Britney Spears, a gonzo, nostalgic, and “allegedly true” recounting of his years as a tabloid spy in the lurid underbelly of Los Angeles. Weiss follows America’s sweetheart through Vegas superclubs and Malibu car chases, annulled marriages and soul-crushing legal battles, all the way to Britney’s infamous 2007 VMA performance. As Weiss lives through the chaos leading to Britney’s conservatorship, he observes, with peerless style, cringe-inducing fashion waves, destructive celebrity surveillance, and a country whose decline is embodied by the devastating downturn of its former golden child.

With the narrative flair that established him as a singular chronicler of modern pop culture, Weiss goes for broke in Waiting for Britney Spears, a descent into a neon hall of mirrors reflecting our obsession with fame, morality, and the mystery of what really happened to the last great pop star.

This book asks how a study of many different musics in South East Europe can help us understand the construction of cultural traditions, East and West. It crosses boundaries of many kinds, political, cultural, repertorial and disciplinary. Above all, it seeks to elucidate the relationship between politics and musical practice in a region whose art music has been all but written out of the European story and whose traditional music has been subject to appropriation by one ideology after another. South East Europe, with its mix of ethnicities and religions, presents an exceptionally rich field of study in this respect. The book will be of value to anyone interested in intersections between pre-modern and modern cultures, between empires and nations and between culture and politics.

Discovering Country Music chronicles the incredible evolution of country music in America -- from the fiddle to the pop charts -- and provides an insightful account of the reasons and motives that have determined its various transformations and offshoots over the years. In order to understand what country music is today, and why, it is essential to understand how it makes its money -- the basic revenue streams, the major companies involved, and how country artists such as Carrie Underwood, Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Toby Keith, and Rascal Flatts are booked and marketed. In Discovering Country Music author Don Cusic helps readers do that, and goes even further, covering not only the business and the technology that have shaped the industry, but also tackling the question of country's relationship to the other major genres of the American recording industry, including pop, blues, and rock music. Discovering Country Music is broken down into ten sections which include: key musical trends; ancillary business trends such as recording technology, radio, and the recording industry; and prominent artists, including as a small sample Stephen Foster, The Carter Family, Elvis, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Garth Brooks, The Dixie Chicks, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, and Kenny Chesney. This work should appeal to fans, scholars, educators, libraries and the general reader alike.

While more than 80 percent of the world's commercial music is controlled by four multinational firms, most music is made and enjoyed in diverse situations divorced from such corporate behemoths. These fourteen original essays examine the fascinating world of ""music scenes,"" those largely inconspicuous sites where clusters of musicians, producers, and fans explore their common musical tastes and distinctive lifestyle choices. Although most music scenes come and go with hardly a trace, they nevertheless give immense satisfaction to their participants, and a few - New York bop jazz, Merseybeat, Memphis rockabilly, London punk, Bronx hiphop - achieve fame and spur musical innovations. To date, serious study of the scenes phenomenon has focused mainly on specific music scenes while paying less attention to recurrent dynamics of scene life, such as how individuals construct and negotiate scenes to the various activities. This volume remedies that neglect. The editors distinguish between three types of scenes - local, translocal, and virtual - which provide the organizing framework for the essays. Aspects of local scenes, which are confined to specific areas, are explored through essays on Chicago blues, rave, karaoke, teen pop, and salsa. The section on translocal scenes, which involve the coming together of scattered local scenes around a particular type of music and lifestyle, includes articles on Riot Grrrls, goths, art music, and anarcho-punk. Aspects of virtual scenes, in which fans communicate via the internet, are illustrated using alternative country, the Canterbury sound, postrock, and Kate Bush fans. Also included is an essay that shows how the social conditions in places where jazz was made influenced that music's development.

Surely you've experienced it before: you're listening to a piece of music and all of a sudden you find a lump in your throat, a tear in your eye, or a chill down your spine.

Whether it's Beethoven's Choral Symphony or The Verve's 'Bittersweet Symphony', a bit of blues or a bit of baroque, music has the power to move us. It's a language which we all speak. But why does it have this effect on us? What is going on, emotionally, physically and cognitively when listeners have strong emotional responses to music? What, if anything, do such responses mean? Can they tell us anything about ourselves?

Jeanette Bicknell uses research in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology to address these questions, ultimately showing us that the reason why some music tends to arouse powerful experiences in listeners is inseparable from the reason why any music matters at all. Musical experience is a social one, and that is fundamental to its attractions and power over us.

The North of England is regarded as a region economically and culturally lagging behind the South of England. However, this situation does not refer to popular music in which the North has had an influence which is comparable to that of London. Many bands and performers coming from the North, including the Beatles, the Animals, Herman's Hermit, the Smiths, the Happy Mondays, the Fall, Joy Division, New Order, Pulp and Oasis belong to most popular and influential pop-rock musicians in the world. The North has also been the home to some particular dance scenes including Northern Soul, the `Madchester' acid house, rave scenes and hip hop and grime scenes. This collection presents some of the less well known facets of popular music in the North of England, examining how popular music reflected on various aspects of the North, such as its economy and architecture and how it impacted on self- and external perception of the North. It assumes that understandings of the English North vary and its geography has more to do with imagined rather than empirical communities. The North can be seen as being defined against an England epitomised by London and as an area reflecting the most salient features of England as a whole. Specific chapters discuss topics such as the music scenes in Manchester, Liverpool, Hull and Sheffield, music festivals and careers of some musicians connected with the North such as MC Tunes and Bugzy Malone. Written in a jargon-free language, it should be of interest to everybody interested in music of the North.

The present book is the result of a three year research project which investigated the creative act of composing by means of algorithmic composition. Central to the investigation are the compositional strategies of 12 composers, which were documented through a dialogic and cyclic process of modelling and evaluating musical materials. The aesthetic premises and compositional approaches configure a rich spectrum of diverse positions, which is reflected also in the kinds of approaches and methods used. These approaches and methods include the generation and evaluation of chord sequences using genetic algorithms, the application of morphing strategies to research harmonic transformations, an automatic classification of personal preferences via machine learning, and an application of mathematical music theory to the analysis and resynthesis of musical material. The second part of the book features contributions by Sandeep Bhagwati, William Brooks, David Cope, Darla Crispin, Nicolas Donin, and Guerino Mazzola. These authors variously consider the project from different perspectives, offer independent approaches, or provide more general reflections from their respective research fields.

A reflection and symbol of the turbulent 1960s and the culture and lifestyles of the Hippies, Hair made history as the first rock musical on Broadway and one of the most successful musicals. The sixties left an indelible imprint upon the American psyche, and Hair, in the words of critic Clive Barnes, "summed it up better than any other piece of American theatre." Aside from bringing experimental techniques and rock music to Broadway, Hair, in author Barbara Horn's view, represented a major step in the evolution of the "concept musical" from the "book musical" and was the first concept musical to reach mass audiences, an achievement unheralded and little recognized. Horn analyzes the social context of Hair and the Hippies, describes the tenor of the Broadway theatre of the times and the experimental trends Off-Broadway that culminated in Hair's innovations on the Great White Way. She then goes on to relate the dramatic story of Hair's creation and growth, dash myths and clarify the actual events, including the casual meeting of coauthors Gerome Ragni and James Rado with producer Joseph Papp on a train. The transfer of Hair to Broadway is fully detailed, and the Broadway production is compared with the earlier production at Papp's Public Theater with lists of song sequences provided. Several revivals and the film version are also discussed, and staff and cast lists appear as appendixes. Horn's extensive archival research is amplified by insights from numerous interviews, including those with the authors, Ragni and Rado; composer, Galt MacDermot; Broadway producer, Michael Butler, directors, Gerald Freedman and Tom O'Horgan, musical director, Galt MacDermot; set designer, Robin Wagner;lighting designer, Jules Fisher, cast members, Melba Moore and Lorrie Davis; and others associated with one or more of the productions, as well as with theatre critics and theorists. Numerous published works were also connsulted, and a strong bibliography is provided.

YOU may not dare to admit it, but you probably have a weird and wonderful fascination for the Eurovision Song Contest. Well, it is now high time to come out, be proud and truly celebrate the United Kingdom's golden jubilee association with this annual musical phenomenon. And, at the same time, join in a little contemplation - where does the UK in Eurovision go from here? Flying The Flag affectionately captures the essence of a song fest which exudes a rare and not easily-defined appeal. The book is a light-touch examination of the UK's 50-year participation and spotlights the nation's successes and failures and also the countries that have lined up against us. It includes interviews with some of the major UK Eurovision acts over the years, features the contest likes and dislikes from fans near and far and debates the 21st century challenges facing this great institution with the offices of the European Broadcasting Union and the British Broadcasting Corporation. It's time to Fly The Flag for the good old Royaume-Uni

The problems of analyzing and synthesizing musical timbres have been prevalent for over half a century, and a book length exploration of this large and complex subject has been long overdue. Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception of Musical Sounds: Sound of Music consists of eight chapters that span the range from tutorial introduction to advanced research and application to speculative assessment of its various techniques. All of the contributors use a generalized additive sine wave model for describing musical timbre which gives a conceptual unity but is of sufficient utility to be adapted to many different tasks. The authors represent an international community of researchers and teachers in the field of analysis/synthesis/perception, and this book reflects the important trends and interests current in the subject. Due to its breadth, students will find the book a thorough introduction to current thinking and implementation of additive sine wave timbral models. Researchers new to the field will find a canvas of applications with citations to the relevant literature, which will also benefit the teacher searching for an effective syllabus.Due to its scope, Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception of Musical Sounds will become the standard reference in the field and will be seen as the catalyst for exciting research in the years ahead.

While more than 80 percent of the world's commercial music is controlled by four multinational firms, most music is made and enjoyed in diverse situations divorced from such corporate behemoths. These fourteen original essays examine the fascinating world of ""music scenes,"" those largely inconspicuous sites where clusters of musicians, producers, and fans explore their common musical tastes and distinctive lifestyle choices. Although most music scenes come and go with hardly a trace, they nevertheless give immense satisfaction to their participants, and a few - New York bop jazz, Merseybeat, Memphis rockabilly, London punk, Bronx hiphop - achieve fame and spur musical innovations. To date, serious study of the scenes phenomenon has focused mainly on specific music scenes while paying less attention to recurrent dynamics of scene life, such as how individuals construct and negotiate scenes to the various activities. This volume remedies that neglect. The editors distinguish between three types of scenes - local, translocal, and virtual - which provide the organizing framework for the essays. Aspects of local scenes, which are confined to specific areas, are explored through essays on Chicago blues, rave, karaoke, teen pop, and salsa. The section on translocal scenes, which involve the coming together of scattered local scenes around a particular type of music and lifestyle, includes articles on Riot Grrrls, goths, art music, and anarcho-punk. Aspects of virtual scenes, in which fans communicate via the internet, are illustrated using alternative country, the Canterbury sound, postrock, and Kate Bush fans. Also included is an essay that shows how the social conditions in places where jazz was made influenced that music's development.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive.We are republishing many of these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.