Pioneers in their fields and two of the best-known women in music in the twentieth century, Nadia and Lili Boulanger have previously been considered in isolation from one another. Yet, as Caroline Potter's new book demonstrates, their careers were closely linked during Lili Boulanger's short life (1893-1918) and there are several intriguing connections between their musical works. This biography also provides the first full analysis of the Boulanger sisters' musical styles, placing them within the context of French musical history. Their lives are also a case study in the issues of gender which surround music making even to the present day. Despite an unusually privileged upbringing, Nadia and Lili Boulanger exemplify the struggle women experienced when attempting to enter the professional music world. Lili became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome in 1913, and Nadia gained second place in 1908. Yet in spite of this initial success, Nadia Boulanger was to give up composing in her thirties and devoted the remainder of her long life to teaching. Her pupils included several of the great composers of the century, including Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter. This book, focusing on their musical careers, is essential reading for anyone interested in French music of the twentieth century.

Born into the famous family of piano makers, Lucy Broadwood (1858-1929) became one of the chief collectors and scholars of the first English folk music revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Privately educated and trained as a classical musician and singer, she was inspired by her uncle to collect local song from her native Sussex. The desire to rescue folk song from an aging population led to the foundation of the Folk Song Society, of which she was a founder member. Mentor to younger collectors such as Percy Grainger but often at loggerheads with fellow collector Cecil Sharp and the young Ralph Vaughan Williams, she eventually ventured into Ireland and Scotland, while remaining an eclectic contributor and editor of the Society's Journal, which became a flagship for scholarly publication of folksong. She also published arrangements of folk songs and her own compositions which attracted the attention of singers such as Harry Plunket Greene. Using an array of primary sources including the diaries Broadwood kept throughout her adult life, Dorothy de Val provides a lively biography which sheds new light on her early years and chronicles her later busy social, artistic and musical life while acknowledging the underlying vulnerability of single women at this time. Her account reveals an intelligent, generous though reserved woman who, with the help of her friends, emerged from the constraints of a Victorian upbringing to meet the challenges of the modern world.

This book brings together important material from a range of sources and highlights how government organizations, musicians, academics and commercial companies are concerned with, and seek to use, a particular notion of Irish musical identity. Rooting the study in the context of the recent history of popular, traditional and classical music in Ireland, as well as providing an overview of aspects of the national field of music production and consumption, O'Flynn goes on to argue that the relationship between Irish identity and Irish music emerges as a contested site of meaning. His analysis exposes the negotiation and articulation of civic, ethnic and economic ideas within a shifting hegemony of national musical culture, and finds inconsistencies between and among symbolic constructions of Irish music and observed patterns in the domestic field. More specifically, O'Flynn illustrates how settings, genres, social groups and values can influence individual identifications or negations of Irishness in music. While the apprehension of intra-musical elements leads to perceptions of music that sounds Irish, style and authenticity emerge as critical articulatory principles in the identification of music that feels Irish. The celebratory and homogenizing discourse associated with the international success of some Irish musical forms is not reflected in the opinions of the people interviewed by O'Flynn; at the same time, an insider/outsider dialectic of national identity is found in various forms of discourse about Irish music. Performers and composers discussed include Bill Whelan (Riverdance), Sinead O'Connor, The Corrs, Altan, U2, Martin Hayes, Dolores Keane and Gerald Barry.

Representations of music were employed to create a wider 'Orient' on the pages, stages and walls of nineteenth-century Britain. This book explores issues of orientalism, otherness, gender and sexuality that arise in artistic British representations of non-European musicians during this time, by utilizing recent theories of orientalism, and the subsidiary (particularly aesthetic and literary) theories both on which these theories were based and on which they have been influential. The author uses this theoretical framework of orientalism as a form of othering in order to analyse primary source materials, and in conjunction with musicological, literary and art theories, thus explores ways in which ideas of the Other were transformed over time and between different genres and artists. Part I, The Musical Stage, discusses elements of the libretti of popular musical stage works in this period, and the occasionally contradictory ways in which 'racial' Others was represented through text and music; a particular focus is the depiction of 'Oriental' women and ideas of sexuality. Through examination of this collection of libretti, the ways in which the writers of these works filter and romanticize the changing intellectual ideas of this era are explored. Part II, Works of Fiction, is a close study of the works of Sir Henry Rider Haggard, using other examples of popular fiction by his contemporary writers as contextualizing material, with the primary concern being to investigate how music is utilized in popular fiction to represent Other non-Europeans and in the creation of orientalized gender constructions. Part III, Visual Culture, is an analysis of images of music and the 'Orient' in examples of British 'high art', illustration and photography, investigating how the musical Other was visualized.

The Japanese geisha is an international icon, known almost universally as a symbol of traditional Japan. Numerous books exist on the topic, yet this is the first to focus on the 'gei' of geisha - the art that constitutes their title (gei translates as fine art, sha refers to person). Kelly M. Foreman brings together ethnomusicological field research, including studying and performing the shamisen among geisha in Tokyo, with historical research. The book elaborates how musical art is an essential part of the identity of the Japanese geisha rather than a secondary feature, and locates current practice within a tradition of two and half centuries. The book opens by deconstructing the idea of 'geisha' as it functions in Western societies in order to understand why gei has been, and continues to be, neglected in geisha studies. Subsequent chapters detail the myriad musical genres and traditions with which geisha have been involved during their artistic history, as well as their position within the traditional arts society. Considering the current situation more closely, the final chapters explore actual dedication to art today by geisha, and analyse how they create impromptu performances at evening banquets. An important issue here is geisha-patron artistic collaboration, which leads to consideration of what Foreman argues to be the unique and essential nexus of identity, eroticism and aesthetics within the geisha world.

Singer-Songwriters and Musical Open Mics is an ethnographic exploration of New York City's live music events where musicians signup and perform short sets. This sociological study dispels the common assumption that open mics are culturally monolithic and reserved for novice musicians. Open mics allow musicians at different locations within their musical development and career to interactively perform, practice, and network with other musicians. Important themes in the book include: the tension between self and society in the creative process, issues of creative authenticity and authorship, and on-going cultural changes central to the Do-It-Yourself cultural zeitgeist of the early 21st century. The open mic's cultural antecedents include a radio format, folk hootenannies, and the jazz jam session. Drawing from multiple qualitative methods, Aldredge describes how open mics have etched a vital organizational place in the western and urban musical landscape. Open mics represent a creative place where the boundaries of practicing and performing seemingly blur. This allows for a range of social settings from more competitive, stratified, and homogenous music scenes to culturally diverse weekly events often stretching late into the night.

Bhangra is commonly understood as the hybrid music produced in Britain by British Asian music producers through mixing Panjabi folk melodies with western pop and black dance rhythms. This is derived from a Punjabi harvest dance of the same name. This book looks at Bhangra's global flows from one of its originary sites, the Indian subcontinent, to contribute to the understanding of emerging South Asian cultural practices such as Bhangra or Bollywood in multi-ethnic societies. It seeks to trace Bhangra's moves from Punjab and its 'return back' to look at the forces that initiate and regulate global flows of local texts and to ask how their producers and consumers redirect them to produce new definitions of culture, identity and nation. The critical importance of this book lies in understanding the difference between the present globalizing wave and previous trans-local movements. Gera Roy contrasts the frames of cultural imperialism with those of cultural invasion to show how Indian cultures have constantly reinvented themselves by cross-pollinating with 'invading' cultures such as Hellenic, Persian, Arabic and many others in the past. By looking at Bhangra's flows to and from India, the book revises the relation between culture, space and identity and challenges boundaries. It weighs both the uses and costs of visibility provided by global networks to marginalized groups in diverse localities and explores whether collaborations between Bhangra practitioners, largely of working class origin, give ordinary people any control over the circulation of culture in the global village. Finally, the book considers whether cultural practices can alter hierarchies and power structures in the real world.

Debut albums are among the cultural artefacts that capture the popular imagination especially well. As a first impression, the debut album may take on a mythical status, whether the artist or group achieves enduring success or in rare cases when an initial record turns out to be an apogee for an artist. Whatever the subsequent career trajectory, the debut album is a meaningful text that can be scrutinized for its revelatory signs and the expectations that follow. Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself: Essays on Debut Albums tells the stories of 23 debut albums over a nearly fifty year span, ranging from Buddy Holly and the Crickets in 1957 to The Go! Team in 2004. In addition to biographical background and a wealth of historical information about the genesis of the album, each essay looks back at the album and places it within multiple contexts, particularly the artist's career development. In this way, the book will be of as much interest to sociologists and historians as to culture critics and musicologists.

There are undercurrents and peripheral taste preferences that are a defining part of our individual and collective cultural experience. Music is no exception. George Plasketes adapts the iconic "A-side/B-side" dichotomy from the 45 r.p.m. for use as a unique conceptual, critical, historical, and cultural framework for exploring and threading together a variety of popular music and media texts. The profiles and perspectives focus on the peripheries; on texts which might be considered "B-sides""overlooked, underappreciated, and unsung cases, creators, patterns and productions that have unassumingly, but significantly, marked popular culture, music and media during the past 40 years. The underappreciated yet enduring contributions of a variety of creative individuals in music, television and film are a centerpiece of this volume: actress Doris Day's son, Terry Melcher, a 1960s music producer whose imprint is on the surf, country blues, garage pop and most importantly the folk rock genre; Hans Fenger's kid chorus cover project, a musical variation of "outsider art" that became representative of the tribute wave that began in the 1990s and continues today; versatile guitarist virtuoso Ry Cooder's extensive film soundtrack work; World Music "missionary efforts" of American artists beyond Paul Simon's Graceland, including Neil Diamond's precursor with Tap Root Manuscript in the 1970s and the exotic adventures of Henry Kaiser and David Lindley in Madagascar and Norway"to name just a few examples. These B-sides represent undercurrents, but they resonate as overtones in the mainstream of music and culture, many as historical hinges. Collectively, these B-sides are an A-side antidote of outskirt observations, individual snapshots of artists, artifacts and rituals, genres and generations, producers and musical productions in television, film and video. They constitute an important connect-the-dots cultural chronicle with a multi-layered context"social, legal, historic, economic, technological, generational, aesthetic"for interpreting the interrelations between creators and institutions, the music market place, the production of culture and important connections between the peripheral and the popular.

Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience explores the processes and experiences of attending live music events from the initial decision to attend through to audience responses and memories of a performance after it has happened. The book brings together international researchers who consider the experience of being an audience member from a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives. Whether enjoying a drink at a jazz gig, tweeting at a pop concert or suppressing a cough at a classical recital, audience experience is affected by motivation, performance quality, social atmosphere and group and personal identity. Drawing on the implications of these experiences and attitudes, the authors consider the question of what makes an audience, and argue convincingly for the practical and academic value of that question.

Seditious Theology explores the much analysed British punk movement of the 1970s from a theological perspective. Imaginatively engaging with subjects such as subversion, deconstruction, confrontation and sedition, this book highlights the stark contrasts between the punk genre and the ministry of Jesus while revealing surprising similarities and, in so doing, demonstrates how we may look at both subjects in fresh and unusual ways. Johnson looks at both punk and Jesus and their challenges to symbols, gestures of revolt, constructive use of conflict and the shattering of relational norms. He then points to the seditious pattern in Jesus' life and the way it can be discerned in some recent trends in theology. The imaginative images that he creates provide a challenging image of Jesus and of those who have relooked radically in recent years at what being a 'seditious' follower of Christ means for the church. Introducing both a new partner for theological conversation and a fresh way of how to go about the task, this book presents a powerful approach to exploring the life of Christ and a new way of engaging with both recent theological trends and the more challenging expressions of popular culture.

The silent attentiveness expected of concert audiences is one of the most distinctive characteristics of modern Western musical culture. This is the first book to examine the concept of attention in the history of musical thought and its foundations in the writings of German musical commentators of the late eighteenth century. Those critics explained numerous technical features of the music of their time as devices for arousing, sustaining or otherwise influencing the attention of a listener, citing in illustration works by Gluck, C. P. E. Bach, Georg Benda and others. Two types of attention were identified: the uninterrupted experience of a single emotional state conveyed by a piece of music as a whole, and the fleeting sense of 'wonder' or 'astonishment' induced by a local event in a piece. The relative validity of these two modes was a topic of heated debate in the German Enlightenment, encompassing issues of musical communication, compositional integrity and listener competence. Matthew Riley examines the significant writers on the topic (Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, Rousseau, Meier, Sulzer and Forkel) and provides analytical case studies to illustrate how these perceived modes of attention shaped interpretations of music of the period.

This book investigates the discursive and performative strategies employed by Australian Indigenous rappers to make sense of the world and establish a position of authority over their identity and place in society. Focusing on the aesthetics, the language, and the performativity of Hip Hop, this book pays attention to the life stance, the philosophy, and the spiritual beliefs of Australian Indigenous Hip Hop artists as 'glocal' producers and consumers. With Hip Hop as its main point of analysis, the author investigates, interrogates, and challenges categories and preconceived ideas about the critical notions of authenticity, 'Indigenous' and dominant values, spiritual practices, and political activism. Maintaining the emphasis on the importance of adopting decolonizing research strategies, the author utilises qualitative and ethnographic methods of data collection, such as semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, participant observation, and fieldwork notes. Collaborators and participants shed light on some of the dynamics underlying their musical decisions and their view within discussions on representations of 'Indigenous identity and politics'. Looking at the Indigenous rappers' local and global aspirations, this study shows that, by counteracting hegemonic narratives through their unique stories, Indigenous rappers have utilised Hip Hop as an expressive means to empower themselves and their audiences, entertain, and revive their Elders' culture in ways that are contextual to the society they live in.

Embracing your Christian identity does not make you "soft." Embracing your Black identity does not make you less Christian. Throughout American history, Black people were not given the freedom to acknowledge their suffering. A. D. Thomason believes that the Holy Spirit brings freedom and liberation as we're able to name our pain, recognize its roots in history and society, and seek healing. While many saw a confident, six-foot-five Black man, A. D. "Lumkile" Thomason lived most of his life in fear and anguish, deeply wounded by encounters with violence, abandonment, and family tragedy. Hiding behind a tough exterior, Adam earned his "Black card" but felt joyless inside. Even traveling around the globe to play professional basketball could not resolve his despair. But in the art of Jay-Z, A. D. discovered stirring honesty that gave voice to his own expressions of longing. And in the gospel of Jesus, he experienced the healing and salvation that had long evaded him. Now through what he calls "kingdom therapy," he's figuring out how to redefine the Jay-Z and Jesus that make up his blackness. A. D. uses his artistry as a poet and storyteller to share how he confessed his internalized pain and embraced the liberating joy of Christ. He writes for millennials, emerging adults, and anyone else who's ready to acknowledge the reality of racial trauma and our need to confront it. A. D.'s powerful story gives you permission to be Black, to be Christian, and to be the person God has made you to be.

Drawing on methodologies and approaches from media and cultural studies, sociology, social history and the study of popular music, this book outlines the development of the study of men and masculinities, and explores the role of cultural texts in bringing about social change. It is against this backdrop that The Beatles, as a cultural phenomenon, are set, and their four live action films, spanning the years 1964-1970, are examined as texts through which to read changing representations of men and masculinity in 'the Sixties'. Dr Martin King considers ideas about a male revolt predating second-wave feminism, The Beatles as inheritors of the possibilities of the 1950s and The Beatles' emergence as men of ideas: a global cultural phenomenon that transgressed boundaries and changed expectations about the role of popular artists in society. King further explores the chosen Beatle texts to examine discourses of masculinity at work within them. What emerges is the discovery of discourses around resistance, non-conformity, feminized appearance, pre-metrosexuality, the male star as object of desire, and the emergence of The Beatles themselves as a text that reflected the radical diversity of a period of rapid social change. King draws valuable conclusions about the legacy of these discourses and their impact in subsequent decades.

Who are pop dandies? Why are stars like David Bowie, Jarvis Cocker, Pete Doherty and Robbie Williams so dandified? Taking up a wide range of British pop stars, Hawkins seeks to find out why so many have cast themselves in roles that often take style to absurd extremes. In this study, male pop artists are mapped against a cultural and historical background through a genealogy of personalities, such as Oscar Wilde, W.H. Auden, Andy Warhol, NoA"l Coward, Derek Jarmen, David Beckham and countless others. A critical analysis of issues and approaches to musical performance through masculinity becomes the focal point of this fascinating study. Ranging from the sixties to beyond the twentieth century, The British Pop Dandy considers the construction of the male pop icon through the spectacle of videos, live concerts and films. Why do we derive pleasure from the performing body, and how is entertainment linked to categories of gender and sexuality? The author insists that pop performances can be understood through human characteristics that relate to the particulars of dandyism, camp and glamour, and this he theorizes through the work of Charles Baudelaire. One of the political objectives of the dandy is to liberate himself through a denial of the structures that assume fixed identity. Not least, it is acts of queering in pop music that characterize entire generations of male artists in the UK. Setting out to discover what distinguishes the British pop dandy, Hawkins considers the role of music and performance in the articulation of hyperbolic display. It is argued that the recorded voice is a construction that idealizes self-representation, and absorbs the listener's attention. Particularly, camp address in singing practice is taken up in conjunction with a discussion of intimacy, which forms part of the strategy of the performer. In a range of songs and videos selected for music analysis, Hawkins points to the uniqueness of the voice as it expresses a transgressive quality that often comes across 'put-on', naive and vulnerable. To this end, vocal performativity is considered part of music's discursive disciplining through some of the greatest pop tracks, videos, concerts and films of our time. It is also argued that shifting signs of masculinity can be understood through musical process and style. While musicological in its main focus, this study is interdisciplinary and sets out to open new modes of thinking on the complex issues surrounding how masculinity, music and culture have developed in the UK.

The late Jan Fairley (1949-2012) was a key figure in making world music a significant topic for popular music studies and an influential contributor to such world music magazines as fRoots and Songlines. This book celebrates her contribution to popular music scholarship by gathering her most important work together in a single place. The result is a richly informed and entertaining volume that will be of interest to all scholars in the field while also serving as an excellent introduction for students interested in popular music as a global phenomenon. Fairley's work was focused on the problems and possibilities of cross-cultural musical influences, fantasies and flows and on the importance of performing circuits and networks. Her interest in the details of music-making and in the lives of music-makers means that this collection is also an original and illuminating study of music and politics. In drawing on Jan Fairley's journalism, this volume also offers students a guide to various genres of world music, from Cuban son to flamenco, as well as an insight into the lives of such world music stars as Mercedes Sosa and Silvio RodrA guez. This is inspiring as well as essential reading.

In the 1960s, Welsh-language popular music emerged as a vehicle for mobilizing a geographically dispersed community into political action. As the decades progressed, Welsh popular music developed beyond its acoustic folk roots, adopting the various styles of contemporary popular music, and ultimately gaining the cultural self-confidence to compete in the Anglo-American mainstream market. The resulting tensions, between Welsh and English, amateur and professional, rural and urban, the local and the international, necessitate the understanding of Welsh pop as part of a much larger cultural process. Not merely a 'Celtic' issue, the cultural struggles faced by Welsh speakers in a predominantly Anglophone environment are similar to those faced by innumerable other minority communities enduring political, social or linguistic domination. The aim of 'Blerwytirhwng?' The Place of Welsh Pop Music is to explore the popular music which accompanied those struggles, to connect Wales to the larger Anglo-American popular culture, and to consider the shift in power from the dominant to the minority, the centre to the periphery. By surveying the development of Welsh-language popular music from 1945-2000, 'Blerwytirhwng?' The Place of Welsh Pop examines those moments of crisis in Welsh cultural life which signalled a burgeoning sense of national identity, which challenged paradigms of linguistic belonging, and out of which emerged new expressions of Welshness.

Music and Irish Identity represents the latest stage in a life-long project for Gerry Smyth, focusing here on the ways in which music engages with particular aspects of Irish identity. The nature of popular music and the Irish identity it supposedly articulates have both undergone profound change in recent years: the first as a result of technological and wider industrial changes in the organisation and dissemination of music as seen, for example, with digital platforms such as YouTube, Spotify and iTunes. A second factor has been Ireland's spectacular fall from economic grace after the demise of the "Celtic Tiger", and the ensuing crisis of national identity. Smyth argues that if, as the stereotypical association would have it, the Irish have always been a musical race, then that association needs re-examination in the light of developments in relation to both cultural practice and political identity. This book contributes to that process through a series of related case studies that are both scholarly and accessible. Some of the principal ideas broached in the text include the (re-)establishment of music as a key object of Irish cultural studies; the theoretical limitations of traditional musicology; the development of new methodologies specifically designed to address the demands of Irish music in all its aspects; and the impact of economic austerity on musical negotiations of Irish identity. The book will be of seminal importance to all those interested in popular music, cultural studies and the wider fate of Ireland in the twenty-first century.

At the end of his life, Pierre Schaeffer commented that his musical and sound experiments had attempted to go beyond 'do-re-mi'. This had a direct bearing on EinstA1/4rzende Neubauten's musical philosophy and work, with the musicians always striving to extend the boundaries of music in sound, instrumentation and purpose. The group are one of the few examples of 'rock-based' artists who have been able to sustain a breadth and depth of work in a variety of media over a number of years while remaining experimental and open to development. Jennifer Shryane provides a much-needed analysis of the group's important place in popular/experimental music history. She illustrates their innovations with found- and self-constructed instrumentation, their Artaudian performance strategies and textual concerns, as well as their methods of independence. EinstA1/4rzende Neubauten have also made a consistent and unique contribution to the development of the independent German Language Contemporary Music scene, which although often acknowledged as influential, is still rarely examined.

The first in-depth biography of Bon Iver mainman Justin Vernon, Bon Iver will tell his story via extensive and exclusive original interviews with those around him throughout his rise from his failed Wisconsin bands to the illness and isolation that forged his breakthrough album For Emma, Forever Ago, and his subsequent critical and commercial success as the latest US alternative icon. Also features an overview of the US alternative scene that Bon Iver sprung from.

Turbo-folk music is the most controversial form of popular culture in the new states of former Yugoslavia. Theoretically ambitious and innovative, this book is a new account of popular music that has been at the centre of national, political and cultural debates for over two decades. Beginning with 1970s Socialist Yugoslavia, Uros Cvoro explores the cultural and political paradoxes of turbo-folk: described as 'backward' music, whose misogynist and Serb nationalist iconography represents a threat to cosmopolitanism, turbo-folk's iconography is also perceived as a 'genuinely Balkan' form of resistance to the threat of neo-liberalism. Taking as its starting point turbo-folk's popularity across national borders, Cvoro analyses key songs and performers in Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia. The book also examines the effects of turbo on the broader cultural sphere - including art, film, sculpture and architecture - twenty years after its inception and popularization. What is proposed is a new way of reading the relationship of contemporary popular music to processes of cultural, political and social change - and a new understanding of how fundamental turbo-folk is to the recent history of former Yugoslavia and its successor states.

Giulio Cesare Brancaccio was a Neapolitan nobleman with long practical experience of military life, first in the service of Charles V and later as both soldier and courtier in France and then at the court of Alfonso II d'Este at Ferrara. He was also a virtuoso bass singer whose performances were praised by both Tasso and Guarini - he was even for a while the only male member of the famous Ferrarese court Concerto delle dame, who established a legendary reputation during the 1580s. Richard Wistreich examines Brancaccio's life in detail and from this it becomes possible to consider the mental and social world of a warrior and courtier with musical skills in a broader context. A wide-ranging study of bass singing in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy provides a contextual basis from which to consider Brancaccio's reputation as a performer. Wistreich illustrates the use of music in the process of 'self-fashioning' and the role of performance of all kinds in the construction of male noble identity within court culture, including the nature and currency of honour, chivalric virtA(1) and sixteenth-century notions of gender and virility in relation to musical performance. This fascinating examination of Brancaccio's social world significantly expands our understanding of noble culture in both France and Italy during the sixteenth century, and the place of music-making within it.

Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music opens up a new way of thinking about the absence of women's music. It does not aim to find 'a solution' in a liberal feminist sense, but to discover new potentialities, new possibilities for thought and action. Sally Macarthur encourages us, with the assistance of Deleuze, and feminist-Deleuzian work, to begin the important work of imagining what else might be possible, not in order to provide answers but to open up the as yet unknown. The power of thought - or what Deleuze calls the 'virtual' - opens up new possibilities. Macarthur suggests that the future for women's 'new' music is not tied to the predictable and known but to futures beyond the already-known. Previous research concludes that women's music is virtually absent from the concert hall, and yet fails to find a way of changing this situation. Macarthur finds that the flaw in the recommendations flowing from past research is that it envisages the future from the standpoint of the present, and it relies on a set of pre-determined goals. It thus replicates the present reality, so reinforcing rather than changing the status quo. Macarthur challenges this thinking, and argues that this repetitive way of thinking is stuck in the present, unable to move forward. Macarthur situates her argument in the context of current dominant neoliberal thought and practice. She argues that women have generally not thrived in the neoliberal model of the composer, which envisages the composer as an individual, autonomous creator and entrepreneur. Successful female composers must work with this dominant, modernist aesthetic and exploit the image of the neo-romantic, entrepreneurial creator. This book sets out in contrast to develop a new conception of subjectivity that sows the seeds of a twenty-first-century feminist politics of music.

Studies of opera, film, television, and literature have demonstrated how constructions of madness may be referenced in order to stigmatise but also liberate protagonists in ways that reinforce or challenge contemporaneous notions of normality. But to date very little research has been conducted on how madness is represented in popular music. In an effort to redress this imbalance, Nicola Spelman identifies links between the anti-psychiatry movement and representations of madness in popular music of the 1960s and 1970s, analysing the various ways in which ideas critical of institutional psychiatry are embodied both verbally and musically in specific songs by David Bowie, Lou Reed, Pink Floyd, Alice Cooper, The Beatles, and Elton John. She concentrates on meanings that may be made at the point of reception as a consequence of ideas about madness that were circulating at the time. These ideas are then linked to contemporary conventions of musical expression in order to illustrate certain interpretative possibilities. Supporting evidence comes from popular musicological analysis - incorporating discourse analysis and social semiotics - and investigation of socio-historical context. The uniqueness of the period in question is demonstrated by means of a more generalised overview of songs drawn from a variety of styles and eras that engage with the topic of madness in diverse and often conflicting ways. The conclusions drawn reveal the extent to which anti-psychiatric ideas filtered through into popular culture, offering insights into popular music's ability to question general suppositions about madness alongside its potential to bring issues of men's madness into the public arena as an often neglected topic for discussion.