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.

Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) and Grace Williams (1906-1977) were contemporaries at the Royal College of Music. The three composers' careers were launched with performances in the Macnaghten-Lemare Concerts in the 1930s - a time when, in Britain, as Williams noted, a woman composer was considered 'very odd indeed'. Even so, by the early 1940s all three had made remarkable advances in their work: Lutyens had become the first British composer to use 12-note technique, in her Chamber Concerto No. 1 (1939-40); Maconchy had composed four string quartets of outstanding quality and was busy rethinking the genre; and Williams had won recognition as a composer with great flair for orchestral writing with her Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (1940) and Sea Sketches (1944). In the following years, Lutyens, Maconchy and Williams went on to compose music of striking quality and to attain prominent positions within the British music scene. Their respective achievements broke through the 'sound ceiling', challenging many of the traditional assumptions which accompanied music by female composers. Rhiannon Mathias traces the development of these three important composers through analysis of selected works. The book draws upon previously unexplored material as well as radio and television interviews with the composers themselves and with their contemporaries. The musical analysis and contextual material lead to a re-evaluation of the composers' positions in the context of twentieth-century British music history.

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.

Kaija Saariaho is internationally recognized as a leading figure in contemporary music, enjoying a well-deserved reputation for works that are both creatively original and of considerable appeal. Her music communicates with a refreshingly broad audience, and this special achievement deserves careful consideration. In the first symposium book in English to be dedicated exclusively to this single figure, scholars from both the UK and Saariaho's native Finland bring a range of perspectives to her richly varied output. Uncovering the compositional, historical, cultural and sociological issues that have resulted in such critical acclaim lies at the heart of this collection of essays. Saariaho's approach to composition is an interdisciplinary one; it embraces a number of art forms - visual, literary and musical - in works that explore a creative dialogue between image, continuity and time. While such diversity is readily accommodated in a multi-authored collection, the consistency of an underlying compositional identity and integrity is also an important trait. The grouping of these essays into three strands - 'visions', 'narratives' and 'dialogues' - reflects the wide range of Saariaho's creative preoccupations while subscribing to a carefully structured succession of commentaries.

Seeking to extend discussions of 9/11 music beyond the acts typically associated with the September 11th attacks"U2, Toby Keith, The Dixie Chicks, Bruce Springsteen"this collection interrogates the politics of a variety of post-9/11 music scenes. Contributors add an aural dimension to what has been a visual conceptualization of this important moment in US history by articulating the role that lesser-known contemporary musicians have played"or have refused to play"in constructing a politics of protest in direct response to the trauma inflicted that day. Encouraging new conceptualizations of what constitutes 'political music,' The Politics of Post-9/11 Music covers topics as diverse as the rise of Internet music distribution, Christian punk rock, rap music in the Obama era, and nostalgia for 1960s political activism.

Britpop and the English Music Tradition is the first study devoted exclusively to the Britpop phenomenon and its contexts. The genre of Britpop, with its assertion of Englishness, evolved at the same time that devolution was striking deep into the hegemonic claims of English culture to represent Britain. It is usually argued that Britpop, with its strident declarations of Englishness, was a response to the dominance of grunge. The contributors in this volume take a different point of view: that Britpop celebrated Englishness at a time when British culture, with its English hegemonic core, was being challenged and dismantled. It is now timely to look back on Britpop as a cultural phenomenon of the 1990s that can be set into the political context of its time, and into the cultural context of the last fifty years - a time of fundamental revision of what it means to be British and English. The book examines issues such as the historical antecedents of Britpop, the subjectivities governing the performative conventions of Britpop, the cultural context within which Britpop unfolded, and its influence on the post-Britpop music scene in the UK. While Britpop is central to the volume, discussion of this phenomenon is used as an opportunity to examine the particularities of English popular music since the turn of the twentieth century.

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.

Invisible Now describes Bob Dylan's transformative inspiration as artist and cultural figure in the 1960s. Hughes identifies Dylan's creativity with an essential imaginative dynamic, as the singer perpetually departs from a former state of inexpression in pursuit of new, as yet unknown, powers of self-renewal. This motif of temporal self-division is taken as corresponding to what Dylan later referred to as an artistic project of 'continual becoming', and is explored in the book as a creative and ethical principle that underlies many facets of Dylan's appeal. Accordingly, the book combines close discussions of Dylan's mercurial art with related discussions of his humour, voice, photographs, and self-presentation, as well as with the singularities of particular performances. The result is a nuanced account of Dylan's creativity that allows us to understand more closely the nature of Dylan's art, and its links with American culture.

Grunge has been perceived as the music that defined 'Generation X'. Twenty years after the height of the movement there is still considerable interest in its rise and fall, and its main figures such as Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. As a form of 'retro' music it is even experiencing a resurgence, and Cobain remains an icon to many young music fans today. But what was grunge, and what has it become? This book explores how grunge has been remembered by the fans that grew up with it, and asks how memory is both formed by and forms popular culture. It looks at the relationship between media, memory and music fans and demonstrates how different groups can use and shape memory as part of an ongoing struggle for power in society. Grunge was the site of such a struggle, as popular music so often is, with the young people of the time asking questions about their place in the world and the way society is organized. This book examines what these questions were, and what has happened to them over time. It shows that although grunge challenged many social structures, the way it, and youth itself, are remembered often work to reinforce the status quo.

Canons are central to our understanding of our culture, and yet in the last thirty years there has been much conflict and uncertainty created by the idea of the canon. In essence, the canon comprises the works and artists that are widely accepted to be the greatest in their field. Yet such an apparently simple construct embodies a complicated web of values and mechanisms. Canons are also inherently elitist; however, Carys Wyn Jones here explores the emerging reflections of values, terms and mechanisms from the canons of Western literature and classical music in the reception of rock music. Jones examines the concept of the canon as theorized by scholars in the fields of literary criticism and musicology, before moving on to search for these canonical facets in the reception of rock music, as represented by ten albums: Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, The Beatles' Revolver, The Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St., Patti Smith's Horses, The Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks: Here's the Sex Pistols, and Nirvana's Nevermind. Jones concludes that in the reception of rock music we are not only trying to organize the past but also mediate the present, and any canon of rock music must now negotiate a far more pluralized culture and possibly accept a greater degree of change than has been evident in the canons of literature and classical music in the last two centuries.

Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong kind of music, could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading to illness, immorality and even death. Since then there have been successive waves of moral panics about supposed epidemics of musical nervousness, caused by everything from Wagner to jazz and rock 'n' roll. It was this medical and critical debate that provided the psychiatric rhetoric of "degenerate music" that was the rationale for the persecution of musicians in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, the focus of medical anxiety about music shifted to the idea that "musical brainwashing" and "subliminal messages" could strain the nerves and lead to mind control, mental illness and suicide. More recently, the prevalence of sonic weapons and the use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror have both made the subject of music that is bad for the health worryingly topical. This book outlines and explains the development of this idea of pathological music from the Enlightenment until the present day, providing an original contribution to the history of medicine, music and the body.

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.

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.

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.

What does it mean to think of Western Art music - and the Austro-German contribution to that repertory - as a tradition? How are men and masculinities implicated in the shaping of that tradition? And how is the writing of the history (or histories) of that tradition shaped by men and masculinities? This book seeks to answer these and other questions by drawing both on a wide range of German-language writings on music, sound and listening from the so-called long nineteenth century (circa 1800-1918), and a range of critical-theoretical texts from the post-war continental philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions, including Lacan, Zizek, Serres, Derrida and Kittler. The book is focussed in particular on bringing the object of historical writing itself into scrutiny by engaging in what Zizek has called a 'historicity' or a way of writing about the past that not merely acknowledges the ahistorical kernel of historical writing, but brings that kernel into the light of day, takes account of it and puts it into play. The book is thus committed to a kind of historical writing that is open-ended - though not ideologically naA-ve - and that does not fix or stabilize the nature of the relationship between so-called 'primary' and 'secondary' texts. The book consists of an introduction, which places the study of classical music and the Austro-German tradition within broader debates about the value of that tradition, and four extensive case studies: an analysis of the cultural-historical category of listening around 1800; a close reading of A. B. Marx's Beethoven monograph of 1859; a consideration of Heinrich Schenker's attitudes to the mob and the vernacular more broadly and an examination, through Franz Kafka, of the figure of Mahler's body.

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.

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.

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.

Composers, performers, listeners, critics and theorists all play vital roles in the creation of music culture; yet often each group can appear to hold widely divergent views of a musical work's aims and effects. As the title indicates, this book examines the parts played by these groups and the interaction between them. In the first of eleven essays, Robert Saxton discusses the difficulty in pin-pointing the moment of inspiration for a new composition; while Raymond Warren looks at the problems facing operatic performers, including those that arise when interpretations are suggested by the libretto but not in the music. The changing perception of the composer's art from the 14th century to the present day is charted by Wyndham Thomas, in particular attitudes towards arrangement. Two quite different views of the performer's responsibility in communicating the composer's intentions are taken by Charles Rosen and Susan Bradshaw, the latter arguing for the need to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical analysis of a work; and in two fascinating case studies, Eric Clarke and Jennifer Davidson highlight the ways in which attention to movements of the body in performance can reveal aspects of musical structure. The reception of music is tackled from a variety of perspectives in the book. In his assessment of audience reaction to Jonathan Harvey's 'The Riot', Adrian Beaumont concludes that our response is influenced by a complex web of expectations and previous musical experience. The influence of record sleeves in also determining a listener's response to music is discussed by Nicholas Cook; while Stephen Walsh and Adrian Thomas explore two milieux of critical reception - the first to the music of Stravinsky, and the second to works composed during the social-realist period in Poland. On a more personal level, Bojan Bujic's essay forms a fitting counterpart to Saxton's in his attempt to locate the ways in which we experience a new musica

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.

Listening to popular music and watching television have become the two most common activities for postwar generations in Britain. From the experiences of programmes like Oh Boy! and Juke Box Jury, to the introduction of 24 hour music video channels, the number and variety of television outputs that consistently make use of popular music, and the importance of the small screen as a principal point of contact between audiences and performers are familiar components of contemporary media operation. Yet there have been few attempts to examine the two activities in tandem, to chart their parallel evolution, to explore the associations that unite them, or to consider the increasingly frequent ways in which the production and consumption of TV and music are linked in theory and in practice. This volume provides an invaluable critical analysis of these, and other, topics in newly-written contributions from some of Britain's leading scholars in the disciplines of television and/or popular music studies. Through a concentration on four main areas in which TV organises and presents popular music - history and heritage; performers and performances; comedy and drama; audiences and territories - the book investigates a diverse range of musical genres and styles, factual and fictional programming, historical and geographical demographics, and the constraints of commerce and technology to provide the first systematic account of the place of popular music on British television.

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.

Popular music is a cultural form much rooted in space and place. This book interprets the meaning of music from a spatial perspective and, in doing so it furthers our understanding of broader social relations and trends, including identity, attachment to place, cultural economies, social activism and politics. The book's editors have brought together a team of scholars to discuss the latest innovative thinking on music and its geographies, illustrated with a fascinating range of case studies from the USA, Canada, the Caribbean, Australia and Great Britain.

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.