The first regional history of music in England. Music in the West Country is the first regional history of music in England. Ranging over seven hundred years, from the minstrels, waits, and cathedral choristers of the fourteenth century to the Bristol Sound of the late twentieth, the book explores the region's soundscape, from its gateway cities of Bristol and Salisbury in the east to the Isles of Scilly in the west, and examines music-making in tiny villages as well as conditions in important centres such as Bath, Exeter, Plymouth, and Bournemouth. What emerges is both a study of the typical - musical practices which would apply to any English region - and a portrait of the unique - features born of the region's physicalisolation and charm, among them the growth of festival culture, the mythologising of folk music, the late survival of parish psalmody and nonconformist carolling, and the unique continuance, today, of a professional resort orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Banfield's vividly written and extremely readable history of music in the west country considers an array of subjects, firmly centred on people's stories: musical inventions and theidea of tradition, music as cultural capital, the economics of musical employment and the demographics of musicianship, musical networks, the relationship of the hinterlands to the metropolis, the influence of topography, the importance of institutions and events, and the question of how to measure value. A study in prosopography, it shows how people went about their lives with music and explores how things changed for them - or did not. STEPHENBANFIELD is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Bristol.

A discussion of more than 50 composers focuses on poets whose verse was set to music frequently, Housman, Hardy, De la Mare, Yeats, etc.. and song composers, Butterworth, Finzi, Gurney, Ireland, Quilter, Somervell and Vaughan Williams.

A founding father of the modern American musical, Jerome Kern (1885-1945) was the composer of legions of popular songs, including such standards as "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "Ol' Man River." His 1927 Show Boat with Oscar Hammerstein II helped to set a new standard for musical theater. This book is the first to provide a critical overview of Kern's musical accomplishments throughout his career. Stephen Banfield ranges from Broadway, to Hollywood, and to London's West End, drawing on unpublished manuscripts and scores to assess the composer's extraordinary oeuvre. Kern's life, personality, and working methods are given due attention, as is the development of his work from the early musical comedies through the collaborations with Hammerstein and P. G. Wodehouse up to the later film scores. Banfield focuses especially on the musical and lyrical structures of Kern's compositions, illuminating beloved works and shedding light on compositions often overlooked.

The Sounds of Stonehenge originated as a workshop of the Centre for the History of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth (CHOMBEC), held at the Victoria Rooms, University of Bristol, UK in November 2008. The 8 papers contain material pertaining to acoustic physics, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, cognitive psychology, English literature, film studies, history, history of art, media and popular studies, musicology, sociology, and creative composition.

Most books on the American musical are little more than exercises in nostalgia. The specially commissioned essays that make up Approaches to the American Musical take a different view of the form. Going beyond the common assertion that musicals are simply escapist; these examinations of American stage and film musicals argue that Porgy and Bess, Top Hat, Kiss Me Kate and All That Jazz were popular precisely because they engaged with such important American issues as ethnicity, commerce and international relations.