Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series
About the Book Series
Popular musicology embraces the field of musicological study that engages with popular forms of music, especially music associated with commerce, entertainment and leisure activities. The Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series aims to present the best research in this field. Authors are concerned with criticism and analysis of the music itself, as well as locating musical practices, values and meanings in cultural context. The focus of the series is on popular music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a remit to encompass the entirety of the world’s popular music.
Critical and analytical tools employed in the study of popular music are being continually developed and refined in the twenty-first century. Perspectives on the transcultural and intercultural uses of popular music have enriched understanding of social context, reception and subject position. Popular genres as distinct as reggae, township, bhangra, and flamenco are features of a shrinking, transnational world. The series recognizes and addresses the emergence of mixed genres and new global fusions, and utilizes a wide range of theoretical models drawn from anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, media studies, semiotics, postcolonial studies, feminism, gender studies and queer studies.
Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film
1st Edition
By Robynn Stilwell, Phil Powrie
September 25, 2017
The study of pre-existing film music is now a well-established part of Film Studies, covering 'classical' music and popular music. Generally, these broad musical types are studied in isolation. This anthology brings them together in twelve focused case studies by a range of scholars, including ...
Chanson: The French Singer-Songwriter from Aristide Bruant to the Present Day
1st Edition
By Peter Hawkins
September 25, 2017
’En France, tout finit par des chansons’ is the well-known phrase which sums up the importance of chanson for the French. A song tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages and troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, chanson is part of the texture of everyday life in France - a part of...
Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945
1st Edition
By Jon Stratton, Nabeel Zuberi
June 29, 2017
Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945 provides the first broad scholarly discussion of this music since 1990. The book critically examines key moments in the history of black British popular music from 1940s jazz to 1970s soul and reggae, 1990s Jungle and the sounds of Dubstep and Grime that ...
How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education
1st Edition
By Lucy Green
June 09, 2017
Popular musicians acquire some or all of their skills and knowledge informally, outside school or university, and with little help from trained instrumental teachers. How do they go about this process? Despite the fact that popular music has recently entered formal music education, we have as yet a...
Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain
1st Edition
By William Washabaugh
May 24, 2017
Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain explores the efforts of the current government in southern Spain to establish flamenco music as a significant patrimonial symbol and marker of cultural identity. Further, it aims to demonstrate that these Andalusian efforts form part of the ambitious ...
Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s
1st Edition
By Annette Davison
May 16, 2017
Relatively little has been written about film scores and soundtracks outside of Hollywood cinema. Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice addresses this gap by looking at the practices of film soundtrack composition for non-Hollywood films made after 1980. Annette Davison argues that since the mid...
The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–1935
1st Edition
By Catherine Tackley (née Parsonage)
May 16, 2017
As a popular music, the evolution of jazz is tied to the contemporary sociological situation. Jazz was brought from America into a very different environment in Britain and resulted in the establishment of parallel worlds of jazz by the end of the 1920s: within the realms of institutionalized ...
British Rock Modernism, 1967-1977: The Story of Music Hall in Rock
1st Edition
By Barry J. Faulk
February 27, 2017
British Rock Modernism, 1967-1977 explains how the definitive British rock performers of this epoch aimed, not at the youthful rebellion for which they are legendary, but at a highly self-conscious project of commenting on the business in which they were engaged. They did so by ironically ...
How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues Style in the United Kingdom
1st Edition
By Roberta Freund Schwartz
February 27, 2017
This book explores how, and why, the blues became a central component of English popular music in the 1960s. It is commonly known that many 'British invasion' rock bands were heavily influenced by Chicago and Delta blues styles. But how, exactly, did Britain get the blues? Blues records by African ...
Song Interpretation in 21st-Century Pop Music
1st Edition
By Ralf von Appen, André Doehring, Allan F. Moore
December 20, 2016
Existing books on the analysis of popular music focus on theory and methodology, and normally discuss parts of songs briefly as examples. The impression often given is that songs are being chosen simply to illuminate and exemplify a theoretical position. In this book the obverse is true: songs take...
Hip-Hop Turntablism, Creativity and Collaboration
1st Edition
By Sophy Smith
December 01, 2016
Armed only with turntables, a mixer and a pile of records, hip-hop DJs and turntable musicians have changed the face of music. However, whilst hip-hop has long been recognised as an influential popular culture both culturally and sociologically, hip-hop music is rarely taken seriously as an ...
The Life, Music and Thought of Woody Guthrie: A Critical Appraisal
1st Edition
Edited
By John S. Partington
December 01, 2016
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (1912-67) has had an immense impact on popular culture throughout the world. His folk music brought traditional song from the rural communities of the American southwest to the urban American listener and, through the global influence of American culture, to listeners and ...