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.
Death and the Rock Star
1st Edition
By Catherine Strong, Barbara Lebrun
June 30, 2020
The untimely deaths of Amy Winehouse (2011) and Whitney Houston (2012), and the ’resurrection’ of Tupac Shakur for a performance at the Coachella music festival in April 2012, have focused the media spotlight on the relationship between popular music, fame and death. If the phrase ’sex, drugs and ...
From the chanson française to the canzone d'autore in the 1960s and 1970s: Authenticity, Authority, Influence
1st Edition
By Rachel Haworth
June 30, 2020
The similarities between the chanson française and the canzone d'autore have been often noted but never fully explored. Both genres are national forms which involve the figure of the singer-songwriter, both experienced their golden age of production in the post-World War II period and both are ...
Music Festivals and the Politics of Participation
1st Edition
By Roxy Robinson
June 30, 2020
The spread of UK music festivals has exploded since 2000. In this major contribution to cultural studies, the lid is lifted on the contemporary festival scene. Gone are the days of a handful of formulaic, large events dominating the market place. Across the country, hundreds of ’boutique’ ...
Music Festivals in the UK: Beyond the Carnivalesque
1st Edition
By Chris Anderton
June 30, 2020
The outdoor music festival market has developed and commercialised significantly since the mid-1990s, and is now a mainstream part of the British summertime leisure experience. The overall number of outdoor music festivals staged in the UK doubled between 2005 and 2011 to reach a peak of over 500 ...
PJ Harvey and Music Video Performance
1st Edition
By Abigail Gardner
June 30, 2020
PJ Harvey’s performances are premised on the core contention that she is somehow causing ’trouble’. Just how this trouble can be theorised within the context of the music video and what it means for a development of the ways we might conceptualise ’disruption’ and think about music video lies at ...
Popular Song in the First World War: An International Perspective
1st Edition
Edited
By John Mullen
June 30, 2020
What did popular song mean to people across the world during the First World War? For the first time, song repertoires and musical industries from countries on both sides in the Great War as well as from neutral countries are analysed in one exciting volume. Experts from around the world, and with ...
Stories We Could Tell: Putting Words To American Popular Music
1st Edition
Edited
By Benjamin Halligan, David Sanjek, Mark Duffett, Tom Attah
June 30, 2020
How has the history of rock ‘n’ roll been told? Has it become formulaic? Or remained, like the music itself, open to outside influences? Who have been the genre’s primary historians? What common frameworks or sets of assumptions have music history narratives shared? And, most importantly, what is ...
This is the Sound of Irony: Music, Politics and Popular Culture
1st Edition
By Katherine L. Turner
June 30, 2020
The use of irony in music is just beginning to be defined and critiqued, although it has been used, implied and decried by composers, performers, listeners and critics for centuries. Irony in popular music is especially worthy of study because it is pervasive, even fundamental to the music, the ...
The Quest for the Melodic Electric Bass: From Jamerson to Spenner
1st Edition
By Per Elias Drabløs
December 12, 2019
The double bass - the preferred bass instrument in popular music during the 1960s - was challenged and subsequently superseded by the advent of a new electric bass instrument. From the mid-1960s and throughout the 1970s, a melismatic and inconsistent approach towards the bass role ensued, which ...
The Twenty-First-Century Legacy of the Beatles: Liverpool and Popular Music Heritage Tourism
1st Edition
By Michael Brocken
December 12, 2019
It has taken Liverpool almost half a century to come to terms with the musical, cultural and now economic legacy of the Beatles and popular music. At times the group was negatively associated with sex and drugs images surrounding rock music: deemed unacceptable by the city fathers, and unworthy of ...
Understanding Scotland Musically: Folk, Tradition and Policy
1st Edition
Edited
By Simon McKerrell, Gary West
December 12, 2019
Scottish traditional music has been through a successful revival in the mid-twentieth century and has now entered a professionalised and public space. Devolution in the UK and the surge of political debate surrounding the independence referendum in Scotland in 2014 led to a greater scrutiny of ...
When Music Migrates: Crossing British and European Racial Faultlines, 1945�2010
1st Edition
By Jon Stratton
December 12, 2019
When Music Migrates uses rich material to examine the ways that music has crossed racial faultlines that have developed in the post-Second World War era as a consequence of the movement of previously colonized peoples to the countries that colonized them. This development, which can be thought of ...