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.
Queer Tracks: Subversive Strategies in Rock and Pop Music
1st Edition
By Doris Leibetseder
November 15, 2016
Queer Tracks describes motifs in popular music that deviate from heterosexual orientation, the binary gender system and fixed identities. This exciting cutting-edge work deals with the key concepts of current gender politics and queer theory in rock and pop music, including irony, parody, camp, ...
Sonic Synergies: Music, Technology, Community, Identity
1st Edition
Edited
By Gerry Bloustien, Susan Luckman, Margaret Peters
November 15, 2016
Sonic Synergies: Music, Technology, Community, Identity focuses on the new and emerging synergies of music and digital technology within the new knowledge economies. Eighteen scholars representing six international perspectives explore the global and local ramifications of rapidly changing new ...
The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman's Film
1st Edition
By Heather Laing
November 15, 2016
Heather Laing examines, for the first time, the issues of gender and emotion that underpin the classical style of film scoring, but that have until now remained unquestioned and untheorized, thus providing a benchmark for thinking on more recent and alternative styles of scoring. Many theorists ...
The Globalization of Irish Traditional Song Performance
1st Edition
By Susan H. Motherway
November 15, 2016
In The Globalization of Irish Traditional Song Performance Susan Motherway examines the ways in which performers mediate the divide between local and global markets by negotiating this dichotomy in performance practice. In so doing, she discusses the globalizing processes that exert transformative ...
The Irishness of Irish Music
1st Edition
By John O'Flynn
November 15, 2016
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 ...
Turkish Metal: Music, Meaning, and Morality in a Muslim Society
1st Edition
By Pierre Hecker
November 15, 2016
Turkish Metal journeys deep into the heart of the Turkish heavy metal scene, uncovering the emergence, evolution, and especially the social implications of this controversial musical genre in a Muslim society. The book applies an ethnographic approach in order to study social and cultural change in...
B-Sides, Undercurrents and Overtones: Peripheries to Popular in Music, 1960 to the Present
1st Edition
By George Plasketes
November 10, 2016
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 ...
Bhangra Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond
1st Edition
By Anjali Gera Roy
November 10, 2016
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 ...
Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself: Essays on Debut Albums
1st Edition
Edited
By George Plasketes
November 10, 2016
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 ...
The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture
1st Edition
By Stan Hawkins
October 27, 2016
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 ...
'Blerwytirhwng?' The Place of Welsh Pop Music
1st Edition
By Sarah Hill
October 26, 2016
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 ...
Living Politics, Making Music: The Writings of Jan Fairley
1st Edition
By Jan Fairley, edited by Simon Frith, Ian Christie
October 26, 2016
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 ...