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.
Heavy Metal Music in Britain
1st Edition
Edited
By Gerd Bayer
September 08, 2016
Heavy metal has developed from a British fringe genre of rock music in the late 1960s to a global mass market consumer good in the early twenty-first century. Early proponents of the musical style, such as Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Saxon, Uriah Heep and Iron Maiden, were mostly ...
Punk Aesthetics and New Folk: Way Down the Old Plank Road
1st Edition
By John Encarnacao
September 08, 2016
Joanna Newsom, Will Oldham (a.k.a. 'Bonnie Prince Billy'), and Devendra Banhart are perhaps the best known of a generation of independent artists who use elements of folk music in contexts that are far from traditional. These (and other) so called ’new folk’ artists challenge our notions of '...
The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume I: 1950-1967: From Dance Hall to the 100 Club
1st Edition
By Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Emma Webster
September 08, 2016
The social history of music in Britain since 1950 has long been the subject of nostalgic articles in newspapers and magazines, nostalgic programmes on radio and television and collective memories on music websites, but to date there has been no proper scholarly study. The three volumes of The ...
Brazilian Popular Music: Caetano Veloso and the Regeneration of Tradition
1st Edition
By Lorraine Leu
September 06, 2016
Brazilian Popular Music, or Música Popular Brasileira (MPB), developed in the mid 1960s as a response to the re-thinking of Brazilian national identity following the establishment of the post-1964 military regime. A leading figure in MPB at this time was Caetano Veloso, and it is his music and its...
Countercultures and Popular Music
1st Edition
By Sheila Whiteley, Jedediah Sklower
September 06, 2016
’Counterculture’ emerged as a term in the late 1960s and has been re-deployed in more recent decades in relation to other forms of cultural and socio-political phenomena. This volume provides an essential new academic scrutiny of the concept of ’counterculture’ and a critical examination of the ...
Popular Music and the State in the UK: Culture, Trade or Industry?
1st Edition
By Martin Cloonan
September 06, 2016
In an era of the rise of the free market and economic globalization, Martin Cloonan examines why politicians and policymakers in the UK have sought to intervene in popular music - a field that has often been held up as the epitome of the free market form. Cloonan traces the development of ...
The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance Practice, and Technology
1st Edition
By Babette Babich
September 06, 2016
This book studies the working efficacy of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah in the context of today's network culture. Especially as recorded on YouTube, k.d. lang's interpretation(s) of Cohen's Hallelujah, embody acoustically and visually/viscerally, what Nietzsche named the 'spirit of music'. Today...
The Sociology of Wind Bands: Amateur Music Between Cultural Domination and Autonomy
1st Edition
By Vincent Dubois, Jean-Matthieu Méon, translated by Jean-Yves Bart
September 06, 2016
Despite the musical and social roles they play in many parts of the world, wind bands have not attracted much interest from sociologists. The Sociology of Wind Bands seeks to fill this gap in research by providing a sociological account of this musical universe as it stands now. Based on a ...
Experiencing 'Flow' in Jazz Performance
1st Edition
By Elina Hytönen-Ng
August 26, 2016
The term 'flow' refers to experiences where the musician moves into a consciousness in which time seems to be suspended and perception of reality is blurred by unconscious forces. An essential part of the jazz tradition, which often serves as the foundation of the musician's identity, flow is ...
Global Repertoires: Popular Music Within and Beyond the Transnational Music Industry
1st Edition
By Andreas Gebesmair, Alfred Smudits
August 26, 2016
With just four record companies controlling nearly 80 per cent of the world market in popular music, issues of globalization are evidently significant to our understanding of how and why popular music is made and distributed. As transnational industries seek to open up increasingly larger markets, ...
Political Rock
1st Edition
Edited
By Mark Pedelty, Kristine Weglarz
August 26, 2016
Political Rock features luminary figures in rock music that have stood out not only for their performances, but also for their politics. The book opens with a comparative, cultural history of artists who have played important roles in social movements. Individual chapters are devoted to The Clash ...
The British Barbershopper: A Study in Socio-Musical Values
1st Edition
By Liz Garnett
August 26, 2016
Barbershop singing is a distinctive and under-documented facet of Britain's musical landscape. Imported from the USA in the 1960s, it has developed into an active and highly organized musical community characterized by strong social support structures and a proselytizing passion for its particular ...