Ashgate Studies in Theory and Analysis of Music After 1900
About the Book Series
The Ashgate Studies in Theory and Analysis of Music After 1900 series celebrates and interrogates the diversity of music composed since 1900, and embraces innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to this repertoire. A recent resurgence of interest in theoretical and analytical readings of music comes in the wake of, and as a response to, the great successes of musicological approaches informed by cultural studies at the turn of the century. This interest builds upon the considerable insights of cultural studies while also recognizing the importance of critical and speculative approaches to music theory and the knowledge-producing potentials of analytical close readings. Proposals for monographs and essay collections are welcomed on music in the classical tradition created after 1900 to the present through the lens of theory and analysis. The series particularly encourages interdisciplinary studies that combine theory and/or analysis with such topical areas as gender and sexuality, post-colonial and migration studies, voice and text, philosophy, technology, politics, and sound studies, to name a few.
Structural Multistabilities and Listening Experiences in Minimalist Music
1st Edition
By Kristen Wallentinsen
November 24, 2025
Kristen Wallentinsen uses an interdisciplinary theory of multistability to investigate different effects minimalist music has on the listener. Drawing on theories of multistability from philosophy and psychology, the book builds an analytical framework and typology that demonstrates minimalist ...
Perspectives on Greek Musical Modernism
1st Edition
Edited
By Eva Mantzourani, Costas Tsougras, Petros Vouvaris
August 01, 2025
This is the first book to investigate systematically the diverse aspects and compositional approaches of Greek musical modernism. The volume contributes to ongoing discussions about aesthetic modernism in general and the epistemological issues that pertain to its historiography, especially with ...
Pierre Boulez’s sur Incises and its World
1st Edition
By Peter O'Hagan
December 30, 2024
Performer and researcher Peter O’Hagan studies the musical style of Pierre Boulez during his final creative period, by means of a detailed consideration of the ensemble work sur Incises, which stands at the heart of Boulez’s later output. O’Hagan offers a unique blend of perceptions stemming from ...
War and Death in the Music of George Crumb: A Crisis of Collective Memory
1st Edition
By Abigail Shupe
May 27, 2024
This book studies George Crumb’s The Winds of Destiny (2004) and Black Angels (1970) as artifacts of collective memory and cultural trauma. It situates these two pieces in Crumb’s output and unpacks the complex methodologies needed to understand these pieces as contributions and challenges to ...
John Zorn’s File Card Works: Hypertextual Intermediality in Composition and Analysis
1st Edition
By Maurice Windleburn
March 13, 2024
This book is the first study of John Zorn’s ‘file card’ works, with special focus made on the pieces Godard (1985), Spillane (1986), Interzone (2010), and Liber Novus (2010). It explains the unique creative process behind these compositions, contextualizing them in relation to the history of file ...
Musics with and after Tonality: Mining the Gap
1st Edition
Edited
By Paul Fleet
September 25, 2023
This volume is a journey through musics that emerged at the turn of the 20th Century and were neither exclusively tonal nor serial. They fall between these labels as they are metatonal, being both with and after tonality, in their reconstruction of external codes and gestures of Common Practice ...
Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras: Intertextuality and Stylization
1st Edition
By Norton Dudeque
May 31, 2023
Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras demonstrates how the composer achieved his own Brazilian neoclassical style in a group of works, nine suites in total, that is arguably one of the best examples of homage to J.S. Bach’s music in the twentieth century. In this book, the corpus of Bachianas ...
Concepts of Time in Post-War European Music
1st Edition
By Aaron Hayes
May 06, 2022
Concepts of Time in Post-War European Music gives a historical and philosophical account of the discussions of the nature of time and music during the mid-twentieth century. The nature of time was a persistent topic among composers in Paris and Darmstadt in the decades after World War II, one which...
György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque
1st Edition
By Peter Edwards
February 07, 2019
György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre (1974–77, revised 1996) has consolidated its position as one of the major operatic works of the twentieth century. Few operas composed since the 1970s have received such numerous productions, bringing the eclectic score to a global audience. Famously dubbed by ...