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Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska delves into histories of Inuit musical life in Alaska to amplify the broader significance of sound as integral to Indigenous self-determination and resurgence movements. The book offers relational and radical ways of listening to a vast archive of Inuit presence across a range of genres—from hip hop to Christian hymnody and drumsongs to funk and R&B—to register how a density (not difference) of Indigenous ways of musicking invites readers to listen more critically to and for intersections of music, Indigeneity, and colonialism in the Americas. The research aims to dismantle stereotypical understandings of “Eskimos,” “Indians,” and “Natives” by considering how Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered analyses of Native musicking can reframe larger debates of race, Indigeneity, power, and representation in twenty-first-century American music historiography. Instead of proposing singular truths or facts, this book asks readers to consider the existence of multiple simultaneous truths, a density of truths, all of which are culturally constructed, performed, and in some cases politicized and policed. A sound relations approach advances a more Indigenized sound studies and a more sounded Indigenous studies that works to move beyond colonial questions of containment—“who counts as Native” and “who decides”—and colonial questions of measurement—“what exactly is ‘Native’ about Native music”—and toward an aesthetics of self-determination and resurgent world-making.

The best-known Tudor manuscript partbooks tend to be complete or near-complete sets, associated with known individuals, elegantly copied, and with a clear repertorial focus. Yet such manuscripts are not the norm among extant partbooks. Rather most are obscure in origin, the product of workaday copying, and survive as orphans or partial sets. They are miscellanies with wide-ranging contents, complex and seemingly chaotic in their compilation, and their challenges have tended to deter scholarly attention. This article focuses on one particular miscellany from which two partbooks survive—the privately owned McGhie partbook and Bodleian Library Tenbury MS 389—to explore what such collections can reveal about the methods and habits of compilers and the circulation of music. These partbooks were assembled in a series of stages that demonstrate several different strategies for the collection and selection of pieces, methods for organizing scribal labour, and the influence of musical print culture on manuscript production.

This chapter begins from the failure of both musicology and philosophy to grasp the aesthetic experience afforded by music. It argues instead for an approach that explores the gap between the sensuous particularity of musical thought and the kinds of language brought to it. This hinges on recognising that key terms are not absolute but historically constructed – issues of musical beauty, taste, expression, representation, meaning, ontology – and that the aesthetic experience of music resists the generality of conceptual language. It proposes four key issues for rethinking the relation of music and philosophy: (1) the persistence of the aesthetic (what is not reducible in music to either history or philosophy); (2) the restoration of the body (music as an embodied practice that resists being the object of language); (3) the particularity of listening; (4) the challenge of contemporary music to ahistorical ‘normative’ ideas about music.

This chapter outlines the proliferation of musical biography and life-writing in its multifarious forms across Europe in the long nineteenth century, and its role in establishing and perpetuating the canon, shaping the reception history of specific composers, constructing exemplary lives, providing firm foundations for the intellectual culture of the time, and maintaining a strong relationship to music history and criticism. Two case studies explore distinctive examples of “popular” manifestations of nineteenth-century music-biographical writing by influential authors to educate and entertain wide communities of autodidactic readers. This first concerns a two-volume compilation of anecdotes, surveyed for its reflection of Victorian values and musical preoccupations; the second, a collected biography whose close reading reveals much about the passive role into which women were repeatedly cast in contemporaneous life-writing on the Great Composers. A concluding section considers the extent of the impact and continued indebtedness of modern musical biography and musicology to the legacy of nineteenth-century intellectual developments.

The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music assembles a wide spectrum of contemporary perspectives on how sound functions in an equally wide array of popular music. With subjects ranging from the twang of country banjos and the sheen of hip-hop strings to the crunch of amplified guitars and the thump of subwoofers on the dance floor, this volume attempts to bridge the gap between timbre, the purely acoustic characteristics of sound waves, and tone, an emergent musical construct that straddles the borderline between the perceptual and the political. The book’s chapters engage with the entire history of popular music as recorded sound, from the 1930s to the present day, under four large categories. The chapters in Part I, “Genre,” ask how sonic signatures define musical identities and publics; Part II, “Voice,” considers the most naturalized musical instrument, the human voice, as racial and gendered signifier, as property or likeness, and as raw material for algorithmic perfection through software; Part III, “Instrument,” tells stories of the way some iconic pop music machines—guitars, strings, synthesizers—got (or lost) their distinctive sounds; and Part IV, “Production,” puts it all together, asking structural questions about what happens in a recording studio, what is produced (sonic cartoons, rockist authenticity, empty space?), and what it all might mean. The book includes a general theoretical introduction by the editors and an afterword by noted popular music scholar Simon Frith.

A late eighteenth-century mechanical organ, built into a clock made by Henry Borrell of London, plays melodies that sound completely unlike those normally found on English domestic musical clocks. This article draws on the disciplines of historical musicology, ethnomusicology and horology to argue that these tunes derive directly from the repertory of the eighteenth-century Ottoman court. The melodies are analysed firstly in the context of the Ottoman repertory and then alongside contemporary European transcriptions of ‘exotic’ music, notably Edward Jones’s Lyric Airs. The distortion of ‘Turkish’ melodies in European representations is set within the wider context of orientalism and musical transculturation; this evidence is then brought to bear on interpreting music that may also be subject to mechanical distortion. The article ends with a consideration of how these earliest known sounding examples of Ottoman music may have arrived in London and its reception there.

This chapter traces how classical music works can create a sense of time and place in video games. Beginning with a case study of how music establishes the eighteenth-century setting of Assassin’s Creed III, it then explores both how games build on frameworks of musical signification established in early cinema. It identifies games, such as Punch-Out!!, which use classical works to indicate a specific nation, as well as those that do the same for chronological setting, such as Versailles 1685. The chapter culminates in a study of games in which the music is misleading, suggesting the “wrong” time or place.

Review of the following recordings: Giovanni Gabrieli: Sacred symphonies (Hyperion cda67957); Giovanni Gabrieli: Sacrae symphoniae (Accent acc24282); Venise sur Garonne (Flora flo3314); Giovanni Battista Fontana, Giovanni Gabrieli: Sonate & canzone (Accent acc24250); L’Arte dei Piffari: Cornetts and sackbuts in early Baroque Italy (Pan Classics pc10332); Trombone grande: Music for bass sackbut around 1600 (Accent acc24263).

A common definition of listening distinguishes between hearing and listening. The basic distinction describes hearing as a passive action of perceiving sounds, whereas listening involves paying active attention to various layers and elements of what one is hearing. Active listening to music, featuring the discerning of sounds, musical structures, harmonies, and the interrelations between the sounds, is akin to contemplating complex ideas. Providing meaning for this nexus of relationships requires listeners to grapple with these complex musical nuances, listening to different layers of the melody and harmony and connecting them to cultural and historical aspects. Challenging students to grapple with the complex nuances of musical pieces, to listen to different layers of the melody and harmony, and to connect those elements to cultural and historical aspects will provide them the opportunity to reflect upon the social and cultural contexts in which they live. The concept of what it means to be active (or mindful) has been examined from various perspectives and theories and holds great potential in advancing individual growth and social sensitivity.

Robert Benchley, the famous American columnist, once quipped that ‘there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't’. I was reminded of the quote when approached to write this chapter that addresses, amongst other questions, whether ‘music technology’ should be taught as an independent subject or should it be integrated across the music curriculum? It does seem to be the case that human beings are prone to like to categorise things; music education is no exception. But, as we will discover, this can lead to many unhelpful, although perhaps unintended, consequences. So, this is an important question but, in many senses and in the United Kingdom’s schools and colleges at least, it has been answered in recent years through educational policy and resulting curriculum frameworks. However, this does not mean that the questions are not worthy of further consideration. Given this mix of experiences, this paper will begin with an examination of the current curriculum framework in the United Kingdom and analyse some of the consequences of this separation between Music and Music Technology. Following this, I will present two alternative visions of musicianship, drawn the work of two writers, and argue that a more coherent approach to the development of music technology skills within a music teacher’s pedagogy is urgently needed.

This chapter examines the revival of the psychedelic style of Swedish progressive rock called flumprogg, which originated in Stockholm in the 1960s, within evolving transnational geographies and historical complexities of revivalism. In the late 1980s, this music started to experience a revival in a global sphere of Anglophone DIY culture. The prog-rock revival was not limited to Scandinavian prog rock; it also involved a broader international landscape of progressive rock in the 1970s, including German kraut and English folk prog. Inspired by postmodern historiography, the chapter introduces an analytical approach that explores how people make sense of fragments of the past in particular sites of transnational flows. The analytical method involves ethnography of fragments—recordings, photos, and decorations—as found in record stores, for instance. The authors propose the concept of a retrology to account for how these constellations of fragments create utopian timeless spaces that suggest a historical and spatial consciousness.

This chapter outlines macro structural changes in the Nordic music landscape, drawing from sociological theory of modernity. The chapter identifies popular music in wider tensions in Nordic modernity, particularly in relation to shifting hegemonic cultures to uncover the underlying dynamics of tensions between shifting mainstream formations and their alternatives. Following this logic, musical style and taste involve positionings in relation to issues of capitalism, nationalism, and mass media. The chapter analyzes changes in the region’s music landscape within the region’s evolving modernity, particularly in the transition from a national to a more global modernity. This is illustrated by the declining status of Stockholm’s Anglo pop music industry as the region’s center into a more decentralized and networked transnational cultural geography.

This chapter suggests that academic folklorists have been slow to undertake study of country music until the late twentieth century in part due to the discipline’s early history as an outgrowth of European, British, and American nineteenth century intellectual movements embracing the notion of the “folk” as a social entity retaining a pure and uncontaminated oral tradition of song. On the other hand, promoters, musicians, and audiences have embraced country music because of both a constructed myth and an authentic legacy of cultural identity, both deriving from American folk music. The global nature of country music in an era of extensive digitalization of media presents challenges within the industry to retain at least a pretense of history/regionalism and within academic folk studies to address new and unfamiliar media as conduits of tradition and new definitions of musical community.

This chapter argues that country music should be examined first and foremost as social practice—as a driver of community expression and social capital through music, words, and dance. While country music functions in a multitude of ways, from narrative storytelling to commercial product and points in between, the commercial sphere of country music has been exhaustively examined. Scholarly inquiry into country music, rooted in the folk revival of the mid-twentieth century and significantly influenced by collectors (and collections) of commercial country music, has maintained a southern, commercial focus for much of the past half-century. As such, scholarly and popular understanding of what, where, and who country music springs from has ignored significant regional vernacular forms and uses of country music. Ethnographic inquiry has made it possible to tell the story country music culture and traditions. Murphy illustrates his argument with examples from New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and Atlantic Canada.

This article examines how scholarship in the sociology of music has been dominated by an economic framework known as the production/consumption paradigm. It first traces the history of the production/consumption paradigm through its appearance in key texts, showing how it changes as it passes from Theodor W. Adorno and Pierre Bourdieu to the American production of culture perspective. It then presents a thematic overview of the literature and highlights the strengths of established research agendas as well as the blind spots that reveal the need for a more cultural approach. It also considers music as a text, as a resource, as a product, and as performance before proposing an alternative to the production/consumption dichotomy. The article argues that the growing interest in performance presents an opportunity not only to advance the study of music, but also to engage with the core theoretical issues in sociology.

This article considers the pragmatic difficulties of implementing feminist pedagogy in the undergraduate music history survey course. Drawing on the author’s teaching experience at the Aaron Copland School of Music, the article tackles the question of what counts as feminist pedagogy. It considers the fundamental problem of feminist scholarship and its application to the music history survey and provides pragmatic examples of how the author teaches, bridging the theoretical/practical divide that often fractures musicology in general and pedagogical speculation in particular. It also explains the author’s syllabi and a particular set writing assignments given as part of a music history survey, considering their effectiveness as components of a distinctly feminist pedagogy and how feminist goals might result in pedagogical choices that themselves seem less obviously feminist. Finally, the article reflects on whether the idea of a feminist history survey is a useful, or even feasible, goal.

This chapter aims to understand the phenomenon of leisure-time music activities from the perspective of musical agency. It explores how individuals’ and groups’ recreational practices involving music can be seen as a means for expanding their capacities for acting in the lived-in world. The exploration proceeds through theoretical and experiential accounts. It first draws on literature from general sociology, music sociology, and the sociology of music education in order to elaborate on the broader notion of agency, as well as the more field-specific concept of musical agency. It then explores various music-related agency modes through narrating the author’s own experiences of participating in, leading, and observing leisure-time music activities. The chapter aims to dissolve the binary opposition between recreational music production and music consumption. It argues that the two poles instead can be understood as inseparably intertwined venues for the constitution of agency, musical taste and music-related learning trajectories.

Music and patterned expressions of sound (whether classified as music or not) serve Buddhist cultures and practices in many important ways. This chapter takes stock of the many diverse practices of the world’s Buddhist cultures, in the vehicles of Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, and Zen. Functions of music, sound, and chanting include proclaiming, memorizing, and contemplating the Dhamma; signaling transitions in rituals; repeating mantras; narrating Jataka stories; cultivating a sense of community within Buddhist lay groups; and performing a rich pageantry of processual music to glorify shrines. Scholarship on Buddhist chanting and music is rapidly growing, though it is divided by language and dispersed among many fields of study. The emerging Buddhist musicology holds great promise, if lingering obstacles between fields of study and languages of scholarship can be overcome.

The relationship between music and politics and specifically that between music and protest has been relatively under-researched in the social sciences in a systematic manner, even if actual experiences of music being used to express protest have been innumerable. Further, the conceptual analysis that has been thrown up from the limited work that is available focuses mostly on Euro-American experiences with protest music. However, in societies where most music is not written down or notated formally, the discussions on the distinct role that music can play as an art form, as a vehicle through which questions of artistic representation can be addressed, and the specific questions that are addressed and responded to when music is used for political purposes, have been reflected in the music itself, and not always in formal debates. It is only in using the music itself as text and a whole range of information around its creation—often, largely anecdotal and highly context dependent—that such music can be understood. Doing so across a whole range of non-Western experiences brings out the role of music in societal change quite distinctly from the Euro-American cases. Discussions are presented about the informed perceptions about what protest music is and should be across varied, yet specific experiences. It is based on the literature that has come out of the Euro-American world as well as from parts that experienced European colonialism and made the transition to post-colonial contexts in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Although disability has long been a subject of premodern historical, cultural, and literary studies, musicologists have not thoroughly investigated conceptions of disability in early music. This essay is intended to enrich understanding of how disability operated in the culture of early modern England and argues for Disability Studies as a useful tool for illuminating aspects of early modern English culture that might otherwise go unnoticed within traditional cultural analysis. It uses disability as a departure point for a more nuanced understanding of premodern culture in England, centering on case studies of music and madness and tropes of disability and gender. It argues that disability, while not understood as analogous to our modern conceptions of abnormality, was an important operational category in early modern English music and was often conflated with femininity, as evidenced in the plays of Shakespeare.

Conjunto is a traditional folk music originating in the borderlands of South Texas with roots from Mexico. This music is a symbol of pride and is woven into the cultural fabric of Mexican American children and youth across the United States, with many of them singing along, dancing to, and performing this music. Despite the use of Spanish-language songs and attention to the mariachi genre in US music education programs, conjunto music is often ignored. In order to provide equal educational rights to all students regardless of native tongue, a socially just music education curriculum needs to include Mexican Americans’ language, culture, and musical practices so that they are held in the same regard as other musics. This chapter examines the role of conjunto as a vital part of Mexican American students’ musical and cultural identities and offers suggestions for its inclusion in the music curriculum.

This chapter provides an overview of a music-centered model of music therapy entitled Aesthetic Music Therapy (AeMT). AeMT was developed over many years of practice and theoretical reflection not only as a music-centered approach to therapeutic work, but also as a way to consider the myriad means by which humans experience the world of self and others. By placing AeMT within the framework of other present-day music therapy models, the need for music-centered thinking to be considered equal to those of medicine, community, and psychotherapy is endorsed. By expanding our knowledge and use of diverse musical cultures, music therapy will remain at the forefront of contemporary theories in both the field of health and the arts.

A substantial amount of music listening in contemporary Western society is deliberately chosen. This article reviews what is known about the psychology of self-chosen exposure to musical performances of others (recorded or live). The research reviewed is organized by the functional niche that the music is chosen to be part of. Six main niches appear in the literature. These are travel (e.g. driving a car, walking, using public transport); physical work (everyday routines such as washing, cleaning, cooking, and other forms of manual labour); brain work (e.g. private study, reading, writing, and other forms of thinking); body work (e.g. exercise, yoga, relaxation, pain management); emotional work (e.g. mood management, reminiscence, presentation of identity); and attendance at live-music-performance events as an audience member. Within these niches, four recurring functions of self-chosen music use are also identified: distraction, energizing, entrainment, and meaning enhancement.

This chapter explores the long process by which musical meanings are made in the choral repertoire of a Russian diasporic church, the ROCOR Russian Orthodox church, in its mid-Atlantic U.S. diaspora. Its point of departure is not meanings held in common by these church members, but instead the disjunctive meanings assigned to musical practice (and the consequent differences in preferred musical practice) by multiple generations of Russian immigrants. Common meanings emerge from this process through the reconstruction of a Russian diasporic identity that both draws on the symbolic resources of musical institutions characterizing different factions of Russian church musicians and on the positionality of being “Russian abroad” that unifies members by a common idea of preserving prerevolutionary Russian culture.